imagetic
We just moved from 12 years on Bay Area fiber to PNW Comcast Coax, 1Gb down, but 4mb up and averaging 4 brief outages a day. Yay, me!
nunez
This is a very welcome change. 25/3 is fine but maxes out once you have one Netflix 4K stream going and won't work at all once AR/VR becomes more mainstream
hansvm
It's a good start, but networks can have all sorts of pathologies rendering them less useful (or nearly useless), and the current oligopoly is financially incentivized to minimally meet these definitions regardless of how usable the network is:

(1) We provide speeds "up to 100mbps" (actual max throughput in any 24h period being 10-60mbps)

(2) We provide mean speeds of 200mbps, easily beating the definition (mean is measured over time, not from the customer's perspective, so if most people get on at the same time then most browsing sessions see throughput of 10mbps or less due to poorly handled congestion)

(3) We provide mean speeds of 100mbps (upload is 0.01mbps)

(4) We provide mean speeds of 100mbps, over 99% of the time (every 3 months an 8h maintenance block drops speeds to 10kbps, rendering the network totally unusable that workday)

(5) Mean throughput is 100mbps, mean latency is 2000ms (totally unusuable for real-time _anything_)

(6) Mean throughput is 200mbps, mean latency is 20ms, every 5min a few packets will have up to 10s of latency (still totally unusable for most real-time purposes, but naive metrics make it sound good)

(7) You're allowed "unlimited" "100mbps" (but if you use that for more than a contiguous day, or a few long evenings in a row, then 100mbps is redefined to mean 100kbps)

And on and on and on. More useful metrics might measure actual consumer impact:

(a) Can you rely on this every workday to shuffle documents back and forth?

(b) Can you rely on this every workday to have low-resolution video calls?

(c) Can you usually play a quasi-realtime game for 30min without lag killing your character?

(d) During peak hours, can you reasonably expect to be able to stream buffered 720p video?

A raw 100mbps floor doesn't guarantee your network suffices for any of those use cases.

Arubis
If I’m Comcast, I’m getting behind this. What a great way to kill off competition from small urban fixed wireless ISPs!
hollander
Naming should be megaband, gigaband, teraband etc.
medellin
This would have been great 10 years ago. In 2023 20 mbps for upload is a joke.
pokstad
Isn’t the term “broadband” supposed to reference using the full capacity of the wire medium? Like DSL was broadband because voice lines only used a narrow band of the frequency range of the wire?
speby
Remember when a T-1 line was considered to be like the god-level status of internet connections? Whoa.... 1.5Mbps!? Later, more affordable DSL speeds would reach single-digit Mbps and it felt like being on another planet.

Now all of those speeds feel like they're dial-up modems.

pokstad
T1 was a dedicated circuit though, even with DSL there was still a need for T1 lines.
dathinab
as far as I can tell given the IT usage in the country I'm from:

- 10mbps is the bare minimum to not have frequent major problems with all kinds of things but it still just a minimum (symmetric, if with reasonable latency and reliable and always actually 10mbps, i.e. not a contract which says 10mbps but is often much less or supper low latency)

- 100(down)/~50(up)mbps is "good enough" for quite many (but then bluray dvds are still make some profite here, soo...; also again actual speeds not "marketed speeds")

- 500+mbps down are what you really want if you play a lot of AAA games or similar, else download times for updates and similar become quite in-convenient and can infer with you playing with other people (e.g. due to you waiting for a unexped download). Some jobs need speeds like that, too.

- there is little point in more then 1gbps down or 250mbps up (where I live; outside some niche cases). It's partially a chicken and egg problem: Without good internet you can't sell services which need/want such speeds but without such services why should anyone spend (larger amounts of) money to buy such internet and if very few buy it where available why should a teleco make it available in other areas

Through that's private usage, not b2b, e.g. remote controlled agriculture machines.

runjake
What's really hurting me isn't my 400Mbps download.

What's hurting me is the advertised 12Mbps upload, or in reality, 9-10Mbps upload.

Customers are so focused on synthetic download speeds, but meanwhile the upload rug is being pulled from them. Get a few devices on your network with iCloud Photos enabled and you're hosed, because traffic can't ACK/get out.

bmicraft
Wow, the worst ratio i've ever seen was 20:1 and that's way below
runjake
This is on Spectrum Cable Internet, for anyone wondering.
photonios
Everyone here arguing that most people have no practical use for higher speeds at home have never experienced 1 GBit up+down. Once you have it, you'll never settle for less.

I have 1 GBit up+down at home, I cabled the whole house with CAT7 cables and set up the best access points money can buy for mobile devices. Everything else is wired. It's an amazing experience and internet everywhere sucks compared to home.

When I lived in Romania this costed me €10, now that I am back in the Netherlands it's a bit more pricey at €52, but it's 100% worth it.

smilekzs
I did the same, hoping that someday I will finally get FTTH. Currently still on the only real option here which is Comcast 1G/20M. Sometimes LTE has better upload speed (but not latency, obviously).
pottertheotter
I think that people also say that they have no practical use for it because they don't have access to it, so they don't realize all the practical uses. For instance, I've worked with a lot of engineering companies that collect a lot of lidar data. Having reasonable speeds (1Gbps up/down) would have a huge impact on how and where we can transmit and process the data.
gnarlouse
In Iowa, you can still find fiber speeds as low as 5mbps in an upscale residential neighborhood. They'll sell it to you marked as 100mbps without batting an eye. Customer service will say "oh you've probably got a gamer in the neigborhood" as if that excuses them from their unapologetically horrible service.

Gotta love the late stage greed in this world

manchmalscott
The issue with that is even though I have gigabit internet, and we pay over $200 a month for it, my internet speed is still usually measured in kilobytes and sometimes just bytes per second. Speed tests show anywhere between 4-9 hundred MiB/s down and yet it takes YouTube like ten seconds just to load the titles of videos, and I’m in a big city not even a rural area. Just because they “””provide””” a speed doesn’t mean anyone will ever see it in practice.
z_zetetic_z
I have had an uncapped symmetric 10Gbps connection for ~50 USD / month for more than 10 years.
mcoliver
Should update the title to 100/20. I still find it amazing that companies can list services without the upload speed (eg Comcast). Of course latency and jitter matter too but that's probably above the heads of a lot of consumers.

Upload and latency increasingly matter more and more and is essential to many work from home endeavors. Whether you are uploading content for work or play, or have a family video conferencing, or a host of other things.

Perhaps the more interesting part of the doc is the future proposal for 1gb/500mb. I understand the engineering tradeoffs and reasoning for the asymmetrical bandwidth on coax/docsis but perhaps it's time to rethink some of that. That would be a good thing.

m463
Upload speed is just a cash grab. It is a way to segregate price-sensitive residential vs price-insensitive business customers who can then be charged enormous amounts.
packetlost
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. That is not at all how ISPs distinguish between residential/consumer and commercial customers at all. It's almost always entirely dependent on the transport being used (DOCSIS, twisted pair, fiber, etc.)
SV_BubbleTime
> Upload speed is just a cash grab.

No.

This lacks all historical and practical understanding of why upload speeds are limited.

Back in the 70s/80s when coax was being planned and rolled out for cable, they needed to figure out what frequencies they would use. Cable providers knew they needs a ton in one direction and only a tiny bit for things like buying pay per view in the other.

This has been fine traditionally because even up to Netflix and streaming we haven’t needed the upload at residential. No one complained. That may start to change a little.

As far as I am aware, all DOCSIS (cable) providers in the USA that are using cable-tv coax are limited to a max of 35Mbps upto DOCSIS3.1.

I am writing this on 1250/35 right now. The local tiers for me are 100/15, 400/25, 1000/35, 1250/35.

It isn’t a “cash grab” at all. If you need more upload you need a new line that isn’t divided so asymmetrically, which means fiber. And once you fiber, there is zero reason to go go symmetric, as you have two lines with the same equipment on either side, to a point where the ISP will charge differently if you cut into their bandwidth too much.

m463
When I first got cable in the beginning, it was symmetrical.
SV_BubbleTime
Upto 35, yea, ok.

Over 35? You are remembering wrong.

m463
it was 8/8 (looong ago). Company was taken over, then they made it more expensive and 8/1 I believe.
nunez
And for most folks 35Mbit up is perfectly fine. Okay, maybe bulk uploading photos and videos to Google Photos will be a slog, but most users aren't doing that with any regularity.
hn_acker
> It isn’t a “cash grab” at all. If you need more upload you need a new line that isn’t divided so asymmetrically, which means fiber. And once you fiber, there is zero reason to go go symmetric, as you have two lines with the same equipment on either side, to a point where the ISP will charge differently if you cut into their bandwidth too much.

Everything else you said could be true, yet not the part about a cash grab. Anything worse than $10 for 100 Mbps down and 100 Mbps up from a large ISP is a cash grab now that fiber exists [1], DOCSIS 3.1 can offer up to 1 Gbps (to say nothing of DOCSIS 4) [2], and large ISPs like Comcast keep committing subsidy fraud [3].

I wrote more about pricing in a different comment [4].

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-super...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Comparison

[3] Pick any one of these links. https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-too... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-oversta...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873

SV_BubbleTime
>Anything worse than $10 for 100 Mbps down and 100 Mbps up from a large ISP is a cash grab now that fiber exists [1],

I thought you were serious for a sec. You should open an ISP, it would be wildly successful with your background knowledge.

vel0city
The FCC requires ISPs to publish information about their network management practices. That's how you get sites like this:

https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement

I do wish this was required to be easily accessible from the marketing pages. Usually it takes some digging to find it. But at least they do have to make these numbers public.

portpecos
>The FCC determined that Comcast’s Xfinity Internet broadband Internet access services deliver, on average, over 100 percent of their advertised downstream and upstream speeds during the busiest periods of the day, known as "peak" times, during sustained testing. Peak times are Monday through Friday from 7:00pm to 11:00pm local time.

>Latency is typically measured in milliseconds, and generally has no significant impact on typical everyday Internet usage.

I took that from their networkmanagement page. Their statements seem to conflict with the consensus of the HN crowd, but I could be wrong.

ryandrake
I'm the only happy Comcast customer on HN. They have consistently delivered their advertised speeds to me with nearly zero downtime. I can't even remember the last time I witnessed an outage lasting longer than a minute. I WFH full time and am utterly reliant on my "consumer tier" service, and they have not let me down. They have also been very progressive and strong early with Native IPv6.

They are god awful expensive, but I feel the quality of their product is excellent. And I'm not even a Comcast employee or shill.

vel0city
People getting their contracted speeds from a company they generally despise probably aren't going to come out of the woodwork to write supporting comments.

Note they're not saying 100% of customers got their rated speeds, but the average customer got over 100% of their rated speeds. So, say the 50th percentile customer pays for 100M, they actually got 102M, boom, that metric is met. However easily 25%+ of customers didn't get their rated speeds during that peak period.

