this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 227 points 1 year ago (5 children)

The internet needs to be classified as a utility, living without it is just not possible in the world we have created.

[–] [email protected] 100 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I remember the collective shitfit around a decade ago when Obama give out free cell phones to homeless people. It was such a crazy concept to people who have never struggled that yes, you DO need a smartphone to meet your calling, banking and personal management needs. Everything has an online portal. Every job application requires an online portion. It's how the world works and has worked since the mid 00s.

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[–] [email protected] 177 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Should be 1gbps asymmetric now, with a near future goal of 1gbps symmetric.

[–] [email protected] 154 points 1 year ago (29 children)

I'd be okay with 200mbps symmetric, with a future goal of 1gbps symmetric. More than ANYTHING, I'm tired of providers providing things like 1gbps down, 10mbps up. And then doing shit like "Here's you're 1gbps plan with a 1tb data cap!"

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I really wish symmetric broadband was standard. Having 500 down (as a homelabber especially) means nothing if you have only 25 up 😭

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Same boat here with Comcast. I would gladly give up some of the 800Mbps download to increase the 12Mbps upload speed I'm getting.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

800Mbps*

*with SPEEDBOOST! (We throttle lawl)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

We don’t throttle to our company-owned Speedtest servers though so we can disprove you when claiming we are not offering you peak speeds.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (7 children)

The asymmetrical aspect of cable will be here to stay. Fiber can do it because it was build on a different foundation.

Copper cable transmits data using electric signals in various frequencies. There are a batch of frequencies reserved for phone and TV. ALL of the tv programming is constantly streamed to your lines whether you have TV or not and whether you pay for it or not. It’s encrypted and is only decrypted by your cable boxes when your provider says they can decrypt it. The phone frequencies are reserved so you can make phone calls and still max out your download.

So what about the rest of the bandwidth? Well, way back in the early days of cable it was pretty much everyone for themselves. Every company did things its own way. That’s where DOCSIS came in. It’s a platform that allows modem manufacturers to make modems that will work on any cable network that supports Docsis. And the key part is that DOCSIS is always backwards compatible. The network upgrade to 3.1 did not break the old d2 devices.

When it was developed the download was extremely more necessary than the upload. You’d be sending small single line commands on upload and receiving entire files in download. So more frequencies went to download than upload. In a lab setting 1.0 could reach 40mbps down and 10 up. That’s not what was sold because real life isn’t a lab and there’s loss over large distances. Realistically most people got 10 mb down and upload wasn’t even listed.

Whats changed? Well today those same download and upload frequencies are still used. We’ve added more around them to deliver higher speeds. But we’ve also kept the same principles that people need more download than upload. Docsis 3.1 was released in 2013. We really didn’t start stressing over upload until Covid and work from home had us on zoom calls all day.

Docsis 4.0 is technically released but requires quite a bit of overhaul to work with existing networks. We pretty much need to do away with cable tv. That’s why many ISP’s are pushing IPTv. It removes the need for all that bandwidth devoted to just TV. If everyone in a region drops traditional cable for IPTv they can easily switch to d4. D4 does increase upload but does not make it symmetrical.

Your cable company does not decide their highest tier realistically. It’s the most that medium will offer. It’s gonna be a while too for d4 to be available everywhere. Everyone would need to drop traditional cable (which is honestly a nice move regardless) and people don’t upgrade plans very often. When I worked in tech support I would frequently deal with customers complaining about slow speeds while on plans from 2002.

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[–] [email protected] 112 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does this really matter. We aren't getting it anyway.

The telcom/cable companies are just going to take the "broadband" money, build out a couple of neighborhoods, claim it is too hard, and then keep all the money.

They have already done it many times. Free taxpayer money with zero repercussions. Why would they do anything different.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have a lot of experience with rural broadband initiatives, and generally yes, the FCC designation sets the minimums we see in terms of new service delivery to underserved communities. I specifically worked with state and municipal entities to build grant packages to fund infrastructure and these new minimums would be a great help.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (7 children)

We are between towns in western WA state stuck with 10Mb DSL service. There are a lot of us folks. After moving in (the PO said the internet was great, lol), we discovered that doing anything excessive like downloading AND streaming would not work. One thing at a time. We were able to bond two pair and get 20Mb which is workable, but that's where we sit. Gigabit service is all around us, but we'd have to trench a mile up the road and pay for that to even think about getting a provider to lay a line. Century Link outright laughed at me.

