Please do. Had to go up to full gigabit down with xfinity to get 35 up. Next highest was 15 I think? Not that you can figure that out easily - their website doesn't list upload speeds. Or maybe it does - the website is terrible to navigate, slow and I got 404s off their main internet landing page.
Anyhow at the risk of this turning into a multi page rant about comcast I'll cut back to upload speed. I see it as upload is for creation and download is for consumption. What do the cable companies want people to be doing?
If you look at the popularity of twitch/youtube/(things I'm too old and unhip to know about) it is a direct threat to cable/traditional content creation. I'd wager the current state of affairs holds a lot of people back from getting into content creation, especially poorer/larger families who have to share a limited connection.
Most cable carriers, prominently Comcast, have issues with legacy channel allocations (e.g. for the On Demand feature for legacy Motorola STBs) that conflict with the channel allocations required for the higher upstream speeds supported by DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1. This results in a de facto situation of upstream speeds being constrained to only a very small portion of the up to 2gbps upstream capability of 3.1, due to only having typically 3 QAM channels for upstream.
Unfortunately, eliminating these issues requires large-scale replacement of not just equipment in the field (nodes and amplifiers which are broadly all being replaced anyway to support Node+Zero architecture) but equipment in customer homes: the legacy STBs. Cable carriers have found in the past that getting people to turn these in to swap out for newer models is excessively expensive in customer goodwill, and less so cost, so there's a major technical disincentive to such a change.
I see it as upload is for creation and download is for consumption.
Nowadays, I see it as upload is for Zoom, download is for everything. It used to be basically okay to have slow upload speeds, but in an era when everything from kindergarten to the workplace requires video conferencing, good upload speeds are more important.
You’re overthinking it. I’ve worked at enough big companies to be 100% sure it’s not elaborate, long term evil plan to keep people from competing with them.
They do that because it’s cheaper that way for them, and majority of users don’t complain.
> Anyhow at the risk of this turning into a multi page rant about comcast I'll cut back to upload speed. I see it as upload is for creation and download is for consumption. What do the cable companies want people to be doing?
Fun fact: Comcast does not even show you the upload speed by default on their speed test page. You have to click an extra "details" section for it to run the upload part of the test. Otherwise you just see the single download number.
My understanding is that it is going to take a lot of capital investment from Comcast to fix that because their entire (copper) infrastructure is optimized around downloads. That is because the entire network was designed around cable TV, which is primarily downloading data. Newer fiber installations are better designed to handle uploads.
I believe they're required to publish something called a "rate card". If you search "[name] internet rate card", you should be able to find a PDF type document listing service and rates.
I think the upload limit has something to do with the Docsis protocol that most of their equipment operates (cable TV) under. I believe that the newer version protocol (Docsics 4) should allow for much greater speeds, up and down. I have no idea how long it will take these companies to update to this version.
My local broadband provider admitted to me that they could offer symmetric 1 gig service, but are choosing not to. The current max a residential customer can purchase is 1 gig down, 25Mbs up. The monthly non-discount rate is $180, with $110/month possible with certain promotions. It is an extra 10$/month to go from 20Mbs up to 25Mbs. Starlink is doing well here.
I live in South Africa. Myself and all my friends are sitting on around 100 Mbps up/down uncapped unshaped, no fair use policy each at around $100 USD monthly. A few of my friends are on Gigabit down, 200 up.
How is America behind on this? Everything is hosted there and cached there. Is it big business lobbying politicians to prevent them from having to compete? In South Africa we have dozens on ISPs and as an economy we're probably not far off from one US state. The competition has been great for consumers.
USA built out its internet infrastructure earlier than most of the developing nations, who now, almost universally, have better connectivity.
That caused two things:
1. Coming later to the game, you don’t need to deal with legacy infra, that’s there, costed huge amount of money, and replacing it will cost even more (like cable connections to the houses)
2. USA has a general approach of building out infra in sprints, and then neglecting it until next sprint. Few examples - credit cards and their security, roads, space program, internet infra. And while it’s more complicated, politics are large reason for it. It’s much less catchy to say “I’ll spend $500B to maintain X”, then “I’ll spend $1000B to build Y”.
