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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users. The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber. I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options. If we really want to target overall coverage and affordability, then this does make sense.

Edit: why disagree?

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> I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users

640K was "perfectly fine" for most people, too.

100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users. The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world and settling for 2010's version of "fast" in 2025 is ... not how we're going to get better.

> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas

Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...

"100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users."

It's plenty for my household with a similar number of users. We have people working from home, streaming, downloading documents or games, etc with no problem.

"The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world"

Because the countries in the rest of the developed world are about the size of 1 state and have higher urbanization. If you want better coverage for an area this size, then it makes sense to include satellite coverage. The gigabit goal excludes them.

"Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost."

They're only the same cost if you're starting from the same location. Copper has better penentration already. Expanding copper might mean adding a couple miles. Expanding to that same location with copper might mean putting in 10-50 miles plus any sort of hub or substation. So yes, equal distance is roughly equal cost, but almost everywhere fiber is put in, it's alongside copper anad thus not increasing coverage nor decreasing costs.

> It's plenty for my household with a similar number of users. We have people working from home, streaming, downloading documents or games, etc with no problem.

I recognize that "no problem" and "as fast as possible" are not the same. 100/20 works for you but once you've seen 1000/20, you really do notice things taking ~10x longer than they need to. It all adds up.

> Copper has better penentration already.

Excluding 56k, twisted-pair copper has absolutely crap throughput unless you're ~500m or less from the 'head-end' which is where your DSL is being turned back into laser pulses. Coax does have better performance/distance compared to twisted pair but now you have a non-trivial network of amps/taps/power-injectors to maintain. DOCSIS really does not like it if there's any issue w/ the coax so you're going to need a small army just to keep the hard-lines in good shape.

I have never seen a PON network get it's throughput cut in half just because somebody didn't screw the cable _all the way_ in to the tap. I see ingress degrading DOCSIS networks all the time though.

At least as far as rural northern CA goes, ATT runs fiber out to plants and then twister pair from there to the customers which are - at most - a few km away. Fiber is already 85% of the way to the customer... let's just finish the job instead of giving everybody a starlink account.

> Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...

Well they voted for it, so I'll stick to my fiber in my big city and they can fend for themselves and pay $90/month for 10 up 1 down or whatever while I pay $40 for 1 gig....

With the snide remarks aside, why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?

I'm sympathetic to a goal of "have really, really fast Internet service" but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.

> Well they voted for it

Not all of us.

> why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?

Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher. SL May have a slight edge going vast distances since the speed of light is faster in a vacuum compared to glass but for 99.999% of residential ISP needs, fiber-to-the-home is going to offer a more robust pipe that fits more and with less latency.

> but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.

Almost certainly. Regardless, any better solution necessarily exists only in a world where 100/20 isn't "cutting edge" 30 years after it became technically possible.

> Not all of us.

I didn't vote for all these highways and suburbs either but we live in a democracy. By and large rural voters* voted to cut programs like this, though, and I think it's very fair to point that out.

> Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher.

Yes and no, it depends on the cost. It might not be ideal but I'm also not sure my tax dollars should go to make sure people who live in rural areas have faster Playstation downloads. Do we actually need to physically pay for and build this infrastructure? I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but where is the economic analysis? If we invest $XYZ on this infrastructure what's the expected ROI versus alternatives?

* Just to be clear I don't have any particular problem with "rural voters" and I don't really like these arbitrary groupings of people into Urban, Suburban, Rural but it is what it is.

> Do we actually need to physically pay for and build this infrastructure? I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but where is the economic analysis? If we invest $XYZ on this infrastructure what's the expected ROI versus alternatives?

I wish I had a clear answer and good data on this. My gut tells me that giving more people faster and more reliable access to information is almost certainly going to be worth it in the long run. A few hypotheticals that come to mind:

Some highly paid engineer can live out in the boonies but still work for their high wages. That excess cash is probably going to make it's way into the local economy.

Likewise, rural schools are not know for their performance. That almost certainly could change if better content/curricula was easier to access and distribute. There is a non-zero chance that some breakthrough cure for cancer comes from a smart kid that grew up in a rural area. With crap internet access, that kid almost certainly would not get the education to match their potential.

(or maybe it isn't a cure for cancer, it's the next John Carmack...)

Fiber isn't the only way to level-up access... but it is the easiest to maintain. Other than the very ends of the connection, it's all passive.

No need to to inject power for amplifiers. No need to keep building/launching satellites and corresponding ground-stations.

Once it's installed, it's more or less maintenance free until a wild backhoe shows up...

100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users.

What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?

2 younger kids streaming a movie, one parent listening to a podcast in the shower, one parent streaming a YouTube cooking video while making dinner, and an older kid playing any game would completely saturate the network. That is assuming nobody has a phone that is also connected to the network

Also its ridiculous to think that is excessive in any way. Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit. Instead of watching a flat 4k movie, render a full 4k scene in AR.