Some people ranting on an internet forum isn't high quality data of overall network metrics.

For a lot of residential customers, once latency is good enough it doesn't really matter. Once you get down below like 30 or so milliseconds, a lot of consumer applications just won't be any different. I could have 80ms latency to HN and my experience of the site would be roughly the same. Not saying all residential applications don't care about latency <30ms, but generally speaking the vast majority have very little difference at the moment. Watching a streaming movie, loading a web page, doom scrolling social media, etc are all going to be the exact same experience at 2ms or 10ms or 30ms. This is changing though, and I do prefer having such low latency with my residential fiber connection.

NoPicklez
<30ms latency is absolutely a good sweet spot.

Most people that need any less are likely gaming, heck even I'd like less for gaming but 30ms is more then enough to be able to play FPS games well.

I appreciate there is more to latency than just gaming, but I hear more people wanting less ping for those reasons than anything else.

layoric
Australia broadband is not great, but a few years ago I got fibre installed (at my own expense), and since have benefitted from actual competition among ISPs. The little ISP I’m with bills a daily rate which you can change at any point without penalty. Most days I just stay on a 1000/50 for about $3 USD a day, but can change to a range of plans from 50/20 to 1000/400, and it take only a few minutes to apply and kick in.

The monopoly situation I read about in the various areas of the US really sounds like the FCC or another regulator needs to break up region exclusive deals, or something. It feels like Australia, of all places might actually leap frog the US once fibre is more widely available, and that is pretty bad since we have had some of the worst average internet speeds in the developed world at very high prices. Regulatory capture is a plague , and this FCC “proposal” feels like a crumb to delay what sounds like much needed broader disruption of monopolies.

dottjt
Which company are you with? Also in Australia, although I don't think fibre is available yet to my address.

Did you also have to pay for fibre to be installed?

throw0101a
How about a future/stretch goal of open access networks so that we can get some competition at OSI Layer 3:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network

Ideally OSI Layer 1/2 would be a neutral third-party that doesn't do an IP but rather only makes sure physical plant is ubiquitous in good working order:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband

It was possible to wire up countries and continents with electricity and telephone in the early 1900s, so I don't see why is not technically possible to do the same with fibre in the early 2000s.

zbrozek
AT&T is offering 18/1 DSL in my neighborhood in 94022. Comcast offers nothing. Pretty sure this goalpost movement isn't going to convince either of them to offer service.
jdlyga
Verizon Fios still advertises in my building at an amazing 50 mbps. They have an old hookup from a decade+ ago when the building was first constructed. Meanwhile, our minimum cable speed available for purchase is 300 mbps. I still get contacted by Fios people every so often. They want 70 per month for 50 mbps!
ghostly_s
Great, I hope they codify what can be called "Fiber" next. My friend was excited to share Centurylink fiber was available at their new address, but while it is indeed delivered by fiber, it's capped out at 200Mbps.
elicksaur
When will a SLA be enforced by regulation? Who actually sees 90%+ of the billed speed 90%+ of the time?

I paid for 200mbps for a long time and only typically saw 20-30mbps. When I moved, Comcast gave me a deal for 400mbps, I’m now seeing 50-60mbps typically. Never bothered looking at 1g plans because why pay the price to get just 100mbps in reality.

gnicholas
I started with Comcast with 12Mbps service. Over time, they increased the base speed they offer to 20, 25, 50, and now 75. They have done this because they want to have x% of their customers on "broadband", per the federal definition.

This is all well and good, but they keep increasing the price, and refuse to offer lower-tier service. I probably wouldn't want 12Mbps anymore, but 20 or 25 would suffice. I wish I could pay a fraction of what I'm paying for 75Mbps and get a lower tier of service. It should suffice that x% of customers are offered "broadband" for a reasonable price, even if some choose a lower speed.

Ultimately, this comes down to competition. There are no other wired options where I live (in the heart of Silicon Valley). I have considered using a cellular hotspot, but it's not competitive in terms of pricing.

I'm all for prodding companies to move to faster speeds, but there should still be room for consumer choice.

jedbrown
They tripled the price of my grandmother's service over a five year period despite no speed increases so I figure they were going to charge you more regardless.
hn_acker
> I'm all for prodding companies to move to faster speeds, but there should still be room for consumer choice.

There certainly should be consumer choice, but in your case another problem is that the amount you pay Comcast for 75 Mbps download now should be no more than what you paid for 12 Mbps before. As I wrote in a different comment [1]:

> It's not reasonable for big ISPs like Comcast to offer me 300 megabits download 15 megabits upload for $70 a month (might've been $90, but assume $70) while EPB of Chattanooga [1] offers 1 gigabit symmetrical for $67.99 a month. What speed any individual actually needs doesn't have to come into the picture. In matters of consumer protection, the principle of the thing matters just as much as actual consumer needs.

(Ignore the [1] inside the quoted paragraph above. I'm leaving it in for Ctrl-F purposes.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873

m463
I started comcast with 100Mbps service and they have increased my bill every year too. sigh
jmyeet
We don't need competition. We need to provide Internet access as a heavily-regulated utility, ideally as a municipal service. Competition for last-mile Internet actually makes very little sense because it's an overbuild.

Imagine it costs $2000 per household to connect a fiber network. With 70% of households signing up, that produces a certain cost. Now imagine there was a second fiber network that also cost $2000 per household that splits the customer base. By definition, this is going to be more expensive.

Capitalism created this problem. It won't solve it. This is capitalism working as intended: doing the absolute least possible for the highest possible price while lobbying to exclude competition (eg by making municipal broadband illegal).

Expecting markets to solve this problem is neoliberal brain rot. Let's imagine that you do get 2 or even 3 ISPs in an area similar to Comcat, Spectrum, AT&T or Verizon. Now what? They just collude to keep speeds low and prices high [1].

Build municipal broadband. Failing that, regulate ISPs like utilities. And this would include unbundling TV services.

[1]: https://www.legitreviews.com/american-isps-collude-to-keep-b...

josh_carterPDX
I'm a Comcast customer and bundle my services. Every two years, once the introductory rate expires, I call to get a new "promo" rate or just say they can cancel me right then and there. They've never taken me up on the cancellation. As a result I have a full 1GIG service at my house and feel like I pay a reasonable amount.

I'm just not a big fan of their "security" features. Other than that, I haven't had many issues here in Oregon.

tzs
When I had Comcast bundles I did similar, except instead of calling I went to their nearest office. I liked doing this in person because I sometimes have trouble understanding call center accents.
ClumsyPilot
> There are no other wired options where I live (in the heart of Silicon Valley)

This reads like a joke.

adamsvystun
I agree that there should be more consumer choice. But is there anything FCC can do to increase it? Is it in their jurisdiction?
toast0
> But is there anything FCC can do to increase it? Is it in their jurisdiction?

Sure. They could apply the line sharing rules from the 1996 Telecom Act. Afaik, that's still law, but when courts said the FCC couldn't apply it to telephone companies and not cable companies, the FCC opted to declare the market was competitive and end mandatory line sharing.

Help from congress would be great, though. There was a lot of shenanigans under the line sharing regime, like ILECs pricing retail internet lower than wholesale prices. After a transition period, the line owners shouldn't offer retail service at all, make them restructure it into actually separate companies providing the internet service vs the lines.

gnicholas
Well, they seem to be able to offer incentives based on how many customers are on "broadband", so presumably they could offer incentives related to offering lower tiers/pricing, or to ISPs entering a market that only has one provider.
mixdup
>This is all well and good, but they keep increasing the price, and refuse to offer lower-tier service. I probably wouldn't want 12Mbps anymore, but 20 or 25 would suffice. I wish I could pay a fraction of what I'm paying for 75Mbps and get a lower tier of service. It should suffice that x% of customers are offered "broadband" for a reasonable price, even if some choose a lower speed.

The problem is that most of the costs of providing broadband are fixed costs. To run a coaxial cable from their headend to your house, and to provide employees and crews to repair it and install it all costs the same whether you buy 10 megabits or 2 gigabits

The variable costs--things like backbone bandwidth, paying for transit, doing node splits, etc are a smaller part of the overall cost than you might expect

This lower end of the market, though, is being taken up by Fixed Wireless (T-Mobile and Verizon primarily) for example you can get Verizon home wireless internet for as low as $25. My mom has it, and it's decent 50 megabit service for a low price

ZoomerCretin
The UK fixes this by forcing the companies who own the lines to rent and share them with other providers. ISPs in the US vehemently oppose this, of course.
Phileosopher
The US has something like this already with cellular with MVNOs, driven by the free market.

The TL;DR is that the cost of cell towers is mostly the same irrespective of bandwidth (e.g., hiring a technician to break-fix as parts fail from weather conditions), so carriers figured out they could "rent" their leftover bandwidth.

Most of the "cheap" carriers are simply slinging together MVNOs from all the carriers (e.g., Boost Mobile, MetroPCS). It creates a weird situation where you get plenty of signal on off-peak hours and (often) the middle of nowhere, but at the expense of having no signal in larger metro areas at peak hours.

gnicholas
> ISPs in the US vehemently oppose this, of course.

But is it still required though? Isn't this how Sonic uses AT&T lines? Perhaps it only applies to DSL, which is basically obsolete now?

cereal_cable
This happened with copper lines for telephony providers. Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers have to provide access for Competitive Local Exchange Carriers to enter the market and break up their monopoly. This effectively made DSL and T1s available via CLECs as they could acquire access to a copper circuit directly.

Internet has yet to be regulated that way and fiber lines aren't considered the same as those copper lines.

Also, fiber to the home is done using most often a PON system purchased from a specific vendor and is a time shared medium. You might only get 1Gbps service but you also aren't getting 100% of the fiber to yourself. The home side device will filter information from your neighbors for instance.

There's always ways to do this of course but, it wouldn't be as straightforward as patch the fiber from your home in the same way that they did with copper lines.

Phileosopher
The trouble goes back to a 1910's telegraph bill. The US created a de facto monopoly on each carrier for each zone of land. On a particular parcel of land, there is only 1 carrier for any telecom tech, with those parcels as tradable on a market. M&A has allowed it to become a bit of a duopoly (e.g., Verizon + ATT).

It did make sense at the time of the law: carriers kept clustering around the major metro areas and wouldn't expand to the boonies. Nowadays, that law has outlived its purpose.

bonyt
> The problem is that most of the costs of providing broadband are fixed costs. To run a coaxial cable from their headend to your house, and to provide employees and crews to repair it and install it all costs the same whether you buy 10 megabits or 2 gigabits

Not sure if this is completely the case when it comes to older networks that might need upgrades because lots of folk are sharing the same coax line. In an HFC[1] network, bandwidth is shared on the coax branches, and a variable number of units can be sharing the same fiber link, which can serve a neighborhood, block, or even unit. And, so upgrades can make a network more "fiber-rich."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fiber-coaxial

lyu07282
The actual problem is that this is infrastructure owned by a private, international for-profit corporation. Of course it's a fixed cost and a limited number of profitable customers (get fucked if you live anywhere that isn't profitable), yet your profits need to go up forever. I'm always curious because most people intuitively understand why for example it makes no sense to privatize streets and roads, there is only one going to your home. Even most people who have faith in capitalism, understand how monopolies are bad for society, privatized infrastructure is one of the more obvious contradictions of liberalism.
landemva
> it makes no sense to privatize streets and roads, there is only one going to your home.