There is no single situation in "America" with respect to broadband. We're a federation of 50 different states that's almost the size of the entire EU. Broadband is mainly a state level issue and it varies by state. Here in Maryland, over 60% of people have access to fiber. I have two different fiber providers to my house, more than an hour outside a major city. Symmetrical gigabit here is under $80.
My congressional district has a Comcast call center located in it. So my representative bends over backwards to support Comcast because they 'provide so many jobs' in the area. It's pitiful.
> Is it big business lobbying politicians to prevent them from having to compete?
Correct. The politicians that US citizens habitually elect are in the pocket of telecom companies. These politicians have not elevated Internet service in the US to the level of, for example, telephone service which, as a result of government policy established by now long dead politicians, is available almost anywhere someone would care to live in the US. This allows telecom companies to cherry pick lucrative areas for Internet service and ignore everything else. The result is that both rural and poor urban areas have poor or no Internet service while suburbs and dense metropolitan areas have high performance network services.
One might assume that US citizens are fabulously stupid for continuing to elect such politicians. That's the easy answer, frequently offered, and like most easy answers it misses a great deal. There are political undercurrents in the US that create the alignments of power that explain our outcomes. Unfortunately it isn't possible to candidly discuss these currents in forums such as this without igniting flame wars, so I'll end here.
We don't invest in the future, only immediate profits. Look at any other infrastructure....subways, roads, water, electrical, government systems, education, recycling, etc. They're all crumbling.
I am an American with symmetric gigabit service (actually ~900mbps down, ~880 mbps up) with no caps and I pay less than $100/month. Of course, that is because I live in a huge urban area where ISPs actually compete with each other and do not have any local monopolies on service. The problem in America is that there are vast geographic areas where millions of people have no real choice in broadband service, and ISPs let their networks languish in those areas.
Funny that the rich only ever have rich friends. Who can really afford $1200/a for ..., well, what exactly? One can make the case today, that access to the Internet is essential (although I'm not quite convinced that this needs to be from home. An account at school or a public library would suffice methinks), but broadband? with bitrates even exceeding those needed for high definition video streams? C'mon.
I am also in the US and my connection is 10x faster than yours and 30% cheaper.
Half of the senators listed in this article represent states with population densities lower than any South African province other than Northern Cape. Colorado's density is 19.9/km2. Maine is 16.9/km2
Many of the servers which you connect to in the US are in the Northeast megalopolis, which is an area with a density of 359.6/km2
Unless I'm missing something about existing coax cable deployments, this would practically force large-scale fiber buildout. Cable isn't built to service symmetrical speeds, and more than that I don't think that most residential workloads benefit significantly from it.
I do think that in the era of Zoom, a household could use ~20mbps upload, and I guess if we're trying to be forward looking, 100mbps is a target that's achievable right now (with fiber buildout).
It was last year maybe, just before the pandemic hit, Comcast doubled my download speed but also cut my upload in half. They spun the change as a 'free' upgrade, but in reality my download speed was fine before; My gaming, outbound streaming, and work use cases all suffered massively due to the change.
we should increase the upload speed, but 100Mbs is overkill. I had gigabit fiber for 3 years before I realized I never went anywhere near that. I switched to 100/100 now and no one even noticed, that's with the whole family working/schooling from home. I'm pretty sure 50/50 would be fine.
The biggest issues are data caps and upload speeds.
From prior experience in this industry: Customers are generally quite bad at determining where the bottleneck is in their system.
It was surprising to see how often people upgraded their broadband plan or WiFi router after struggling to FaceTime with friends and family (who were likely on cellular), for example.
TBH if we want to see more services like stadia/geforce now or highier res streaming 50Mbps is not enough. Single stream in GFN can reach 50Mbps right now and that's only on 1080p60hz.
Rising bar won't hurt anyone and should force ISPs to create better infrastructure.
