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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Even if 10Gbps to the home is technically available, it's not posted on their website, and I would be willing to bet majority of consumers will be denied due to installation costs (it's not trivial to run a fiber just to your house).

So, why on earth was their network called "10G" if near zero percent of Comcast customers are even aware of that service, let alone actually have that service?

Further muddying the water with the 5G cellular technology and implying 10G is even better, deliberately riding that hype train.

For actual customers, the 100Mbps and 200Mbps upload speed plans are the only "next gen" network upgrade available. It's still not symmetrical, not really what people want, and not priced accordingly. In my area, FTTH providers are rolling out 1Gbps symmetrical for as low as $70 a month - making Comcast's "next gen" network a joke in terms of price and performance.

It was a gimmick from the start, and it's surprising it flew this long.

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Yes, and:

> The Comcast "Gigabit Pro" fiber connection that provides 10Gbps speeds costs $299.95 a month plus a $19.95 modem lease fee. It also requires a $500 installation charge and a $500 activation charge.

For reference, I’m paying €25/mo for 10Gbit symmetric. Modem “lease” and installation included. To be fair, I get ~8Gbit/s in practice, but that’s well worth it.

That price reference from Comcast is only if they actually say "yes" to running fiber to you in the first place. It's not very cost efficient to run a single fiber, and at $300 a month they don't have a huge amount of wiggle room for construction cost.

The cutoff is $8000 if they’ll run fiber for you or not. It’s a strange service. 10Gb business-class fiber (non-GPON), some $10k juniper router to delineate the edge that they put in your house, and a backup gigabit cable connection for $300/mo. It’s the bargain of the century but I can’t imagine it’s for anything beyond advertising purposes.

I have had it since 2017, though they upgraded it to 10g a year or two ago. It’s not vapor ware. It’s just that $8,000 doesn’t buy you much distance (I think it’s 1/3 of a mile from the nearest fiber node).

Oh I know it definitely exists, it’s just so far from residential grade and costs like 5% of what it would cost if you had a business. Strange product.

I’m banned from upgrading beyond gigabit because my wife knows that I’d have to run fiber through the house so it’s all beyond my ability anyway. I’m jealous.

Just one anecdote here, but my house was built in 2019 and was networked with Cat5e. I successfully run 10GBaseT over the existing copper.

That's gotta be the best deal I've ever seen. Probably a year of service just to break even on the hardware to connect you to the upstream device, not counting actually providing the service. It's hard to find a base VPS with that level of service even allowing for a low data cap for the price and that's just for a connection with no hardware and a limited place to put data in the first place.

They don't happen to offer colocation do they :p.

Haha no I think they might not. I agree the VPS space is underserved wrt connection speed, which is where VPSes could really shine given the egress scams of cloud providers. Sometimes they have higher than advertised speeds though. I suspect most people care about cpu, ram and fs IO more than network speeds. This, in turn, might be because of bloated modern stacks that eat so much resources that link speed never becomes a bottleneck. Just a theory..

I’ve found good deals with Netcup (EU) and Colohouse (US) although the latter is not fun to deal with their “support” aka sales “team”.

Does that include the cost of the fiber loop itself? In some countries that’s a separate build-out fee (like getting a public water hookup in the US).

> I’m paying €25/mo for 10Gbit symmetric.

Can you post where you live so I can move there.

Willing to bet Netherlands.

Outside possibility of Romania, because they basically skipped over an entire generation (DSL) of telecom so there were no incumbents to cause trouble.

Romania is 10E a month for 10gbit with ~60E install charge

Netherlands is unlikely, cheapest is ~80e/month for 10gbit and 45e/month for gigabit

> because they basically skipped over an entire generation (DSL) of telecom so there were no incumbents to cause trouble.

Oh we had that (romtelecom) and people werent willing to use it, they used cheaper local ISPs that just ran copper wires everywhere.

Now a company (RDS) bought up most of those and kept upgrading and keeping prices low and basically are eating the competition. They're basically so far ahead you have construction companies that ask them to put fiber in new builds so its ready when apartments are being sold.

It's mostly competition that drove this from a very competitive company, the rest kind of suck and would go comcast route if they could afford it.

Spain, see my other answer :)

Lemme guess, you're in the Netherlands.

You folks have awesome internet because you force the local loop to be unbundled. Every country should do this. However, almost none do (except yours, and a few counties within the US state of Washington). Nobody with bundled local loops will get pricing+performance like this; please don't raise peoples' expectations.

Instead, point them to the root cause (local loop bundling), because nothing else is going to help them. You'll just make them jealous and distract them from the one change that can actually improve their situation.

Calling your provider and saying "€25/mo for 10Gbit symmetric!!!!" is not going to change anything.

> Lemme guess, you're in the Netherlands.

No, Spain using Digi, which is a Romanian company. 10Gbit is only available in cities where Digi has their own fiber/equipment. When you’re in an area where the fiber is shared it’s 1Gbit max for same price.

> You folks have awesome internet because you force the local loop to be unbundled.