Where I live roads are private (part of the lot) with reciprocal easement to all other lot owners to travel on the easement. It's not a toll and it's not 'public' or 'government'. No worries about government making crazy rules on their roads, when we own it.

Closer to topic, I want to get neighbors and everyone onboard with installing fiber in road and leasing to ISPs. Way too many hassles, so we remain dependent on Comcast.

PaulHoule
There also is a step between DSL and cable and fiber. I have a fiber to the node situation that gives consistent and reliable 20 Mbps down and I have two of those with load balancer. With VDSL they could sell 100Mbps service to a few houses close to the node.

A real upgrade for me would involve running a cable through a beaver meadow. There is an electric line and crews do go in there to limb up trees and they are planning to replace a pole, if there was some rational coordination of services and a commitment to universal service they’d get the fiber in when they do a maintenance cycle on the power line.

dekhn
I mean, the beavers would probably also appreciate an upgrade.
PaulHoule
I think they moved out. They're like any other lumberjacks, they cut down all the trees in an area, complain that the environmentalists shut them down, then go somewhere else.

We used to go out every day to take apart unwanted dams near our driveway. If you go at it in a disciplined way, taking out the sticks from downstream, then digging out the mud, and never letting the water level to get high enough that they can easily float materials to the dam site, it's not that hard. It was awful, however, if they dammed 3/4 of the culvert pipe in which case you had to work inside the pipe with low clearance and (I think) high CO2 levels and no really good place to put the debris. At least they would never reuse materials that they used once.

I don't think anyone has done that in the last year, I certainly haven't.

gnicholas
> you can get Verizon home wireless internet for as low as $25.

I hope this leads to wired ISP price reductions, or at least slower price growth. I happen to live in a VZW dead zone, so unfortunately it won't work for me...

gknoy
> I have considered using a cellular hotspot, but it's not competitive in terms of pricing.

I had the opposite experience. I was a very happy Comcast customer for a year or two (their curfew-for-kids-computers feature on their router was great, and the mobile app integration was very handy), but the 5G Verizon offering was cheaper and faster (where I live). I have never felt so bad canceling my account, as everything about the experience was great, but VZ had double (or more) the upload speed.

Galacta7
I would love to get Verizon 5G Home Internet for my mom, who is currently getting gouged by Verizon with DSL (and slow barely better than dial-up DSL). Unfortunately, she's not eligible, as Verizon apparently limits the number of 5G customers they offer in a given area -- due to bandwidth limitations. So it's great for folks who can get it, but pretty limited in terms of how many people can actually sign-up for service.
teaearlgraycold
I'm in an area with competition and I think I'm paying like $60/month for 10Gbps.
duffyjp
AT&T finally started offering fiber in my neighborhood this summer while Spectrum raised their minimum tier another $5. Needless to said I've seen a lot of AT&T vans around.

Unlike most folks my experience with fiber has been dreadful but at least I'm not paying out the nose for a connection with less upload speed than phone.

huytersd
I’ve only ever heard good things about fiber. High bandwidth, relatively low cost and next to no outages because they are buried. What’s dreadful about it?
gnicholas
Yeah that's Comcast's regular price for their lowest tier (75Mbps) where I am.
huytersd
What? I wasn’t even aware consumer speeds got that high. No caps I hope?
geraldwhen
I have 5gbps available at my house, but what would I use it for? Symmetric 1gbps is fine for me.
teaearlgraycold
No caps, no cap :P

I even made my own router because I didn't like the consumer options available: https://danangell.com/blog/posts/10gbps-router-for-fun/

Jiocus
Started seeing consumer 10Gbps back in 2018 (in Sweden). The problem was there wasn't many consumer router devices around back then to support that kind of link. It might have even been unheard of, so one ISP solved it by designing their own custom device to specification - just so they could offer 10Gbps asap.
tracker1
That would be my problem... my router has 2.5gbps ports, and I've only got 2 devices on my network supporting 10gb (nas and my desktop)... everything else is 1gb or 2.5gb. I'm not sure what the hardware costs would be to support that.
bitbckt
Sonic in the Bay Area offers 10Gb symmetric at that price, no cap. I upgraded from their 1Gb plan to 10Gb with no change in price.

Unfortunately, I’ve since moved to another part of the country, with much less enlightened ISP options.

Workaccount2
In an extreme ironic twist, me, the techie nerd guy, has the slowest internet of the regular-folk friend group of mine. Everyone has got 1Gbps and here I am with 300Mbps.
xattt
It might be that you’re informed enough to consider that 300 Mbps is more than enough.
Terr_
As someone who plays games a lot more than watches movies, I don't need much bandwidth, what I really want is low latency.
isilofi
Non-techie notices "internet is slow" because their youtube video is blocky or pages load slowly. Non-techie goes to ISP to complain. ISP upsells to a more expensive plan.

The actual reason in almost all cases: non-techies are clueless about their slow and shitty WIFI. Picking empty or less busy channels, using 5GHz, using gasp cables, all black magic and never done.

Sometimes the upselling actually helps because the better plan comes with a maybe-better AP...

Workaccount2
When I had the fiber connection for my new internet run to my house, I told the tech I want the router/modem combo installed in the basement.

The guy strongly insisted I not do it, but then when I persisted I had to sign two waivers acknowledging that my wifi will probably be shit and the basement is a terrible spot.

I was just using their router/modem as a pass through, but man, they really don't want people putting routers in their basement. I can totally understand why too.

doubled112
And some techies regret our choice to have both a Mikrotik AP and walls. You can have decent WiFi and one of those, but not all three.

That'll teach me to stay consistent.

gnicholas
Yeah, the Comcast sales reps spin ridiculous tales about how much speed you need. People who don't know better are fooled by this, and end up paying way too much for speeds they don't remotely need.
lifeisstillgood
I live with the shitty wifi because the yak-shaving that comes with "ok, I will set their router to be pass through, now I need to install openwrt on that 100$ recommended router, and run a cable behind my drywall upto the second floor, and install anothe openwrt and bang goes a weekend and really I am only do that once I order a second line because taking out my family's internet for the whole weekend because I will fuck it up at least once ..

ok.

Next month honest

gosub100
> their slow and shitty WIFI

I'm still embarrassed about the time I called my ISP and complained that the new Xmbs package they just installed is capped at only Ymbps only to realize I had run the speed test over wifi (back in the wireless-g,maybe n days)...

warner25
Me too. I tell everyone who will listen that they should look at their actual bandwidth usage. I've looked at the detailed statistics on my Google Nest WiFi router, and my family's peak usage never exceeded about 30 Mbps. That's with me working from home as a CS PhD student and my wife homeschooling our kids during the day. I have 300 Mbps (down) because that's the lowest, cheapest tier that my ISP offers.

Maybe people are actually using their 1 Gbps bandwidth if they have multiple 4K TVs and do serious gaming? I don't know, I doubt it.

I tell everyone to look at their actual cellular data usage too. I think all middle class Americans just buy unlimited plans now, but I do just fine with 500 MB per month for $5.

hn_acker
> Me too. I tell everyone who will listen that they should look at their actual bandwidth usage.

I shouldn't have to look at my actual bandwidth usage. As I wrote in a different comment [1]:

> You are unknowingly accepting being ripped off. It's not reasonable for big ISPs like Comcast to offer me 300 megabits download 15 megabits upload for $70 a month (might've been $90, but assume $70) while EPB of Chattanooga [1] offers 1 gigabit symmetrical for $67.99 a month. What speed any individual actually needs doesn't have to come into the picture. In matters of consumer protection, the principle of the thing matters just as much as actual consumer needs.

> Today's internet technology (particularly optical fiber [2], paired with hardware implementing DOCSIS 3.1 or 4 [3]) is fully capable of providing 1 gigabit symmetrical for "the majority of people", even in rural areas. Moreover, in the long term, transitioning to fiber would be less expensive to the big ISPs like Comcast [4], but Comcast keeps raising prices on broadband over decades-old copper wires and committing subsidy fraud [5]. Don't let big ISPs define "good enough" to be much lower than technology and the price of the technology allow.

(The [] citations within my quotes refer to links in my other comment. I'm leaving them in for Ctrl-F purposes.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873

warner25
Sure. I just mean, from a home economics perspective, that people should look at their actual bandwidth usage rather than blindly paying for 500 Mbps or 1 Gbps because they just want a fast connection and that's what the ISP marketing literature recommends for a family of four.
joe5150
Netflix 4K streams seem to top out around 25Mbps and I'd guess other services are comparable, so 1Gbps is still a lot of bandwidth for even large multi-streamer households. I think a lot of families will reach the limits of cheap, basic wifi routers before they start actually pushing against their bandwidth caps in these situations.

My issue in the past with cable gigabit service was the relatively tiny upstream bandwidth of 20-50Mbps. This made for some challenges a few years ago when suddenly everybody in the house was on Zoom all day long.

warner25
I strongly agree about upload bandwidth. In previous homes I've chosen higher tiers of service for exactly that reason. I think I could live happily with 20 or even 10 Mpbs down, but not 1 Mbps up when I'm using cloud storage for photos and need to be on some video calls. I shouldn't need to pay for an order-of-magnitude more download bandwidth to get reasonable upload bandwidth, but apparently I do.
bdavbdav
Yep. We don’t need the gigabit down, we need the 100 up that comes with it. Openreach seem to sell about 10% of the download as the upload.
pests
I have 3 days left in my billing cycle on phone and I've used 8.5GB of data. I have WiFi everywhere I go too.

500 for $5 would cost me about $50 - unlimited makes perfect sense.

devindotcom
not OP, but anyone who streams music regularly or watches videos on their commute, or does video calls on the go, will rack up pretty serious gigs. I'm with you on low bandwidth usage and certainly on the home bandwidth thing, but some people have a very mobile and streaming-centric lifestyle. It's a bit foreign to me but it's definitely common.
warner25
What do you do with all that, especially with WiFi everywhere? Are you continuously streaming video while on-the-go between WiFi networks? That's fine, it's just stunning.

I'm admittedly a minimal user of my phone. I average about 10 unlocks per day. Especially when I'm on-the-go, it's just calls and text messages, some driving directions, and maybe looking up a phone number or business hours. If I use it to listen to an audiobook or podcast, I download those ahead of time on WiFi. Using only 200 MB per month is normal.

pests
I don't actually like connecting to public WiFi spots. Ususally the connection is worse than my cellular and why send data through yet another third party network? At least I have a long established relationship with my service provider.