That YouTube cooking video is probably ~10Mbit. Assuming the kids are watching 4K streaming video, its maybe up to 20Mbit per stream. So, you're at maybe 50Mbit of throughput with all your highest usage things going at once. Your phone being on the Wifi but not actively being used is practically no bandwidth usage. That podcast is anywhere from 320kbps to maybe even 64kbps, practically nothing compared to even one of those video streams which all together are only using half your bandwidth. Same goes with playing an online game, assuming you're not talking cloud rendered its maybe a few hundred Kbit. Rounding up all the other little things, you're looking at using maybe ~60Mbit down. 60% of your bandwidth.

> Instead of watching a flat 4k movie, render a full 4k scene in AR.

It wouldn't take 100-gigabit to make this happen. You can already get this on existing VR headsets today. I watched some basketball games with a Windows Mixed Reality headset nearly a decade ago, and I definitely did not have terabit networking.

2x1080p streams is 10mbit/s 2x4k is 30mbit/s. so below 100mbit/s. Video games don't consume a lot of traffic[] fortnite literally measured in 100s kbps. Video games consume traffic most only when they're updating, then sure you can saturate 100mbit/s, but you also can saturate 10G just as well, so in this case it's about speed, kid can do some chores while it's updating lmao. I initially wanted to skip podcast because...320kbps max? But then thought that not only that, but it's also most likely already downloaded to the device.

[]: destiny 1/2 consume a lot, but that would mean your older child is over 30 and living with you.

That's if you use any streaming service, if you're streaming legally ripped Blu-rays, then yea, 100/20 isn't enough, but those are usually within LAN. And if you're talking seeding/streaming to others, then any asymmetric connection speed will suck.

> That is assuming nobody has a phone that is also connected to the network

A buddy of mine has horror stories about what happens when an office full of iPhones all download the same 1+ gig iOS update at the same time.

> Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit

Exactly my point. I'd rather we not let large ISPs be the ones that decide what is innovative and "fast enough" for us. I want somebody with the power to push them... pushing them to be faster and better.

Work from home? Copy large files?

The majority of WFH setups are either "remote into a server and work there" (RDP uses a few Mbps at most when streaming HD video, and SSH is basically negligible) or "everything you need is already on your local company-owned machine."

> What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?

Many things. A partial list in no particular order:

My day job is all SSH so I don't need a wide pipe so much as I need a short pipe. If the pipe is also quite wide, I can reliably stream content while I work. This isn't just music, this is watching the daycare camera feeds.

Every once in a while I need to docker pull a multi-gig image. It's nice when that doesn't take more than 30 seconds. I don't worry about background tasks moving/syncing/backing-up data; there's plenty of headroom!

Some of my hobbies involve _lots_ of data and the less time I spend waiting for that to download is more time I get for actually doing hobbies.

I also have a few scripts that backup other consequential data stores; the biggest one is google takeout for a few accounts. This results in ~ 800 gigs of data from a few different accounts.

The work product from these hobbies and backups is something that I like to back up off site and a 20mbps connection is trivial to saturate for hours as a time.

Every once in a while I'll make some of my excess compute/GPU available to friends so they can render things. The assets involved are not small and a big pipe means that everybody gets the desired result _faster_.

If you give me a faster/wider pipe, I _will_ find a new use for the extra room. I may not be representative of the typical user but I know for sure that I would not have developed my skills to the extent that I have if I had crap internet access.

> The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users.

100/20 is fine for one person. But gigabit isn't very hard to achieve and is a far better goal speed for entire households. Gigabit is also a lot more convenient any time a big download is involved.

> The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber.

Coax can do it.

> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options.

Shouldn't fiber be a bit easier to run than coax? If you're going to run one data wire to a new area, it should be fiber. And if you can run power you can run data too.

If you're laying a communications cable, you should just do fiber. It can carry any type of traffic at high data rates, and you can upgrade the speed over time by just replacing the optics at the ends rather than having to replace the whole cable. Fiber plans are only expensive if your service level is expensive, or if you have to pay to get the line run to your building

Fiber should be the goal for everyone. Fiber is cheaper and lighter than copper which is why rural areas that haven't had any internet options except 56k on old degraded lines or satellite are finally now getting high speed internet the last few years, usually through co-op fiber startups. It can be hung on power poles, it can be installed with a trencher, and now that horizontal boring machines are incredibly common it can be put under existing infrastructure very easily.

This scarcity is artificial. Fiber cabling is not expensive; even the poorest of countries have fiber networks well established in suburban areas.

In India you can have high-speed, even gigabit internet at the price of two pizzas a month.

A country that wants technological leadership needs to aim higher. It needs to do more than the absolute minimum.

Coax can come close of the previous FCC gigabit goal. The FCC wanted 1 Gb/s down/500 Mb/s up. Xfinity is currently offering 2 Gb/s down over coax to most of their residential customers. They can only do 200-300 Mb/s up though.

> They can only do 200-300 Mb/s up though.

This is changing with newer DOCSIS standards! It's still up to the network provider to choose how many channels they allocate for up vs down. Even in perfect lab conditions, DOCSIS 4 is still about 3:1 ratio down/up (about 5/1.5 gigabit). Fiber is the only medium that makes a 1:1 down/up possible at any meaningful speeds.

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