I wish they would focus just as much effort on expanding their service area.
I’m out here in the Stone Age with Comcast or maybe space x as my only real options.
I’m out here in the Stone Age with Comcast or maybe space x as my only real options.
AT&T, on the other hand, has been steadily rolling out gigabit fiber across the city since 2016ish, and I've enjoyed their service that entire time. It's consistently stable, fast, and the price is only slightly higher than Google Fiber's - I think I'm paying $90/month right now for symmetric gigabit.
The local Spectrum cable ISP guys offer ~300mbit (with a pathetic upload rate), and a Spectrum sales guy once asked me if I "really needed a full gigabit, no one actually needs that much speed." Lol.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/googl...
Being able to save 8 minutes downloading Fortnite isn't a big enough deal. For video calling, you're limited by how much bitrate the provider is willing to allocate for you. For looking at photos on social media, you're stuck with Instagram compression. Internet browsing more tied to the number of requests and client-side parsing speed than total bandwidth.
Should our society be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on laying new fiber for marginal improvements?
FTTH is a vast improvement over cable in every metric, so yes.
Plus, upgrading the optics on both ends can often lead to massive improvements without changing the lines, and on a scale that far exceeds copper.
The fastest transfers I've seen from source is from Xbox game pass downloads on a PC coming it at 150-200 mbps. Even 4K streaming is usually no more than 20-25 mbps/stream. AT&T keeps sending out flyers enticing me to upgrade to the new 2gbps or 5 gbps service. But again, even during heavy usage I have plenty of bandwidth leftover. So I'm wondering how one maxes out a 5 gbps connection.
Video conferencing is typically about 5-15Mbps.
I have 5Gbit service, and it is awesome to pull down big files at 100MB/s+ while my wife is watching some 4K thing on Netflix at the same time.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
Jokes aside, it is very useful with videogames, those are big multiGB files
OTOH, I have a rental where most people in the building have opted to cancel Google Fiber in favor of Comcast (even tho Comcast is more expensive) because Google Fiber has had multiple outages each year.
Comcast is rolling Docsys 4.0 out to support, “300 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1-gig all the way up to 2-gig” service. Their words, not mine.
Fiber easily supports 10-gig, or 100-gig with easy upgrades. And here’s the point: that single strand of fiber can support, without replacement and in a single strand, around 44 Tbps. That's not something cable companies like Comcast want you to know. Even if they squeeze 10 or 20 gig out of this aging cable lines, it’s holding society back.
People don’t need it. But a T-1 (1.544 mbps) line was the recommended size for 45 people in 1999. Now not 25 years later that’s laughable.