Continuously streaming video? Not at all, might watch something here or there but most of my device usage is text or just reading. I barely use the phone or texting or social media.

I think we forget just how data-hungry modern apps are. A 1080p "Full-HD" YouTube video will consume 4GB/hour of watch time. Even going down to 480p is still 1GB/hour.

warner25
> ...just how data-hungry modern apps are...

True. I really try to avoid using the browser for anything unless I'm on WiFi because a single page (really all the other crap that gets loaded besides the actual content that I'm looking for, even with uBlock Origin) might eat dozens of MB. For a while I used the NPR One app to stream podcasts, but I gave it up when it started using way, way more data than streaming audio should ever require.

anonymouskimmer
> I'm admittedly a minimal user of my phone. I average about 10 unlocks per day.

That's about 5 - 10 times the amount of unlocks I do. Not what I'd consider minimal, at all. :D

warner25
Nice! I have a few days in the past month with only 1-2 unlocks, but those are outliers. At a minimum, my wife and I will exchange a couple messages per hour when I'm out of the house. I like to think that I could live as a total weirdo without a phone (just my Google Voice line from my laptop) if I were single.
pests
How many times a day do you unlock your laptop though?
warner25
Haha, once in the morning, and I then I'm looking at it all day long.
vladslav
My friends in third-world countries get faster and less expensive service than me in Silicon Valley. On top of that, there is no fiber connection in my neighborhood, and they've been on fiber for over 5 years. And there is a data cap also. It's just crazy and sad.
867-5309
"faster" here is relative. unless you live in eastern USA or western Europe, you'd be lucky to see half the quoted "speed", since that is where the majority of the internet resides
Fatnino
Palo Alto just unveiled another fiber to the home plan to be ready by Jan 2025 in one select neighborhood (that I live just outside of, dammit).

This plan will definitely come to fruition just like all the other ones since the 90s

msmith
It boggles my mind that Google Fiber has been available in Austin, TX for 10 years but is still not available in the communities next door to Google HQ.
toast0
Google announced they would bring service to San Jose, along with about 20? other locations, and then later in the week, AT&T announced they would bring fiber to the listed communities in their ILEC territory and a couple more for good measure. And then a few months later, AT&T started rolling it out. Google hadn't figured out how to access poles or where they wanted equipment by the time AT&T was offering service, so they gave up. They did get some new service areas through aquisition, but I don't think they've announced any new construction service areas in a very long time now.
ZoomerCretin
Probably due to the extreme level of veto-ism in the Bay Area. Everyone wants internet, but if 5 people complaining about yards or roads being dug up can get work to stop indefinitely, costs are going through the roof. There's far more uncertainty in that political environment than anywhere else.

For reference, I live in a small town of ~6,000 people, and we're getting fiber laid. For the longest time we only had 25mbps, and then a new provider came in with coaxial and offered 200mbps (with a data cap), and now a third is laying fiber.

Our average income is $34k/year, so it's not because we have more money than the opulent Bay Area.

Workaccount2
It could simply be that poor people don't complain about infrastructure projects like rich people too. Or they don't have the tools/connections to effectively stop it.
I_Am_Nous
I imagine if you are renting a property, you are less likely to complain about things going on around the property because it's not your property to "defend." If you own (and especially if you are part of an HOA) you might be more likely to complain if there is construction going on for 3+ months in your neighborhood.

So it probably does fall into rich vs poor in the same way that renters may be less likely to be rich.

arllk
I live in Perú, and I have 400Mbps internet FTTH with no data cap, and the price is 37 USD [1], the competition of the internet providers is incredibly good for the consumers.

The lowest plan that mi ISP offers is 100Mbps and is at 21 USD.

[1] https://www.movistar.com.pe/hogar/internet/solo-internet (Link in Spanish)

vondur
According to wikipedia the average monthly salary in Peru is $502 US. $37 per month doesn't seem that cheap to me.
nicoburns
As another point of comparison, a new ISP in my area of London is offering symmetric gigabit fiber for £25/month or around $30/month (USD).
vondur
$30/month USD compared to the average salary in London is pretty good. We unfortunately don't have much competition among ISP's here in the US.
ZoomerCretin
Your country requires ISPs to share and rent lines. That does a great deal for competition and lowering prices
robertlagrant
If you develop later you can leapfrog countries that ground through all the necessary phases for the development to happen for everyone globally. But that doesn't mean you can keep pace. Hopefully your area gets an upgrade, or a Starlink, soon.
Fnoord
Check this out:

> Broadband penetration as of June 2017: 23.5 broadband connections for every 100 people. > Distribution of broadband connections by type, as reported by Ancom, is as follows 94% FTTx (FTTH/FTTB/FTTC/FTTN) internet access connections, 4.8% Coaxial cable, 0.2% other.

Now guess the country. Answer in ROT13 at [1]. Hint: it ain't a first world country. Another hint: Latine loquitur. Oh and it ain't a recent development either. They've been at it like forever.

[1] uggcf://ra.jvxvcrqvn.bet/jvxv/Vagrearg_va_Ebznavn

gnicholas
Are they in geographic region that is more densely populated? Or an area that was built out more recently? In my last house (also in SV) the choices were between Comcast and AT&T copper. The latter went up to 6/1, so was effectively useless. I'm sure it was laid down decades ago.
Fatnino
Much of residential silicon valley was built very quickly in the 50s
vladslav
They are in a densely populated area. The city had issues with internet service for quite a while. The government started to invest heavily in fiber tech around the 2010s, and fast forward to now, almost everyone in the city can get a fiber connection to their home or apartment building. The cost is around ~28$ for 300Mbs and $80 for 1Gbs.
ClumsyPilot
You can find fiber connection in some remote vilage in slovakia.

Consolidation is the cause - US had 2-se as many listed companies 30 yeats ago.

Now US capital is buying up independant businesses across easterm Europe and developing countries, killing competition and the local economy.

thumbsup-_-
Yes. Providers in India offer far more speed at far cheaper prices than US. The key to this is competition. There are many providers available in each major city which helps consumer. It's sad that in many US' major cities there is usually one or two providers only for a building or neighborhood. My building in SF only has comcast, so they have a monopoly and can charge whatever they want.
whateverman23
Would it actually be that much less costly to give you 20-25 vs 75, though? My uninformed assumption was that it was largely artificial once you get to a low enough speed.
cmiles74
Agreed, I suspect the cost is in providing the larger amount of bandwidth to the block or neighborhood (better cabling, cable modems, etc.) Once in place, the individual subscriber usage probably all costs the same for Comcast.
chx
Nope, the big ongoing cost is in support. Humans.

The big upfront cost is trenching. The rest is potatoes. If you think the "big heroes" of an ISP are the router wizards, oh boy. It's the permit people. A ransomware gang has nothing on the uppity council of a town of 4000 people.

gnicholas
Well, if there's not a cost difference, why do they keep trying to double my pricing when the base tier goes up?

My sense is there is some cost savings at these lower tiers, but more importantly it would prevent ISPs from jacking prices up while using higher speeds as the rationale ("Look, we just tripled your speed, and it only costs double!"). ISPs would be less likely to double prices without any service improvement. But since many people don't care about the service improvement, it's an illusory benefit for them.

gopher2000
Because they are for-profit organizations and thus greedy. Pretty easy.
Arainach
What makes you think the price wouldn't double if the speed stayed the same? That's what cable prices have done.
HDThoreaun
Because they can? Their goal is to maximize profit, if raising prices does that they'll raise prices.
mixdup
>Well, if there's not a cost difference, why do they keep trying to double my pricing when the base tier goes up?

At least they're giving more speed instead of just doubling the cost with no increase in service

whateverman23
> Well, if there's not a cost difference, why do they keep trying to double my pricing when the base tier goes up?

Because you keep paying for it. It's not like you're going to not pay for internet, and you probably don't have many alternative options.

gnicholas
Yeah, like I said in my original post, it all comes down to competition.
jacksnipe
They’ve already trained consumers that higher speeds cost more. They would need a compelling reason to keep costs the same after increasing speeds.
tzs
In the almost 20 years I've had Comcast they've increased speeds numerous times without increasing prices.
jakogut
In my area, a competitor just finished installing fiber to my neighborhood, and is offering symmetrical gigabit speeds for less (nearly half the price) than I was paying for 500/20 Mbps to the incumbent cable company before.

The cable company now needs to both increase speeds _and_ lower prices to even keep their existing customers. This is a good place to be, as a customer.

vel0city
I've had many instances where ISPs increased my speeds without increasing prices.

If pricing stayed even close to fixed my gigabit internet would cost well over $10,000mo, considering back in the day I was paying SBC for less than a meg for more than I'm paying for a gigabit today. And that's before adjusting for inflation, those 90s dollars are worth way more than 2023 dollars.

sidewndr46
I got hit by this as well. Speed was doubled 'for free' one month with no notice. A few months later the price was doubled.
adrianmonk
My ̶b̶o̶d̶y̶ data terminal is ready.
Eumenes
Wouldn't this just give the greenlight to crappy internet companies to shove more tracking BS and bloatware into their web/mobile apps? Can the average residential internet user even tell the difference from whats available now and 100mbps vs 1gbps?
sschueller
More effective would be to require all connections to be opened to any other provider (for a fee of course also defined by the FCC).

Additionally there should be a over subscriber limit defined based on used capacity based on something like a 95th percentile calculation.

It doesn't help if you have a gigabit internet connection when it's unusable because of the lack of backend capacity.

Although if you had an open infrastructure the free market every one loves so much would kill bad service.

KerrAvon
It actually used to work like something like that in the early 2000's (?), and then the rules were changed to give the power back to the big telcos again.
danielfoster
I recently won a credit card dispute over a hotel resort fee. The hotel claimed they had high-speed Internet. The speed was only 2-3 mbps. I was able to use the current FCC definition of high-speed to claim a refund.
hipadev23
Credit cards almost always side with the consumer if you have meaningful spend and very few issues/chargebacks/claims. If you never use the card, and then chargeback, they'll just deny your claim and drop your ass. It's not about the money of the individual charge (for small stuff like this anyway), it's about keeping you happy and spending on the card.

I highly doubt the argument itself was relevant whatsoever.

danielfoster
The claim was $700.
hipadev23
how did you pay $700 for internet at any speed? was this a cruse ship?
nathanfig
Whoa, was this for multiple parties or a month long stay or something?
freedomben
Hasn't worked for me. Chargebacks are pretty much non-existent. The bank will just contact the vendor, ask them if they delivered "the product" and if they just say "yes" (no proof needed, and they always say yes) they deny my claim. I barely even got it back when my kid stole my credit card and gave it to a scammer selling "minecraft accounts."