I was able to get T-Mo's home internet as a backup since we WFH, but it isn't stellar either.

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[–] [email protected] 112 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If the federal government is regulating them can we admit they're a fucking utility already and stop allowing them to gouge prices when they have more money than they could feasibly spend?

Can you imagine if we said "by 2035 every American household in our electric grid will also be connected to the internet at a speed of 1gbps"?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I can imagine it.

I can imagine the next jerk off administration rescinding that goal in the name of private enterprise or whatever bullshit excuse they choose.

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[–] [email protected] 94 points 1 year ago (18 children)

We really need some upstream minimums as well. That causes so much lag for me. Most plans are 1 up even with 100 down. I have a 200/10 plan now and it's difficult to do work with the maybe 5 that I get in practice if I'm lucky, especially after overhead from VPN.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Most plans are 1 up even with 100 down

That can't be right. I thought Australia's 100/20 plans had pathetic upload speeds but that's unreal.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I have Spectrum here in the southeast of the United States. My plan is 300 down 12 up. That pathetic upload speed needs to change for the better.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Most broadband access in the US is via coax. And the coax companies refuse to let cable TV, and the packages they can bundle, die. So the portion of the coax that would allow for symmetrical service instead brings all the channels you didn't buy because everyone streams now.

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I could give a shit what they call it. How about enforcing some god damn price restrictions or make data caps illegal? Speed means little otherwise

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

This actually does keep prices in check. Albeit, a bit backasswardsly.

I may be off on the specifics but it's something like: Having to offer 100mbps at the lowest rates in (poor neighborhoods) increases the speeds of each tier while keeping the price the same.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Thats great but can we demand some decent UPLOAD to?

cries in 300down measally 10 up

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

In the linked pdf, it does mention the benchmarks.

  • 2015/current standard is 25/3 Mbps.
  • Proposed increase to 100/20 Mbps.
  • Future goal is 1000/500 Mbps.
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I felt so gaslit by optimum because they advertise 1gbps parallel. But, if you don't have their fiber offering in your region they'll happily sell you 1gbps/24mbps for the same price.

Although, unless I complain, they fail to give me even 300mbps down.

I miss Google Fiber :(

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago

Can’t wait til they give another few hundred billion to ISPs who turn it into bonuses instead of infra improvement

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago

As it should have been 5 years ago. Maybe even more.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago

5 years late but better than never.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I did telecom work about 5 years ago

It was shocking the amount of area that depends on a low-quality copper wire infrastructure.

I don't know if that changed in 5 years, but companies are going to have a hard time getting that replaced nationwide

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

They just won't be able to call it broadband.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Laugh in Western European (10Gbps)

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I just don't get it. Why not making upload speed same as download speed?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

the most simple explanation is that total bandwidth is limited and more upload speed they give you the less download speed.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

On all lines the total amount of available bandwidth has to be split between upload and download. If you've got gigabits or even hundreds of megabits to play with then symmetric is great, but on slower connections is makes a world of sense to heavily favour download just because humans are better at consuming information than creating it. Consider how many hours of videos the average person watches per week versus how many they create in the same period. Same for photos, emails, articles, etc. There are people who have parity but they are in a pretty tiny minority.

That said, I hear there are people in the US getting 300Mb/s down and 10Mb/s up which is pretty fucking nuts.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

You might have figured it out by now, but "megabits per second" is abbreviated as "Mbps" with an uppercase m; yeah, it's kinda pedantic, but using lowercase means it's a millibit, which is much, much smaller. The same applies to "gigabits per second," which should be expressed as "Gbps."

At any rate, thank you for posting this, it really is good news. And about time they did this, too.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it's common parlance to use Mbps and mbps interchangeably since nothing uses "millibits" as a unit of measurement. More commonly people misuse Mbps and MBps which is incorrect since it signifies bits and bytes.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

100 mbps? That's 100 millibits per second, or 0.1 bits per second. I'd certainly hope for better bandwidth than one bit every ten seconds; that's slower than smoke signals.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I wish we can all move to MB/s and get rid of the endless confusion on names

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (8 children)

It should also require allowing incoming connections. Too much ISPs, especially mobile, are gives one-way Internet now. Basically like having a phone line with no phone number.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I could also get 100mbps for less than $80 a month that'd be great.

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