I have a family of 4 who will all be streaming, gaming, surfing at once on 25mbps and it's fine. You need about 5mbps per stream at 1080p and 30fps. Streaming in 4K is much more demanding but I think that's still a luxury.
I think the big variable between now and the last time these were set is the great remote working migration of 2020. Zoom doesn't require 1080 quality, but you'll be sending as much up as down, so the 3mbps upload speed would suddenly feel pretty tight.
Maybe you are just capped by bad wifi? I had the same issue and switching around wifi protocols did a 10x on my speed. Like from 20-30mbs to 300-350mbs.
See, this I do not understand... With 50/50Mbps I can't game and watch 1080p60 videos on YouTube whilst family stream, there will be a very noticeable lag in game and stream will start to buffer.
We now get 140/140 for just under $25 (Europe, Denmark)
In a letter to government leaders Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators called for a quadrupling of base high-speed broadband delivery speeds making 100Mbps down and 100Mbps up the new base for high-speed broadband.
Why are Senators writing letters to the Executive branch? The Executive branch enforces the laws that the Legislative branch writes. If Senators want a different definition they should do their damn jobs for once and write some laws.
One of the benefits of home fiber that people rarely talk about is the low latency. On my fiber connection, I get around ~2ms ping to the nearest data center. On my parents' cable internet, it's around ~25ms ping. (I am not up-to-date on the latest DOCSIS versions, etc., and it's possible some cable companies might do better than this.)
This ~20ms makes a small but noticeable difference in how quickly web pages load, how smooth video conferencing and VoIP are, and how fluid online gaming is.
Let's not be fooled by the messaging. This is the wired broadband telcos/cablecos not wanting low orbit satellite providers to be eligible for federal money. Starlink is scaring them. Perhaps the prospects of CBRS as well.
This is anti-competition in an area in which we desperately need competition, and therefore should be fought against, no matter how good it sounds.
“Going forward, we should make every effort to spend limited federal dollars on broadband networks capable of providing sufficient download and upload speeds and quality,”
Does this definition held by the FCC actually map to any legal qualifications for federal subsidies to ISP's, or is this just a nice gesture?
I live in a semi-rural area and work from home in tech. I am within range of LTE towers, but only T-Mo will serve my area and the connection remains spotty even with a $1000 signal booster.
It is frustrating to see initiatives like this that do not address the actual problems that make work difficult. My throughput is about 25 down / 3 up when it works, and this feels fine to me.
What I do need is a ping that stays under 100ms reliably, even when downloading or streaming. I can usually get 60ms or so, but it jumps up to 1000ms for short periods of time regularly for no reason. This interferes with any sort of voip calling severely.
Just as importantly, data caps should be at least 500GB, and clearly unlimited would be better yet. Plans that offer under 100GB of data are used up very quickly if doing anything more than the bare minimum.
Very in favor of modernizing the definition, very not in favor of subsidizing any network buildout -- if a provider is not offering broadband under the new definition that is not (in my eyes) a problem the government needs to step in to fix, it's simply being honest about our nation's network infra capabilities.
Sure, we can incentivize providers for reaching certain percentage rollouts under the new definition, but history shows us we should not consider schemes to help finance those buildouts.
Internet is not currently a utility, so unless we make it a proper utility with proper regulation before handing over money, the federal government is historically not capable of resisting lobbying pressure aimed at remove the teeth from similar subsidized buildout agreements. In almost all cases the money has disappeared without significant real world improvements.
For example, using the money intended for buildout to instead pay lobbyers to re-change the definition of broadband, thereby actualizing some stated goal of "75% of service area covered by broadband", and then pocketing the difference between the actual buildout costs and the lobbying costs.
If we offer a financing without regulation, we may as well move the money straight into the exec bonus category and totally ignore improving infra
Symmetric home bandwidth is a nice idea, but it's not how almost any residential infrastructure is built out. Even "symmetric" gigabit fiber usually isn't (yes I know there are a few FTTH networks using Metro Ethernet etc, but that's rare) since GPON is still asymmetric at the neighborhood level. Everyone on a single OLT port, very similar to how DOCSIS capacity is shared among a coaxial local segment in hybrid fiber/coax cable networks.
