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Comment by notfried | Hacker News Reader

I like they raised the broadband minimum upload speed from 3 to 25Mbps. Spectrum's 300 Mbps broadband is only 10 Mbps up. Let's see how fast they change their statement that "an upload speed of 3 Mbps is enough for most households" [1].

[1: https://www.spectrum.com/resources/internet-wifi/what-is-a-g...]

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Zoom recommends 3.8Mbps for uploading 1080p video. Being able to do 1080p video conferencing is an expectation of broadband. Raising the definition of broadband to meet this basic requirement is clearly a win.

I do think 25Mbps up is more than what's required for a large number of households (>33%). I have advised family that 15Mbps is adequate when they needed to do office work from home. Perhaps the only good thing about this is that it will force ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure, but I'm worried the cost of that will be passed onto consumers at a time when inflation has already taken a toll on budgets.

I've been coping with 6 Mbps upload speeds from Xfinity for years now. This morning I got an email from them saying they were raising my speeds at no cost, and after a modem restart I'm now getting ~20 Mbps up.

This whole time I've been told that Xfinity couldn't provide decent upload speeds because of infrastructure reasons, but now that's been proven a lie.

CATV was designed as a one-way pipe. There are filters everywhere in the network that block inbound traffic because there wasn't much of a reason for cable boxes to need to communicate with the wider network which meant that the bandwidth on the cable that was actually usable for upload bandwidth was orders of magnitude smaller than downloads. As Comcast basically rebuilds their network (fiber to the edge), they're bypassing and removing all of those filters which means that there's plenty of frequency for uploads.

Designed, maybe, but it's not like the cabling is directional.

I thought one of the reasons why DOCSIS was straightforward to rollout was because they only really needed bi-directional amplifiers to do it. Though in the early days of cable internet, some setups used a telephone modem for your uplink.

And if you already had Hybrid-Fibre Coaxial infrastructure (which was rolled out for noise reasons in the pre-data analog days) you were already a step ahead of the game in terms of segmenting nodes/worrying about CPE noise.

Upload is crap because they have to dedicate channels to it at the cost of download channels, and upload has more overhead because of the coordination required.

70s/80s cableTV companies basically won the lottery by being able to re-use their existing last-mile plant for high-value data. Telcos not so much.

The wires weren’t unidirectional but the amplifiers were. Amplifiers capable of full duplex have only come out in the last few years. https://www.telecompetitor.com/comcast-gains-a-key-element-n....

It’s not a lie – they can’t provide upload speeds anywhere near their download speeds. 20 Mbps vs 6 Mbps is still quite small compared to 1000 Mbps. DOCSIS 3.1, the latest and not fully deployed standard goes up to 10Gbps down and 1Gpbs up.

It looks like DOCSIS 4.0 is actually a path forward to symmetric upload/download speeds over the same cables

I didn't say that asymmetric upload speeds being required was a lie, but until today Xfinity wouldn't allow me to pay for >6 Mbps upload without going up to some sort of business-tier package. Now, the day that the FCC sets 20 Mbps up as the minimum, I magically get that exact number for free.

I feel like this does more to affirm the "been proven a lie" statement than refute it.

20 Mbps, while still suffocation, provides a massive amount of breathing room from 6.

I was under the impression DOCSIS 4.0 was basically a rebranded maximum feature of 3.1?

I just got an email saying my provider is bumping my fiber upload from 200 to 400.

Seemed crazy to me, but I guess they are just staying well ahead of the crappy competition.

The 20Mpbs is definitely very welcome and so far it’s pretty constant. I hope one day we will have symmetric connections everywhere.

I got the same email. I was kinda assuming it was spam.

25Mbps up may be adequate in a pinch, but it’s laughably outdated. Symmetric down/up enables a lot of great use cases including seamless backup. I briefly lived with AT&T fiber symmetric 1gbps (actually more like 940mbps at the router, but close enough). It was a game changer and losing it definitely undid a bunch of great use cases. If you WFH, it’s even more important.

Meanwhile our Swiss friends have 10+gbps to home…

I've seen urban condos in US offering 7gbps to home. The high end is there.

After I first experienced symmetrical gigabit fiber I have only lived in residences that offer it -- it is a prerequisite for me choosing a domicile similar to trash pickup and electricity. My argument isn't that we shouldn't offer faster internet. We should have more places that offer faster internet. My question is what is the minimum viable upload speed for residential service.

Yep. I've never had more than 35Mbps up from home, and it sucks. When talking about WFH, a lot of people focus on the uplink bandwidth needed for 1080p video calls (another commenter said Zoom recommends 3.8Mbps), but there's a lot more to it.

I might be building some software locally and uploading it to a cloud server to test it. The built artifact might be tens or hundreds of megabytes and take several minutes to upload.

This isn't even solely a software developer thing. Someone who does video production certainly needs to send around large quantities of data as well. I'm sure we could come up with examples from other industries.