Maybe I need to find a different bank?

doh
This is why I pay almost exclusively with Amex. They do contact a vendor and sometimes the vendor tries to fight it, but if I reopen the dispute, I always get my money back (and I dispute a lot of transactions).

I have the opposite experience with Mastercard. Of the dozen or so disputes across 5 cards I had over the years I essentially lost them all. Visa is somewhere in the middle. They tend to side with customer but also will investigate thoroughly.

joemi
That's not how chargebacks work at all in my experience, from the point of view of the company getting charged-back. I worked for a indie small retail store that also sells online, and I was the guy the owner would give the chargeback notices to and was told to "figure it out". No matter whether a chargeback for an in-store charge or an online order, the credit card company never once granted it the store's favor in all the times I tried. Further they require a lot of proof, more proof than we could actually provide. For weborders, simply showing them the weborder and the tracking info was not enough. They needed _proof_ that what was ordered was what was sent, which we couldn't provide because we weren't taking photos/video of us packing the products. For chargebacks on in-store purchases, it was just as burdensome to present proof. I even had one time when the customer emailed saying she did a chargeback by accident, and I provided that email and what records of the sale I had from the POS system, and the chargeback still went through.

(Also, a bit of a side-point: The chargeback notices always had a VERY short window during which you were allowed to contest them. In most cases we had about 5 days to respond, but sometimes the notice wasn't delivered until after the respond-by date.)

itslennysfault
I've done several chargebacks and never had an issue (with Chase).

$500 for items stolen off my porch. So they WERE delivered, but I didn't receive the item.

Over $1,000 for a hotel I booked and they wouldn't let me reduce my 5 day reservation by 1 day (the first day because I realized I couldn't get there on the expected day). I went back and forth between the booking website and the hotel 3 times each with them both telling me only the other could change the dates. So, I charged back the whole stay and found a different hotel for my updated timeline.

bawolff
> I barely even got it back when my kid stole my credit card and gave it to a scammer selling "minecraft accounts."

Nor should you quite frankly. Kids buying stupid things is not the same as fraud.

freedomben
Perhaps you missed the word "scammer" in my comment? I'm glad you weren't the person deciding on my case. It has nothing to do with the fact that my kid stole my card. The scammer who made the charge was committing text book fraud[1]

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fraud

Yiin
I'd assume in this case the fraud is not getting the minecraft account for advertised price and/or abusing the credit card info afterwards.
freedomben
Exactly. If I had run the card myself in this case, it would not have changed. The dude took the money and ran, never delivered anything
xnx
That is awesome. Can you say more about your process?
danielfoster
I took screenshots of text from the hotel’s website claiming what was included, then sent them to Amex when I filed my dispute online. Of course I tried to work with the hotel before going this route, but they refused to refund anything.
joecool1029
probably just called the card issuer. It's a valid chargeback reason, here's Visa's guidance (probably under section 13.3): https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/global/support-legal/d...

"You inaccurately described the merchandise or services at the time of purchase." (billed as high-speed, it wasn't)

google234123
I feel like you almost always win credit card disputes - could have just said it felt slow and won.
avarun
Was the wifi access part of the resort fee? Curious how you went about explaining the monetary value of the wifi portion of your stay to the credit card company.
danielfoster
Yes, it was advertised as part of the fee.
issafram
I had Comcast forever with a maximum upload of 25mbps. They abandoned advertising the upload speed a long time ago. Finally made the switch to AT&T Fiber last weekend. I'll never go back to cable again!
erwincoumans
Similar here, moved to Sonic fiber, 10G download and upload speed.
userinanother
Does everyone really need that much bandwidth though? Usally 20mbps is enough for most things. 50 is plenty and after that it’s mostly bragging rights.
theideaofcoffee
2023: “Does everyone really need 100Mbps?”

2003: “Does everyone really need 5Mbps?”

1994: “Does everyone really need 28.8Kbps?”

1967: “Does ARPAnet really need 2.4Kbps?”

kcb
It's the difference between playing the game you just bought in 20 mins or having to leave your PC on until the next day.
wmf
25 Mbps is enough for one person so 100 Mbps is reasonable for a household.
aidenn0
You clearly don't play video games. Waiting on downloads in the mid 10s of GB is common.
userinanother
I buy physical media for the most part because it retains resale value. But also the inconvenience of someone downloading for an extra hour or two shouldn’t drive us to build billions in infrastructure
KerrAvon
- Multiple people videoconferencing at once, as was very common in a lot of households during COVID lockdown.

- Gaming.

- Other large downloads/uploads for WFH purposes.

- High-bitrate 4k UHD streaming.

userinanother
All nice to haves but do we really need to build out all the infrastructure for that if most people don’t need that speed and definitely can’t convert that convenience into economic value. This is especially now that most companies are forcing everyone back and the government is pretending covid is no longer a thing
xyst
FCC should fix the collusion that happens under the table between ISPs. ISPs tend to avoid entering an area where there is already established service.

So for a majority of people, the ISPs have a de facto monopoly. No need to improve service or customer support.

Also need to overturn legislation at state level which forbids municipal ISPs from being created. This would help break the mini monopolies that ISPs.

Defining standards is fine. But the real issue needs to be fixed.

apex3stoker
There is a ISP which provides fibre internet with great upload speed and low price a few miles away. I once called their signup phone number and asked if they could extend their service to my place. They said no because they had an agreement with Comcast not to encroach on each other territories.
xyst
how is this not a blatant violation of anti-trust laws?

> The Sherman Act broadly prohibits 1) anticompetitive agreements and 2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market.

somat
Oh boy! pedant time. note that ethernet and gpon(single line fiberoptic) are not broad band, they are base band.

Broad band does not mean speed. it means it uses a lot of frequencies at the same time.

OK getting dizzy here from too much excitement, pedant time is over for this week. We are all allowed to go back to using the non-technical meaning of broadband where it means speed.

aidenn0
If we are being pedants, I object to fiber-optic being labeled as base-band.

It is modulating a ~100THz carrier wave, so is clearly not base-band.

I_Am_Nous
Maybe old fashioned "blink on means 1, no light means 0" is base-band, but these days they have virtual data channels and bidirectional fiber transmits on a different frequency than it receives on...so definitely broad-band.
s1gnp0st
*Pedant
somat
Totally fair call, fixed.
inemesitaffia
Try again
happytiger
1000 Mbps down / 100 Mbps up should be the minimum for any first world country.

Without mandated illegality of data caps and other Comcast data and modem games this does nothing to change the reality of boots on the ground unfortunately. These speeds only really allow you to close your data cap sooner in the month for the vast majority of customers who use Internet for modern things. A fixed data cap locks in an “era” of technology so that when the era ends (HD > 4k, 4k > 8k for example) every one of the customers ends up being a heavy user. It is a scam that should be illegal.

We’ve already paid for this with multiple rural broadband bills. It’s time for change.

This is woefully (and shamefully) inadequate action by the FCC but at least we don’t have to deal with Ajit’s basically sellout behavior anymore and can at least talk about solutions beyond the current regulatory captured standards.

I commend them for moving, but I can’t condone their proposal as it’s truly and utterly inadequate and far behind global standards as well.

If you want your country to slip into uncompetitive mess, go ahead and hamper the backbone of the new Industrial Revolution by giving away all the value to your corporate friends and leaving the innovation a generation of true broadband performance could generate laying on the shop floor.

Did I mention we have already paid for broadband (ready, was supposed to be fiber rollout)? Twice? Low standards might as well be low standards FCC.

gnicholas
I have no need for speeds like this. I have kids, we have many devices, and still we have no need for this. I understand that some people want speeds like this, but it shouldn't be accomplished by eliminating choice for people who would be perfectly happy with much lower speeds. And of course, if the mandated minimum speed is set to 1000/100, then these customers would be subsidizing those who use/want the higher speeds.
happytiger
It’s not just throughout speed it’s latency that’s important about connection speed.
bmicraft
> And of course, if the mandated minimum speed is set to 1000/100, then these customers would be subsidizing those who use/want the higher speeds.

Barely. Most costs to telcos are fixed costs, and upgrading the speeds of their lower speed plans shouldn't lead to a big increase in traffic.

Culonavirus
Many (most?) people do not even have devices that could utilize 1Gbit/s. My (relatively new) Galaxy Tab S7+ (11ac wifi) has a hard time going over 500Mbit/s (not sure if it's wifi or the slow internal memory, can't be arsed to find out), and it's similar with my (not that old) LG Velvet phone... All of that on a connection that can do a rock solid 1Gbps on my PC through UTP (cat 6)...

What I'm trying to say is that many of these devices regular people have don't even have the capability to receive 1Gbit/s streams. It's great for us nerds or people who (also) work from home and need blazing fast connections to work servers etc, but as of 2023, it's overkill for many regular people.

Datacaps should be illegal though.

nikitoci
Many households have a few people sharing single connection, so it’s not that hard to saturate 1Gbit/s even from weaker devices.
I_Am_Nous
This is a relevant issue for people who call our ISP and complain they aren't getting their 250/250 and we find out they speed tested with a 6 year old cheap Android phone that only supports 2.4 GHz wireless.

Wireless is a convenience feature but it gets treated like it should act exactly like a direct wire does.

d3w4s9
Anyone with a PlayStation/Xbox/gaming PC -- that's a lot of people -- can tell you how much they dislike waiting for a game download. I have 300Mbps download and I still find it too slow. I don't want to start a download, wait for half an hour before I can play the game.
Culonavirus
How many times a year do you download a massive AAA game? Not many times. Average console gamer downloading 6 big games a year would probably be an overestimate. There are also preloads for many big games. It's not really a problem.
happytiger
It’s funny how people who don’t use gaming or need to manage large remote files for work will actively advocate for slower speeds and the lack of need for speed.

It’s also about latency.

But the thing people miss is that this is mandating projects for future infrastructure projects. Whatever we set at a baseline is what we will standardize on for the next generation. People donut understand these are leading values for project acceptability not minimum standards of throughout as they are being presented. Massive difference.

It’s not about whether you can make it work today, it’s about what kind of projects are acceptable speed for tomorrow and whether we can call it broadband when it’s not.

Just look at gaming. When it came on a CD people complained that gaming would never work on a t1 line, and 1.5 mbit was supposed to support at 25 person office (1999). Then 10 mbit was mind blowing with bonded DSL and you could support everything. Now we are having an argument about 100 and 300, but the same logic applies. What works for today isn’t the standard we should be applying to qualify infrastructure minimums for buildout (which is what this is).

I mean imagine when games at 2-3TB each (it’s coming) and drives are 50GB. It’s not a question of throughput, as you said it becomes a question of time to complete — aka productivity — and that means waiting around for stuff to finish while you download. That’s what broadband standards are working against — what we think is acceptable to be installing today — not whether you can max the link with your current mix of devices and two 4k TVs.

Good point.

bscphil
It's 100 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up as the proposal, and 1000 Mbps / 500 Mbps as an eventual goal.

