Comment by wuming2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wuming2 | Hacker News Reader

I read about “future proofing” and “expansion” possibilities of one’s fiber connection. And related user equipment.

My story is in the opposite direction.

We and everyone else in the neighborhood had symmetrical 1 Gbps installed about 15 years ago. We all paid the ISP for the top tier of full capacity.

During Covid decided to take inventory of our actual bandwidth needs.

Anything that can be deferred doesn’t count. Gone from instant bandwidth requirements are all cloud backups, OTA OS upgrades and apps updates. They need to complete overnight. Overlapping is not a requirement.

Videos are automatically played at 480p or less on iPhones, 720p or less on iPads and 1080p or less on HDTV. We purposely didn’t buy 4K TV because at our viewing distance has no benefits whatsoever. Aggregate peak bandwidth required here is 25 Mbps at a stretch. That is also enough for my wife to work from home.

We don’t deal with large datasets or raw videos over the internet.

So we found ourselves with one cable connected TV and the usual assortment of mobile devices connected to one WiFi 4 1x1 hotspot. At 70 Mbps we never noticed any loss of quality in our digital lifestyle.

After about ten years we replaced the hotspot with one capable of WiFi 5. An overkill but needed the extra port.

Eventually convinced the ISP to lower our subscription to the lowest available tier of 200 Mbps. We don’t notice any difference. We could afford the extra bandwidth. But don’t see the benefits of it.

Gigabit internet, or even >100mbps internet, is burst capacity. Very few people hit gigabit speeds continuously, and those that do often hit either bandwidth caps or fair use policy limitations. It's also why ISPs can use a 10gbps fiber backbone to serve gigabit to 50-100 homes, because the probability of all of those homes capping out their bandwidth at the same time is tiny.

That's also why a lot of supposedly fast ISPs absolutely crumbled when COVID hit. A lot of people started doing video calls in the morning/afternoons, which suddenly sent latency-sensitive, bidirectional, high-bandwidth data to every corner of the network. Upload speeds collapsed, gigabit networks were struggling to hit a couple hundred mbps, and DSL providers downgraded their customers to 2005 in terms of attainable network speeds.

For that reason, I think ISPs may as well offer 10gbps as a default. Their customer base is not going to make use of that capacity anyway. Only when downloading a new game, or doing a backup, or uploading a video file somewhere, does that bandwidth become a necessity. If you remove the cap on the bandwidth side, all of that capacity will remain available for a longer period of time for all of the other people in the neighbourhood.

Some cellular providers used the same reasoning for their plans here a few years back: there were no 4G speed caps, just upload/download as fast as you can, because if you're done doing your file transfer quicker, you're clearing the airwaves for other users. Of course, you'd still pay for those hefty bandwidth caps, charging >€1 per GB per month to rake in the cash.

Indeed. Guaranteed capacity for FTTH in the EU is often 0.1% or so of peak. Consistent with your answer.

I am not sure maximizing throughput to gigabit and beyond is materials efficient though. Fig 33 shows energy efficiency is squarely on the FTTH side anyway: https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Prysmian-s...

A software update completing download in an hour instead of one minute often doesn’t lead to any practical difference. The same number of users is being served but the latter requiring gigabit class CPEs.

Alas it does offer some up selling opportunities. As promoting Cat 6 or even 7 cables to home users.

> ISPs may as well offer 10gbps as a default

You're thinking with a technical mind, but don't forget the business, marketing, legal and support.

Why have "unlimited" speed as baseline while you can charge some 10 times more for the privilege?

Also don't forget that if you sell "10gbps internet" you might have to legally guarantee a percentage of that. Or you have to explain how networking works to everyone who complains they never see 10gbps on Speedtest.net.

Also the more you offer, the more expensive your modem has to be.

Thinking about when I had to upgrade my elderly parents from ADSL to FTTC, because of old apparatuses being scheduled for decommissioning, often wondering why regulators went down this path. Forcing CPEs replacement when, especially for tens of millions of elderly users, enabling ADSL2+ Annex M would have been sufficient. Most FTTC apparatuses are backward compatible with ADSL2+ and only transmission power auto backdown is necessary. To prevent degradation of neighboring VDSL signals.

My parents have now 150/30 Mbps. Totally unaware of it.

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