The reality is that residential customers use more download than upload on their last mile connection, bandwidth is always a limited resource that must be allocated, and engineering tradeoffs will always be made.
Is 3mbit up insufficient? It's workable right now, but barely. I do think that has good reason, and the capacity exists, to rise in the near future. But moving to symmetric is just going to result in more oversubscription on the upload side, and banking on how real-world most users don't actually fill their upload.
I'd also be concerned about the impacts on rural internet access innovation under this. Yes, "innovation" has too often been an excuse for refusing to build out physical plant; but the market has responded with new options which can provide over 25/3 to deep rural customers at a price point which can be profitable. The biggest threat to customers here is overly restrictive data caps - 20 gigs/month is not a usable quantity even if it's delivered at 100mbit! It's likely that some degree of data cap, at least a soft/deprioritization cap, will always be a fixture of most RF based last-mile access. That's unfortunate but that will always be constrained to the frequencies available. There are some hard decisions there, and points to the need to have a definition of what a sufficient data cap is.
Realistically, if you want broadband with no data caps (or only "top 1% of all users" type caps such as most "no cap" urban/suburban residential ISPs use) then there would need to be actual fiber to the premises run everywhere. That's a rural electrification level project.. which we already mandated and paid for big chunks of with the incumbent telcos, then let them pocket the money and not build out the network. Sigh. It's probably too late to claw any of that back or enforce those old mandates, so we're stuck with finding other ways to do it. (And even those broken promises only covered part of the country to begin with..)
[+] [-] nimos|5 years ago|reply
Anyhow at the risk of this turning into a multi page rant about comcast I'll cut back to upload speed. I see it as upload is for creation and download is for consumption. What do the cable companies want people to be doing?
If you look at the popularity of twitch/youtube/(things I'm too old and unhip to know about) it is a direct threat to cable/traditional content creation. I'd wager the current state of affairs holds a lot of people back from getting into content creation, especially poorer/larger families who have to share a limited connection.
[+] [-] jcrawfordor|5 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, eliminating these issues requires large-scale replacement of not just equipment in the field (nodes and amplifiers which are broadly all being replaced anyway to support Node+Zero architecture) but equipment in customer homes: the legacy STBs. Cable carriers have found in the past that getting people to turn these in to swap out for newer models is excessively expensive in customer goodwill, and less so cost, so there's a major technical disincentive to such a change.
[+] [-] lacker|5 years ago|reply
Nowadays, I see it as upload is for Zoom, download is for everything. It used to be basically okay to have slow upload speeds, but in an era when everything from kindergarten to the workplace requires video conferencing, good upload speeds are more important.
[+] [-] justapassenger|5 years ago|reply
They do that because it’s cheaper that way for them, and majority of users don’t complain.
[+] [-] koolba|5 years ago|reply
Fun fact: Comcast does not even show you the upload speed by default on their speed test page. You have to click an extra "details" section for it to run the upload part of the test. Otherwise you just see the single download number.
[+] [-] sologoub|5 years ago|reply
They should just require that symmetrical connection is provided or at least is an option. After using it for a year, I’d gladly pay extra for it.
300/300 would probably serve most home applications well and 500/500 or 1Gbps/1Gbps for power users/demanding wfh.
[+] [-] conradev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lettergram|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyPuncher|5 years ago|reply
I believe they're required to publish something called a "rate card". If you search "[name] internet rate card", you should be able to find a PDF type document listing service and rates.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vondur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fireball_blaze|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ortusdux|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Just1689|5 years ago|reply
How is America behind on this? Everything is hosted there and cached there. Is it big business lobbying politicians to prevent them from having to compete? In South Africa we have dozens on ISPs and as an economy we're probably not far off from one US state. The competition has been great for consumers.