I imagine the 20 Mbps upload target is useless for most of us, even those on asymmetric cable, but there's a good chance that if the ISPs were forced to provide 20 Mbps up at their lowest broadband tiers, it would raise the ladder quite a bit. For example, on Comcast I get 800 / 20, but there's also a 400 / 10 tier (and maybe a low-cost tier below that?). If everyone was getting 20 up, maybe I'll get upgraded to 40 Mbps.

ShakataGaNai
If you're in the bracket of "100 mbps down is fine for me" then you most likely do not care about the upload speed at all. About the only advantage for the average person would be "Your iCloud backup goes faster".

1gig/500meg would be a huge step forward. I'm currently on the highest most bestest plan that my ISP (Astound) offers. And it's 1.2gig down, 50 mbps up. That's not a typo, FIFTY up. I'm a techy and even I know I don't need 1.2gig down. My house is wired with CAT6 because I dragged it around, but my main switch is still gig. So... I can't even enjoy the increased download. The only reason I stepped to that highest plan was to get more upload than the 20mbps they previously offered.

bscphil
> If you're in the bracket of "100 mbps down is fine for me" then you most likely do not care about the upload speed at all.

Personally I'd trade my current speeds (800 / 20) for 100 / 100 in a heartbeat. There's just ... not that much I can do with more than 100 down. That's fast enough to stream a Blu-ray disc directly off of a web server. It's fast enough that package updates on Linux take longer to install than they do to download.

Can I theoretically use more? Sure, it's nice to be able to download files or update Steam games a little faster. But 20 Mbps up is killing me. Backing up a drive to cloud server can take hours or days.

d3w4s9
I have 10mbps upload from Comcast. My GoPro footage takes ages to upload. This is just infuriating.
gnicholas
There have been times where I considered tethering to my phone for large uploads. If it's at the end of my billing cycle, and I have enough room under my cap, I actually do it.
c2h5oh
Starlink will not qualify - even in area with no congestion where you have to problem maintaining >200Mbps down your upload speed averages around 15Mbps
freedomben
yep, my average is about 88 Mbps down and 7.4 Mbps up on Starlink. The frustrating thing is it fluctuates a lot. At one point I could get about 160/10.
olyjohn
It's a bummer, but considering that all I had before Starlink was 768down/128kup, this is a godsend. It will never be as good as an actual good wire-line connection, but whatever, that's not really it's point. Anybody who has cable or fiber, or even a fast tier of DSL should not really bother with Starlink.
freedomben
Yep, agreed. I am extremely glad that starlink exists, and I'm willing to pay double for starlink that I would pay for a connection limited to 12 Mbps down
c2h5oh
As far as I can tell you can't meet the 20Mbps upload requirement anywhere.

I'm in rural middle of nowhere in central Europe, at a latitude with very dense Starlink coverage and I'm almost certainly the only Starlink user in my hex - the speeds I'm getting are pretty much unaffected by network congestion.

Even in those ideal conditions upload is 10-15Mbps 95% of the time, even when download is closer to 300 than 200Mbps

organsnyder
According to someone I know that works at Comcast, they're working on rolling out symmetrical (or at least closer to symmetrical) speeds—even over coax—within the next few years. I'm able to get 2000/200, which is decent. Metronet just buried fiber in my front yard, though, so I'm looking forward to symmetrical fiber soonish (though Metronet has been building so fast I'm worried about growing pains).
bscphil
Yes, there's actually a significant ongoing scandal over this because they're only rolling it out (in most cases) to people renting their expensive hardware, even if the modem you bought already has the necessary DOCSIS 3.1 support. It's so scummy.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/want-faster-comc...

pianohacker
This has changed very recently: https://cordcuttersnews.com/comcast-is-making-changes-to-its...

Unfortunately, though, there are currently only three customer-owned modems approved for higher upload speeds: the CODA and CODA 56 from Hitron and the CM2050V from Netgear. The first two are from a company noone has heard of, and the last one is $350 (!) and includes pointless phone support. None of the near hundred other DOCSIS 3.1 modems on the market are supported, for no apparent reason.

organsnyder
I can understand it to an extent—easier to do an initial roll-out when you're able to more easily control the parameters—but it certainly isn't a good look.

What's more scummy (IMHO) is that it's actually cheaper for me to rent their modem—which includes unlimited data—than it is for me to pay the fee to remove the data cap.

JoshGlazebrook
They announced this a few weeks ago (https://www.fiercetelecom.com/broadband/comcast-first-deploy...).

Already starting the rollout in Colorado.

SketchySeaBeast
I guess I'm the outlier. I have 300 down / 15 up and never really notice an issue.
lotsofpulp
You don’t notice because you have never had the capability to host content. With symmetric upload, it would be possible to backup our phones/data to our own NAS at home as opposed to relying on Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon. You could stream video from your own device, you could share it, etc.

The lack of high quality, high bandwidth symmetric connections to the home (and ipv6) is a huge boon to the entrenched big tech companies.

chrononaut
> With symmetric upload, it would be possible to backup our phones/data to our own NAS at home as opposed to relying on Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon.

I am not following this one. Why would upload bandwidth at home inhibit backing up your phone/data to a NAS at home? Or are you referring to remote restoration / access?

Wouldn't the NAS be using its download bandwidth to receive backups when your phone is remote? and your phone would be on the local network when you're at home?

lotsofpulp
Sorry, I meant sync services too. As in right now, people use Google or Apple to synchronize their photos/files/etc across devices and locations.

But it could be possible to do this with your own device at home with sufficient upload.

It might be too late though, since if sufficient people are used to the big tech companies doing it, it might not leave enough of a market to develop sell a device to do it (although I feel like it should be doable with software and existing NAS vendors like Synology).

freedomben
How often do you upload? I notice especially when trying to rsync or upload files to the cloud.
SketchySeaBeast
Not often and never in large doses - mostly just recorded images or videos to the cloud. I don't know the use cases people have for that outside of streaming large media.
jupp0r
Agreed. ISPs can allocate bandwidth on DSL/Coax trunks as they please so it should just be a configuration change to increase the upload percentage.
cavisne
DOCSIS (the Coax protocol) is asymmetric. 10:1 for docsis 3.1 and 10:6 for 4.0

So cable at least will always be a bit asymmetric. A lot of fiber deployments (GPON) are also but the bandwidth limits are much higher so it does not really matter.

toast0
That's not really true. There's certainly knobs to turn, and almost certainly some available capacity to increase uploads, but coax and dsl are fundamentally asynchronous.

Coax has to manage the single (or few) headend transmitter vs many CPE transmitters, you get better multiplexing to the CPE than from the CPE; and while the newest equipment may be able to handle CPE uploads across most of the spectrum, older equipment had a narrower range of frequencies available to upload with. If there's spare frequencies and downstream capacity isn't using it, then yeah... if not, there's trade offs.

For DSL, everybody has a dedicated pair to the DSLAM/remote terminal whatever, but crosstalk between pairs impacts the signals and again, the DSLAM has more ability to mitigate that towards the CPE than the CPE can when sending upstream. Anyway, VDSL/VDSL2 are specified with asymetric up and down bandwidth, as was ADSL. Of course, DSL ISPs tend to cap sync rates based on profiles, rather than running the lines to their maximum capacity, so a lot of lines do have more upload capacity than is allowed to be used, and to the extent that's the case, it would just take a profile update to get more upload for many users.

jupp0r
Thanks for the detailed overview. I stand corrected. Posts like yours are why I love HN.
Analemma_
> I imagine the 20 Mbps upload target is useless for most of us, even those on asymmetric cable

I wish this were true. I'm in Seattle and Xfinity will only sell me 5 Mbps up, even at 480 down, unless I pay out the ass for a symmetric gigabit connection I don't need. Very much looking forward to the FCC forcing at least 20.

duffyjp
I'd recommend looking into the 5G home internet services all the major cell carriers offer. They're all cheaper than I was paying Spectrum for their minimum tier. None are offered at my address unfortunately but being in Seattle I'd bet you could get one.

I had fiber installed this summer and until they finally sent a staff engineer out it was going down 2-5 times a day. I work from home so I had to tether to my phone for Teams meetings to make sure I'd stay connected. It was actually completely fine and I only get 2 bars of LTE at home.

danielhep
Where do you live? It's possible to get gigabit service from a handful of different non Comcast ISPs in most of the city.
ska
Comments said they don't want to pay more for gigabit (that they don't need) just to get reasonable upload speed.
jackson1442
I’m also in Seattle and get symmetric gigabit for $49.99 all in, I’d be surprised if they’re getting 480 from comcast for cheaper. I think my provider is only available for apartment buildings but there’s likely competition from other providers that at least offer symmetric speeds.
Analemma_
Unfortunately Comcast is the only option in my 14-unit condo, which AIUI is not unusual for this size of building in this area.

The worst part is that the much larger condo right next to us has Google Fiber :(

jackson1442
Dang, assuming you can get the HOA to sign on you might be able to get in with GFiber Webpass or Atlas (I personally have Atlas) since they’re both microwave providers. There’s no fiber to lay so all they need to do is put a dish on top and integrate it into the distribution system.
ska
That's the worst, and usual require board approval to change, which you can't get.
jwells89
Upload being low is frustrating. In my area Comcast sells “gigabit” service that’s 1000Mbps/20Mbps which seems like it’s explicitly designed to hook less technically aware customers who know “gigabit” is good but not exactly how.

Thankfully there are alternative ISPs here that sell symmetrical gigabit, but that’s definitely not the case everywhere.

m463
I wonder what at upload speed will the acks be congested and prevent full download speeds from occurring.
tga_d
Is that even possible with SACK?
bscphil
In my case Comcast is 800/20 or 1000/35, but they refuse to even advertise the upload rate so you don't know when you're signing up. There's a somewhat outdated, very hard to find page that lists these [1] but many tiers (including mine) don't seem to be shown.

[1] https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement

linsomniac
ISTR, and this was ~3+ years ago now, that Xfinity/Comcast is quite hard to even find out what the upload speed of the different offerings is. I even was chatting with their support and asking and they were cagey, like "why do you want to know?"
bscphil
Currently, at least in my area, after you've purchased a plan (potentially with a term agreement), you can log onto the Xfinity website and see what your expected upload speed is. Mine says 800 / 20, although I think it's possible that the 800 is really 900 and they undersell download speeds to avoid customer complaints. I regularly max out a Gbit line in iperf tests to nearby servers.
0cf8612b2e1e
Will they also change how they define a region? At one point, I thought so long as an ISP service a single customer in a zip code(?), census tract(?), some region definition, the ISP could make claims to offering that tier of service everywhere.
I_Am_Nous
The service regions are kind of a government mandated monopoly for who can offer service where. However, the FCC is now requiring automated speed testing so if you say you can offer 100/100 symmetrical you have to prove it. The FCC can pick any customer and say "prove this customer can get the service they are paying for" -- for us, that means installing a cloud connected router that automatically connects and tests. Apparently the fines are pretty gnarly...
elromulous
I think I speak for many when I say "'bout damn time".
jmyeet
Waht the government needs to do (but never will) is make the last mile a municipal utility such as in Chattanooga [1].