I don’t know what this means (although I can maybe guess). Can you explain it for sake of clarity?

> Nobody with bundled local loops will get pricing+performance like this; please don't raise peoples' expectations.

10Gbit sure, it’s not available everywhere. However, symmetric gigabit fiber is standard in many countries in Europe and elsewhere. Typically with 5+ major providers and local ISPs to choose from.

I lived in the US for a long time. I had to suffer the sub-par quality of cable, arbitrary price hikes and random downtime from shitty cable tech. You should absolutely raise your expectations. Complacency will do nothing but entrench the abysmal situation.

I don’t know what this means (although I can maybe guess). Can you explain it for sake of clarity?

Basically it means that whoever owns the "last mile" can't sell it only directly to the customer as part of a larger (bundled) product like "internet access." They have to sell access to that last mile of fiber or copper "unbundled" from anything else (such as "internet access"), and they have to offer it to other ISPs. This is how it has been for ~25 years in NL, and people there understand how important it is.

By forcing the monopoly (local loop) to be a separate company from everything else it makes it totally obvious when there are ridiculous shenanighans. Like, if local-loop company X has only one ISP customer Y, that's an obvious red flag. Also since they are separate companies regulators can subpoena the contracts, communications, and payments which flow between the two companies.

It's essentially the internet version of what the US did to voice telephony after we broke up our telephone monopoly back in the 1970s: no single company was allowed to do both local loop and long distance.

Currently the Netherlands has this for local-loop fiber, and a few counties in the US State of Washington have it due to the odd fact that their local-loop fiber is owned by the electric utility (not the phone or cable companies). It is an awesome system.

Here's the Dutch cases:

- copper (2000): https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/publication/9225/KPN-is-r...

- fiber (2015): https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/publication/15093/KPN-mus...

General background info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbundled_access

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_loop_unbundling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-stream_access

Thanks.

> and they have to offer it to other ISP

Key point yes. That’s how it is or at least seems to be in many countries.

Societies MUST decouple infrastructure, platforms etc from service providers. Doesn’t matter if private or public. If you don’t, you always end up with shit.

I pay CHF 64.75 (~USD 75) a month for 25gbit symmetric in Switzerland.

I can not understand how they can get away with charging 200+ for 10G. That is nuts.

But we have providers selling bullshit here too. One such provider claims 5G wireless is the equivalent of fiber. Sells 1gbit but actuall throughput is bellow 300mbit even with the best tower. Theoretical max is 2gbit but their equipment can't even do 1. Misleading customers to believe 5G wireless can ever beat fiber is just wrong.

Shit, I was paying 80.-/mo for Swisscom DSL @100Mb in Schwerzenbach because it was the only wireline option available. Eventually just switched to Yallo 4G at 15.-/mo, which was mostly fine.

It looks like your area will be getting fiber around April: https://ftth.init7.net/?x=963376.03977&y=6004593.74257&z=15....

If only :) I moved to Ireland. If I'm lucky, we'll have fiber in Dec 2026!

> I can not understand how they can get away with charging 200+ for 10G. That is nuts.

well, truth said, you can pay that and more here if you want a good SLA and bandwidth guarantees. But for residential use it's not needed.

That kind of speed is wild. What kind of switching hardware does 25 gigabit symmetric require? Do you have 25GbE to Thunderbolt adapters for your computers?

Only to the router right now: https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/

Rest of the network is 10G.

Yes, but ATT advertises 1G fiber connections, and it's only available at a small fraction of their service addresses. Or for that matter spectrum with Internet Gig (or whatever they call the 850/30 Mbit service).

I would be in favor of a bit more truth in advertising such that they have to provide a service (not "up to") at, say, 80%+ of their service addresses before being allowed to advertise it. Or, for that matter, they can only advertise the slower of up/down or maybe the average of both if they wish to site a single number rather than both up/down.

I like the spirit but I'm highly cautious of the measure we choose. E.g. "80%+ of their service addresses" basically means "They can only advertise 25 mbit plans despite massive fiber investments". The intent being few people hear about plans not available in their area but the effect being yet another reason to not bother trying to serve rural areas.

Obviously the measure could be improved, particularly by making it an "and" instead of an "only" (e.g. "Most all service areas with up to 25 mbps, select service areas with up to 5 gbps. Check your location for details") but, for all the song and dance, I'm not sure such a thing really makes much meaningful impact to the consumer in the end (unless, again, it's so restrictive to have negative impacts instead) as regardless you're going to have to check your actual address and see if you're in the remaining x% that doesn't get that speed anyways.

I'm a big fan of just flat requiring "up/down for up to x GB/TB per month" in the advertisement though. Worst impact of that is the viewer just doesn't care.

To Spectrum's credit they seem to be doing a lot of fiber for new builds. Our 1gbit plan is symmetric and pulls those speeds consistently, but yeah their coax footprint is stuck with lower upload, high/low split coax areas should see 500mbit upload at some point but who knows. The state of internet in the US is awful in most places.

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