It's pathetic how limited the coax infra is in the US these days. Supposedly this will be improving soon with DOCSIS 4.0, but c'mon, it's 2024...

It’s also a good opportunity to remind family that bandwidth is cumulative. That is nonobvious to quite a few people I’ve talked to that are not super internet savvy. What I mean by that is that if zoom uses 3.8Mbps that means they probably maximum two people can probably be on a zoom call simultaneously comfortably in a 15 Mbps household while other people are doing regular things. 3 if that’s the only thing happening in the household.

> Zoom recommends 3.8Mbps for uploading 1080p video.

Meta: I wish it was more acceptable to not enable video.

At my last job audio-only was the default, but at the current one people turn it on.

The technology to do asymmetric upload/download exists and many fiber-based companies offer it at the same rate as older infrastructure. It is not more expensive to offer symmetric service, but it may require infrastructure being brought more modern.

For example, in the same region of Massachusetts (around Worcester) I previously paid $40/mo for 300/300 Mbps to Verizon FIOS but now after moving I pay $40/mo to Spectrum for 500/15 Mbps.

I think I'll keep my Verizon 100/100 for ~68$. Still using the old copper coaxial not straight FttH though.

I really think it should be a ratio with minimum cap of 25Mbps.

It would great if DL/UL would be at least 10:1. So 1Gbps user would get 100Mbps upload.

> I do think 25Mbps up is more than what's required for a large number of households (>33%). I have advised family that 15Mbps is adequate when they needed to do office work from home.

Yet my experience when streaming high def video is much better in places with symmetric fiber with much higher upload bandwidth (> 100Mbps) than it ever is in places with coaxial cable bandwidth.

TCP ACKs back up are needed even for downloads and can get crowded if the bandwidth in that direction full or crowded. If those tiny ACKs don't get through downstream may stall. Linux QoS can help, but only if your router is Linux and you can run the appropriate commands on it.

>Zoom recommends 3.8Mbps for uploading 1080p video. Being able to do 1080p video conferencing is an expectation of broadband

You can't even get 1080p on zoom unless you're using "Business, Education and Enterprise". Pro and free users are limited to 720p and 360p respectively. Moreover people don't even have 1080p webcams, much less webcams where you can tell the difference between 1080p and 720p. That's not to say there are other reasons for wanting > 3.8 Mb/s up, but "video conferencing" is a poor one.

3.8Mbps 1080p is an atrocious bitrate. You'd want at least 6Mbps.

Depends what you're watching. A videoconference with a mostly fixed background and infrequently shapeshifting face or a screenshare won't chew up much.

I get, realistically, like 30Mbps up with Spectrum with their 1Gb plan. At my last place they had a smaller competitor that did 1Gb up and down, so they changed existing 1Gb plans to the same. Now I live 8 minutes away from there and it's not an option! But competition is coming to my building soon so I can only hope.

Makes sense why Xfinity just emailed me that they graciously decided to “double my upload speed completely free of charge”

Yep, same here.

For coaxial cable, I assume they will still allocate the same 50Mbps upload between 200 houses, and then let you get a 25Mbps burst for a few seconds by taking it from others.

Sometimes the issue is legacy CPEs that couldn't access channels that newer ones could (or couldn't bond as many). That's why sometimes a modem upgrade could "unlock" higher speeds.

My Comcast gigabit internet is only 25Mbps up. I'm pretty unhappy about it, as somebody who regularly has to push large docker images and wait forever each time.

On coax/cable lines like Charter/Spectrum, the upload speed limit is due to protocol/DOCSIS limitations. Supposedly the new version of DOCSIS fixes this/allows for symmetrical service, and Spectrum has been rolling it out for a while now. Still waiting for it where I'm at...

I've seen this explanation, but it makes no sense

  ver year  download   upload
  1.0 1997  40 Mbit/s  10 Mbit/s
  1.1 2001  40 Mbit/s  10 Mbit/s
  2.0 2002  40 Mbit/s  30 Mbit/s
  3.0 2006  1 Gbit/s   200 Mbit/s
  3.1 2013  10 Gbit/s  1–2 Gbit/s
  4.0 2017  10 Gbit/s  6 Gbit/s

the version previous to the "new version" uploads at 1-2gbit/s which is 40-80x the FCC value

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Comparison

You may want to scroll down to the “throughput” section, instead of looking at the theoretical max.

The theoretical max up and download aren’t additive. It’s like saying that an egg carton can hold a max of 12 white eggs or 12 brown eggs. Good luck putting 24 eggs in it.

The DOCSIS standards carve up the available throughput, using some of that for upload and some for download.

AFAIK they're on DOCSIS 3.0 and upgrading to DOCSIS 4

These are the spec. Implementations vary. They vary in terms of chips, but also the way they get deployed on existing cable plant.

What’s interesting is I’ve been pushing 20-25 up for the last month or so.

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