Instead we have monopolies that do what all monopolies do in a capitalist organization of the economy: they rent-seek, spend their time and money on lobbying to legislatively exclude competition (eg [2]), do the bare minimum and take public money to roll out broadband but then just not do it (eg [3].

The Internet is the US is objectively awful for most people by the standard of other developed economies [4].

It's ridiculous that people still defend this system.

[1]: https://qz.com/1996234/the-best-broadband-in-the-us-is-in-ch...

[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al...

[3]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/veriz...

[4]: https://broadbandnow.com/report/2018-fcc-international-data-...

Zigurd
Municipal ISPs are a good start, and they illustrate how much of your ISP bill goes to debt service from when the commercial ISP bought out competitors.

But you don't have to run a municipal ISP like a commercial ISP. If pricing goes low enough, just make it an amenity, like parks and sidewalks, and fund it that way.

And then you can choose a totally different architecture than a commercial ISP could operate: no network admission barriers, mesh networks, etc.

superkuh
I'm much more excited about the "...and 20 megabits per second for upload". My comcast account for $107/mo with 1.2 TB data transfer cap per month still only has a 5 megabit upload throttle (80/5). I literally had the same upload speed in 2003.
idiot900
Honest question: at what point, with real life usage, is 1 Gbps actually necessary for home users?

I find that latency rather than throughput is what determines my perceived quality of an Internet connection. But am curious how others think.

kaylynb
1 Gbps is nice when downloading games and updates. Since everything is digital it can be the difference between waiting 30 minutes or 3 hours. IE: You play a game the night it's released/updated or wait until after work the next day.

Upload speed probably makes more sense for more use cases though. I used to have symmetric 1Gbps fiber and never bothered to setup QOS as my upload was never saturated.

I moved and am stuck with "1Gbps" Comcast. Which really means 25Mbps upload. I had to setup qdiscs on my gateway and split my network into tiers to get acceptable upload speeds and latency for the workstations in my home. I maybe have more uploads than 'normal' people, as I have automated backups that store data off-site, but normal people have "backups" in the form of cloud storage I think.

Uploading videos (to YouTube, for example) is painfully slow. I'm simulating living in Australia when I upload a video.

kcb
Download a PS5 game or Steam game.that you want to play shortly.
wing-_-nuts
Latency usually explodes as connection utilization goes up. If you have a router with good QOS and limit to 80% of your max available connection you're probably going to have pretty good latency.

Then again I'm not a networking guy. Someone who knows more about this stuff than I do can give you more comprehensive advice and talk about stuff like buffer bloat, etc.

Night_Thastus
The world moves ever onward. Services like 4K high-bitrate playbacks have become more common. Games with sizes of 200GB aren't unheard of now.

Most people could get away with less, but sooner or later 1Gbps will go from "excessive" to "good" to "acceptable" to "slow".

gustavus
As long as front-end developers keep shoving more and more layers of JavaScript "libraries" and corporations shovel more and more adware into every request it's likely we'll continue to need more and more bandwidth; because most developers figure if it is working great in thier office with a dedicated fiber line on the latest MBP it obviously must be fine for everyone.
Szpadel
I have 1gb connection and I agree that 99% of the time this isn't utilized, but it's very helpful when you want to download anything, from new steam game, through system updated to for me work related usage. this isn't that much about you can download per month, but how fast you can do it when you need something
gustavus
Honestly everytime I've tried downloading a large file the bottleneck is on the serving end, where they aren't able to send that much data that fast.
mksybr
If there's a torrent available you can get better speed. Helpful for Linux installation ISOs
wing-_-nuts
You can use something called lftp to transfer single files using multiple connections at once, I'm sure there's similar switches for wget or curl
CSMastermind
Plenty of people work from home and that connection speed can be important when you're uploading a bunch of files while on a video call for example.

Or there's three people in your house all on video calls.

carstenhag
With Teams using 0.3 Mbit/s (3fps) while I am sharing my screen, this is not really a concern.
vel0city
Teams will usually use ~4Mbit of upload when I do screen sharing, and screen shares are usually significantly above 3fps (normally closer to 15-30fps).
Avamander
That's a ridiculously low and bad target to aim for though.
nathanfig
Most households with 4+ people are going to have dozens of connected devices, including multiple doing HD to 4K entertainment streams, outgoing video feeds, and (at least on PS5) the occasional unexpected 80GB updates to a video game you were just about to play. This in addition to the apps/webapps that are often in the 10s of Mb of content served per click.
ipython
Those households also have one poorly configured Wi-Fi access point, which is jockeying for airtime with dozens of competing access points in the same frequency range, meaning the customer is realistically going to see maybe 200Mbps aggregated across those devices (due to interference, channel congestion, that one streaming device with a -90dBm signal sucking up all the airtime at the lowest supported data rate...)

IMHO we need to address the "last meter" experience before mandated gigabit internet speeds mean anything.

jeffbee
Multiple simultaneous 4K streams does not describe any household I know. How much TV are you people watching? It seems like an exceptionally high level of media consumption, in my experience.

Furthermore, 4K video is < 25mbps each per stream, usually.

alerighi
They upgraded my line from VDSL (~80Mbit/s down and 20 up) to 1Gbit/s FTTH (~800Mbit/s down and 300 up) and didn't see that big difference, on normal navigation.

Sure, if I download a torrent, it is much faster. But is not the kind of upgrade that I experienced from ADSL (7Mbit) to VDSL. Since most of the time I use the PC under Wi-Fi anyway, that doesn't go over 600Mbit/s near the AP, but really not over 100 in the location where I usually have my PC.

What I've seen instead is a much more stable connection. Giving that the network is entirely fiber and passive there weren't (so far) any interruption of service in roughly one year, while with VDSL there where time to time that the connection did not work, in one occasion for nearly a week. Also since it was copper lines in case of bad weather, or crosstalk with other users, the performance did vary a lot.

jsight
That matches my experience as well. I'll take a little slower, if its symmetric and fiber. The stability is worth it. I could stream multiple videos at 4k pretty easily with 100Mbps. They've upgraded to 300 since then, but the difference was unnoticeable.

Most complaints that I've seen in various neighborhoods are from people that were not getting anywhere near their full speed. Usually the cause is their wifi router.

cortesoft
I recently went from 300mbps to 2gbps, and one big difference is game update time. In the past, I would sometimes go to play a game with my friends and it would require a 10 gig update, and we would have to play a different game because it would take too long to update. Now I can update in under a minute and we can play.
phkahler
To me that's more about the company making too many large updates. And when they do have a large updated it should be up to the user to decide when to get it. Downloading it over night should be an option, and not required to play. I've seem games that demanded the update in order to play, which is really annoying and I don't think it should be that way.
cortesoft
The whole point is that I am trying to play multiplayer games with my friends. All being on the same version seems like a reasonable requirement.
phkahler
>> All being on the same version seems like a reasonable requirement.

Sounds like instantaneous update is too, but that's a relatively infrequent use of your connection.

Zigurd
First, you are not buying a sustained 1Gb. Not at consumer pricing. Secondly, having burst capacity is very helpful. Moving big images, videos, etc., which you do only occasionally, benefits a lot from a 1Gb consumer-grade link.
dawnerd
When games are 100+ gigs it starts being something that can make an impact especially when updates are also massive. But this is the same thing people say over every incremental in tech. “Isn’t x enough”
lapphi
Probably when VR starts popping off
ehPReth
happy to see upload get the attention it deserves. nothing is more annoying than uploading a video to $messagingapp or $socialmediaplatform and it just taking forever due to slow upload. a nice quality of life improvement to shove that quicker to someone.

even stuff like backing up computers, or running security cameras that you can view remotely or that record to the cloud (encrypted) are really hampered by upload speed. there's a lot of cool stuff one can do if only one had the speed to do it with.

voakbasda
Oh, it's worse than that. With my 20-1 DSL connection, saturating the uplink effectively causes a DoS for the downlink.
inemesitaffia
Cake or fq-codel on Openwrt
voakbasda
That's not viable for me, as my subnet router is on the far side of my DSL connection. There's absolutely no way for me to filter incoming packets before they traverse my downlink. And as far as I know, there's no easy way to get all of my machines on my static subnet to coordinate traffic shaping.
koito17
You gave me flashbacks to 2010 when I had used ADSL and thought 128 KB/s download was the best thing ever for downloading MP3s. And as you mentioned, using up all upload bandwidth effectively DoSed everyone else on the network, though in my case, any single person downloading also slowed down everything else to a crawl. I must have had less "downstream channels" (or whatever the DSL equivalent is) than your setup.

My current internet connection uses DOCSIS 3.1, but I can't recall any resource contention even if I have several computers trying to upload simultaneously. Not a big fan of asymmetric speeds, though, but apparently DOCSIS 4.0 (which is being finalized this year) gets us closer to symmetrical speeds.

andrewmunsell
This is nice, but with increased speed, they should also require ISPs do not impose a data cap to be considered broadband.
kstrauser
I wish ISPs were required to advertise the number of seconds you're allowed to use their service at full speed. Ooh, a gigabit pipe with a terabyte cap? You're allowed to use it for 3 hours per month before throttling or extra charges kick in.

I believe it's false advertising when ISPs claim their price is $X per month if it's only for 1/240th of a month. I understand and support the idea of overprovisioning, but a 240x ratio is insanity.

callalex
They should also require the ISP to use a reasonable method to count the amount of data if there is a data cap. No matter how I count the data in and out of my gateway running OpenWRT, Comcast/Xfinity consistently counts and charges me for at least 20% more data with no discernible reason why.

I think somewhere in fine print they claim they get to round up to the nearest KB or MB every minute or some asinine made-up scale that only benefits them.

IdiranVibe
It blows my mind that you guys in the US still have to deal with data caps ... It's been years in the UK since that's been a thing for broadband, and we're close to the point where mobile data will be the same
FredPret
Western Europe is covered in little hamlets and the odd big city, but it is amazingly densely populated as a region.

So cell service, internet, trains, and cheap flights are all easier to provide there.