[+] [-] justapassenger|5 years ago|reply
That caused two things:
1. Coming later to the game, you don’t need to deal with legacy infra, that’s there, costed huge amount of money, and replacing it will cost even more (like cable connections to the houses)
2. USA has a general approach of building out infra in sprints, and then neglecting it until next sprint. Few examples - credit cards and their security, roads, space program, internet infra. And while it’s more complicated, politics are large reason for it. It’s much less catchy to say “I’ll spend $500B to maintain X”, then “I’ll spend $1000B to build Y”.
[+] [-] rayiner|5 years ago|reply
There is no single situation in "America" with respect to broadband. We're a federation of 50 different states that's almost the size of the entire EU. Broadband is mainly a state level issue and it varies by state. Here in Maryland, over 60% of people have access to fiber. I have two different fiber providers to my house, more than an hour outside a major city. Symmetrical gigabit here is under $80.
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suchire|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] topspin|5 years ago|reply
Correct. The politicians that US citizens habitually elect are in the pocket of telecom companies. These politicians have not elevated Internet service in the US to the level of, for example, telephone service which, as a result of government policy established by now long dead politicians, is available almost anywhere someone would care to live in the US. This allows telecom companies to cherry pick lucrative areas for Internet service and ignore everything else. The result is that both rural and poor urban areas have poor or no Internet service while suburbs and dense metropolitan areas have high performance network services.
One might assume that US citizens are fabulously stupid for continuing to elect such politicians. That's the easy answer, frequently offered, and like most easy answers it misses a great deal. There are political undercurrents in the US that create the alignments of power that explain our outcomes. Unfortunately it isn't possible to candidly discuss these currents in forums such as this without igniting flame wars, so I'll end here.
[+] [-] theandrewbailey|5 years ago|reply
The ISPs and networks that serve datacenters do not serve apartments and houses.
[+] [-] hanniabu|5 years ago|reply
We don't invest in the future, only immediate profits. Look at any other infrastructure....subways, roads, water, electrical, government systems, education, recycling, etc. They're all crumbling.
[+] [-] betterunix2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guenthert|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kube-system|5 years ago|reply
Half of the senators listed in this article represent states with population densities lower than any South African province other than Northern Cape. Colorado's density is 19.9/km2. Maine is 16.9/km2
Many of the servers which you connect to in the US are in the Northeast megalopolis, which is an area with a density of 359.6/km2
[+] [-] mlcruz|5 years ago|reply
Local ISPs are great for competition.
[+] [-] stu2010|5 years ago|reply
I do think that in the era of Zoom, a household could use ~20mbps upload, and I guess if we're trying to be forward looking, 100mbps is a target that's achievable right now (with fiber buildout).
[+] [-] superbaconman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] u678u|5 years ago|reply
we should increase the upload speed, but 100Mbs is overkill. I had gigabit fiber for 3 years before I realized I never went anywhere near that. I switched to 100/100 now and no one even noticed, that's with the whole family working/schooling from home. I'm pretty sure 50/50 would be fine.
The biggest issues are data caps and upload speeds.
[+] [-] hanniabu|5 years ago|reply
Not really considering this probably won't be updated for another 20 years
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|5 years ago|reply
It was surprising to see how often people upgraded their broadband plan or WiFi router after struggling to FaceTime with friends and family (who were likely on cellular), for example.
[+] [-] mciancia|5 years ago|reply
Rising bar won't hurt anyone and should force ISPs to create better infrastructure.
[+] [-] tootie|5 years ago|reply
I think the big variable between now and the last time these were set is the great remote working migration of 2020. Zoom doesn't require 1080 quality, but you'll be sending as much up as down, so the 3mbps upload speed would suddenly feel pretty tight.
[+] [-] _ea1k|5 years ago|reply
Uh, do you really have 10 people doing separate 4k videos? Its just overkill.
Upload on the other hand is far more important than people realize.
[+] [-] ip26|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hartator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xdrosenheim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juskrey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradleyjg|5 years ago|reply
Why are Senators writing letters to the Executive branch? The Executive branch enforces the laws that the Legislative branch writes. If Senators want a different definition they should do their damn jobs for once and write some laws.
[+] [-] josefresco|5 years ago|reply
Policy: https://www.xfinity.com/learn/internet-service/data
News: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/comca...
