Hacker News Reader

Comment by ai-christianson | Hacker News Reader

Yeah?

We're getting 30-50 mbit/sec per connection on a good day.

In downtown Columbus Ohio the only internet provider (Spectrum) maxes out at maybe 5 mbps up (down 50-100x that), it's not just a rural issue, non-competitive ISPs even in urban cities want you to pay for business accounts to get any kind of upload whatsoever

Is it really a technical capacity issue, or just market segmentation? Usually, it's possible to get so-called business service with higher upload bandwidth, even at residential addresses.

That's exactly what he said, they want you to pay for business accounts.

Yup, I’m saying it’s not a rural issue to have bad upload, often it’s just a way to charge more money even in a major US city (particularly one with limited ISP competition)

In San Francisco monkeybrains is the best ISP I’ve ever used to date; symmetric up/down, great ping and cheaper than any other provider

I am also a quite happy Monkeybrains customer, and have been for a couple of years now.

For any folks who are using cable internet, or shitty DSL, I strongly recommend checking to see if Monkeybrains serves your home. If you have symmetric fiber, or are happy with Webpass, then it might not make sense to switch.

As a (former) long-time monkeybrains customer, it's a mixed bag. For a casual home internet connection they're great. For WFH where you need something reliable, perhaps not.

If you're lucky and get pointed at a good site, you can get great speeds. I was getting 500Mbps up/down. If you're unlucky, you might only get 50Mbps.

There's always some jitter and packet loss on the connection too -- much more than a wired connection. Online gaming was not great. Congestion control algos suffered because of this. I would see TCP throughput drop by 90% over long distances because congestion control isn't tuned for these network conditions.

And in the rain my connection would drop out every few minutes.

But for $35/month it was great value, and the whole company is friendly and easy to deal with.

were they using WiFi as the wireless layer?

Check out Breezeline (previously WOW), they cover nearly the entirety of Columbus and many of the surrounding areas. The minimum plan has 10 up but you can get ~50 up with the standard consumer plans. Bit shitty to deal with though, even for an ISP.

Yes, many residential broadband ISPs top out at 1/10th that.

I'm in NYC, Spectrum is my ISP. 500mb/s down, 10mb/s up. I used to live in a building with symmetric 1G fiber from Verizon, but they don't serve my building.

Maybe once download gets so fast people have a hard time figuring out what to do with it (2-10g+) they'll start finally increasing upload.

That seems unlikely, as it is just more bandwidth they'd have to pay for.

I'm at 300/10. Actual upload is a bit higher I think, it seems they try and account for IPv4 header overhead or something. If I pay some absolutely bananas monthly fee I can get 30mbps up advertised. That isn't really fast enough for me to notice the difference and the service is unreliable anyways.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com