Update: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/comcast-responds...
[+] [-] xiii1408|5 years ago|reply
This ~20ms makes a small but noticeable difference in how quickly web pages load, how smooth video conferencing and VoIP are, and how fluid online gaming is.
[+] [-] mchusma|5 years ago|reply
The question this is asking is "what level should the federal government subsidize connections, particularly in rural areas."
25 down, 3 up is plenty for 99.9% of internet users. It's ok to tell people that if they want faster speeds they have to pay for it.
I am in a city with about 40mb down, 5mb up, 3 kids all doing zoom calls/video all day and internet is basically never constrained.
[+] [-] gz5|5 years ago|reply
This is anti-competition in an area in which we desperately need competition, and therefore should be fought against, no matter how good it sounds.
[+] [-] LinuxBender|5 years ago|reply
Does this definition held by the FCC actually map to any legal qualifications for federal subsidies to ISP's, or is this just a nice gesture?
[+] [-] mkching|5 years ago|reply
It is frustrating to see initiatives like this that do not address the actual problems that make work difficult. My throughput is about 25 down / 3 up when it works, and this feels fine to me.
What I do need is a ping that stays under 100ms reliably, even when downloading or streaming. I can usually get 60ms or so, but it jumps up to 1000ms for short periods of time regularly for no reason. This interferes with any sort of voip calling severely.
Just as importantly, data caps should be at least 500GB, and clearly unlimited would be better yet. Plans that offer under 100GB of data are used up very quickly if doing anything more than the bare minimum.
[+] [-] hamiltont|5 years ago|reply
Sure, we can incentivize providers for reaching certain percentage rollouts under the new definition, but history shows us we should not consider schemes to help finance those buildouts.
Internet is not currently a utility, so unless we make it a proper utility with proper regulation before handing over money, the federal government is historically not capable of resisting lobbying pressure aimed at remove the teeth from similar subsidized buildout agreements. In almost all cases the money has disappeared without significant real world improvements.
For example, using the money intended for buildout to instead pay lobbyers to re-change the definition of broadband, thereby actualizing some stated goal of "75% of service area covered by broadband", and then pocketing the difference between the actual buildout costs and the lobbying costs.
If we offer a financing without regulation, we may as well move the money straight into the exec bonus category and totally ignore improving infra
[+] [-] thaeli|5 years ago|reply
The reality is that residential customers use more download than upload on their last mile connection, bandwidth is always a limited resource that must be allocated, and engineering tradeoffs will always be made.
Is 3mbit up insufficient? It's workable right now, but barely. I do think that has good reason, and the capacity exists, to rise in the near future. But moving to symmetric is just going to result in more oversubscription on the upload side, and banking on how real-world most users don't actually fill their upload.
I'd also be concerned about the impacts on rural internet access innovation under this. Yes, "innovation" has too often been an excuse for refusing to build out physical plant; but the market has responded with new options which can provide over 25/3 to deep rural customers at a price point which can be profitable. The biggest threat to customers here is overly restrictive data caps - 20 gigs/month is not a usable quantity even if it's delivered at 100mbit! It's likely that some degree of data cap, at least a soft/deprioritization cap, will always be a fixture of most RF based last-mile access. That's unfortunate but that will always be constrained to the frequencies available. There are some hard decisions there, and points to the need to have a definition of what a sufficient data cap is.
Realistically, if you want broadband with no data caps (or only "top 1% of all users" type caps such as most "no cap" urban/suburban residential ISPs use) then there would need to be actual fiber to the premises run everywhere. That's a rural electrification level project.. which we already mandated and paid for big chunks of with the incumbent telcos, then let them pocket the money and not build out the network. Sigh. It's probably too late to claw any of that back or enforce those old mandates, so we're stuck with finding other ways to do it. (And even those broken promises only covered part of the country to begin with..)
[+] [-] antattack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinwp|5 years ago|reply
[DONE] CO - Bennet (Thanking him)
[DONE] CO - Hickenlooper (Urging him to support)
[+] [-] me551ah|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seattle_spring|5 years ago|reply