Whereas here in the much more sparsely-populated North America, those things are all pricier, and it’s easier to accommodate big trucks, big highways, giant Costco’s, etc.

adrr
Only data caps if you only have one choice in broad band. Once you have two or more, data caps go away and price is cut in half. If there are no competitors, the provider will milk the customers of cash.
IdiranVibe
I suppose at that point it's a geography issue which is less of a problem here due to the size of the country
ls612
For residential internet most people have no data cap and those who do have a very large cap (over 1TB/month). Even I as a pretty active user only use like 500GB/month on my desktop according to Windows.
callalex
1TB/mo is not “very large” since you can get that kind of data allocation on a $2-4/mo server.
vel0city
Residential internet connections aren't designed for the same kind of usage as some VPS.
callalex
Ok but we’re talking about a whole computer with redundant power and connectivity and memory and disk storage compared to throughput on already-installed non-redundant wires. One of those certainly costs way less than the other, but Comcast still charges multiple orders of magnitude more for.
vel0city
Its not a whole computer, its a tiny fraction of a whole computer. And that whole computer is in a giant datacenter hundreds of feet from massive ISP interconnections and only a few hops of hardware away from it. Meanwhile the residential customer is probably many miles from the nearest interchange, often even hundreds or more miles.

Location, location, location.

I do agree the over the cap costs imposed by residential ISPs are many, many multiples of their true cost, but they're mostly there to discourage use not be a reasonable price. If you want business level usage hop on their business networking where pricing models are more designed for more average load.

criddell
It depends on your ISP. My phone has a data cap of 100 GB/month. Once I go over that I am throttled when the network is congested.

My home internet has no data caps.

thayne
I don't know about other ISPs, but Xfinity/Comcast residential internet has a data cap of 1TB/month, regardless of the bandwidth tier you pay for. Although you can pay a (substantial) fee to remove that data cap.
mjrpes
Comcast Business has no data cap and so might be an option
SoylentYellow
Removing the Xfinity data cap would increase my bill by 60%. It is outrageous.
jjcm
I'm actually on the opposite side of this. I wish there were more metered options available for data, especially for wireless options. I'd love to see an offering that has a low monthly connection fee (i.e. $1-5), along with a sensible price per GB option (i.e. double the cost of transit so there are decent margins on this, but isn't something crazy like $10/gb).

Assuming that for most consumers the end price averages to be the same, the benefit of metered is it puts an incentive on the data provider to make their speeds as high as possible. Higher speeds will result in more bandwidth usage (i.e. Youtube/Netflix will default to a higher data rate), which will result in more profit for the company. The desires of the customer and the desires of the provider are the same - faster and more stable internet leads to better customer experience and more profit.

One of the issues I see with fixed-speed-unlimited-data options is that providers are incentivized to oversell the fixed speed bandwidth, leading to "up to 100mbps" type connections where it's a theoretical max, not the average. Under this model the desires of the customer are misaligned with the desires of the provider. The provider wants the customer to use as little data as possible - the less they use the more they can sell plans on the same infrastructure. This can be addressed with rules and regulations, but I prefer a situation where I know both the customer and provider have aligned desires.

hn_acker
At least for wired connections, data caps are utterly artificial [1].

> Network congestion arguments in this debate operate on an unsubstantiated and uncontextualized assumption of scarcity — there is only so much bandwidth, and a few people are going to use it all. Yes, some network congestion arguments have prevailed with wireless broadband because of the atmospherical and technical limitations of the medium. However, congestion is not as consequential for fixed broadband. Broadband providers reason that instead of limiting these internet “super-users” (which would be discriminatory and litigated accordingly), they need to implement data caps for all consumers, which they claim is fair and unbiased. However, scarcity is not a reality for broadband providers, even with super-users. Internet functions by “statistical multiplexing” meaning that bandwidth is dynamically allocated and reused without a limit “[u]nlike other utilities such as water, electricity, gas or oil.”

> This means that no super-user is consuming bandwidth at the expense of other users; you’re not going to receive less internet because your neighbor runs a Twitch channel, for example. Rather, super-users are simply using more internet more often, and the “super-user discount” (the fact that broadband providers aren’t able to charge them, specifically, for this “above normal” usage) angers providers more than anything else. This brings us to the real reason broadband providers apply data caps to consumers: money. Applying data caps to all of us, therefore, enables broadband providers to pat themselves on the back for devising clever “overage” fees.

As time goes on the same will become true for the majority of wireless usage, if it isn't true already.

Sending twice the data at a time doesn't cost the ISP twice the money. But large ISPs with regional monopolies continue overcharging you [2] while committing subsidy fraud [3] and subsidy obstruction [4] at every opportunity (sometimes with help from corrupt legislators [5]).

[1] https://publicknowledge.org/no-cap-the-truth-about-data-caps...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873

[3] Pick any one of these links. https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-too... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-oversta...

[4] Pick any one of these links. https://communitynets.org/content/monopoly-providers-mire-nt... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2015/04/16/alec-threatens-to-sue-cr...

[5] Ditto. https://www.techdirt.com/2021/02/19/new-bill-tries-to-ban-co... https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/11/illinois-missouri-and-ne...

musha68k
The metered pricing model doesn’t align with reality of data costs for ISPs which are often negligible (thanks to technological advances and peering agreements especially). This makes the metered model more of a revenue strategy than a necessity. It’s also conflicting with basic tenets of net neutrality.
ftth_finland
It makes no sense to price wireless data based on IP transit costs.

IP transit costs per GB are a fraction of a hundredth of a penny.

It barely makes any sense to bill consumers per GB on any terrestrial network.

In Northern Europe a typical 4G SIM with a monthly data quota is $9 per month. An unlimited 4G SIM with all you can eat data is $18. How many price points do you need in between?

Heck, international 4G/5G data roaming fees are capped at $2/GB and by 2027 the cap will be $1/GB.

stefan_
Well twice the price of transit is .. NaN? Data isn't generally charged in bits.
elzbardico
Yes, metering is the rational thing to do.

But caps are different and don't work the same.

notyourwork
And that speed should be symmetrical. We are continuing to push the boundaries are content going out.
sokoloff
I don't care if it's symmetrical. I care that I have enough upstream.

I'd obviously rather have a useful 500/200 than a 100/100 or 50/50, even though the latter is symmetrical. (I think my service now is around 400/20. I'm way happier with that than I would be with 50/50.)

LoganDark
My upload speed is a mere 35th of my download. Affordable symmetrical needs to be a thing. Especially with a certain ISP monopoly.
RajT88
Asymmetric speeds let ISP's oversell their network (more).
kulahan
A huge portion of people don't need a massive upstream. This sounds more expensive for basically no benefit (for most)
gtvwill
Bs. Not sure why you think it but every system has cloud backup these days, folks regularly broadcast multiple video streams at once from home and a plethora of other activities that require upload.

Please stop spreading such misinformation as its an unnecessary expense. It costs zero dollars for upload stop cucking it because you don't understand its use.

asstrotrash
The majority of people is not the qualifier here for this argument. It's what is actually a good definition for the term "broadband" in this time and age.
kulahan
A good definition shouldn't apply to the majority of people?
hn_acker
> A good definition shouldn't apply to the majority of people?

If "good definition of minimum broadband speed", then "applies to the majority of people". The converse is not true. It is not the case that if "applies to the majority of people", then "good definition of minimum broadband speed."

1. Whether a speed applies to a majority of people is necessary but not sufficient.

2. You are unknowingly accepting being ripped off. It's not reasonable for big ISPs like Comcast to offer me 300 megabits download 15 megabits upload for $70 a month (might've been $90, but assume $70) while EPB of Chattanooga [1] offers 1 gigabit symmetrical for $67.99 a month. What speed any individual actually needs doesn't have to come into the picture. In matters of consumer protection, the principle of the thing matters just as much as actual consumer needs.

Today's internet technology (particularly optical fiber [2], paired with hardware implementing DOCSIS 3.1 or 4 [3]) is fully capable of providing 1 gigabit symmetrical for "the majority of people", even in rural areas. Moreover, in the long term, transitioning to fiber would be less expensive to the big ISPs like Comcast [4], but Comcast keeps raising prices on broadband over decades-old copper wires and committing subsidy fraud [5]. Don't let big ISPs define "good enough" to be much lower than technology and the price of the technology allow.

Going by the Chattanooga metric, 100 mbps symmetrical should cost no more than $10, and anything lower is not a good definition of minimum broadband speed for the present (never mind the future).

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-super...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Versions

[3] https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/gig/

[4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/why-slow-networks-real...

[5] Pick any one of these links. https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-too... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-oversta...

--------Everything below this line is bonus.--------

The following excerpt is from an article about data caps [6] but applies equally well to the state of broadband pricing in general.

> Network congestion arguments in this debate operate on an unsubstantiated and uncontextualized assumption of scarcity — there is only so much bandwidth, and a few people are going to use it all. Yes, some network congestion arguments have prevailed with wireless broadband because of the atmospherical and technical limitations of the medium. However, congestion is not as consequential for fixed broadband. Broadband providers reason that instead of limiting these internet “super-users” (which would be discriminatory and litigated accordingly), they need to implement data caps for all consumers, which they claim is fair and unbiased. However, scarcity is not a reality for broadband providers, even with super-users. Internet functions by “statistical multiplexing” meaning that bandwidth is dynamically allocated and reused without a limit “[u]nlike other utilities such as water, electricity, gas or oil.”

[6] https://publicknowledge.org/no-cap-the-truth-about-data-caps...

kulahan
I'm not talking about costs, data caps, or anything else. I'm asking if a specified, asymmetric speed is really insufficient for most people. We don't need to define something that covers 99.9% of the population, we need minimums that are roughly sufficient for any given person. If a cable can only move a certain amount of data at a time, why not engineer for the direction the vast majority of it goes already?

>It is not the case that if "applies to the majority of people", then "good definition of minimum broadband speed."

I don't see why this wouldn't be the case. This isn't a physics problem with a right/wrong answer, it's a balance of the wants/needs of corporations vs. individuals. You're only talking about half of the equation to begin with, so forming logical statements on it is incomplete to begin with.

dpkirchner
Let's pitch symmetrical, let them counter with 20Mbit up per 100Mbit down, and call it a victory.
dylan604
i think you're about 1/5 the minimum speeds we should be countering. 100mbps up, 1000mbps down
dpkirchner
I just noticed the document does prescribe 100 down, 20 up. Mb.

And yeah, I could go for a gigabit minimum.

ceejayoz
A lot of people need enough for at least a steady Zoom/FaceTime call, and that's only going to increase over time.
HDThoreaun
You don't need more than 10 mb for that though. How often are people uploading 1+ GB? For me at least the answer is never.
zerd
If I take a video on my phone and sync it to the cloud that's easily more than that. And if that takes up the whole 10 Mbit, video calls get unusable.
ceejayoz
Not many are using gigabit upstream, but Spectrum’s 300 megabit down plans in my area come with like 20 megabit up. I’d get noticeable stutter in calls if I browsed the web during one.

Thankfully synchronous gigabit fiber came this year.

dylan604
potentially multiple simultaneously if mom&dad have separate jobs with kids attending classes.

asymmetrical is as antiquated as dial-up. there's no reason for it in 2023.

yadaeno
And throw in an availability requirement so my gigabit connection doesn't drop to 10kbps every Friday night when everyone is using the internet.
Astronaut3315
Add in some moderate packet loss and you’ve got CenturyLink fiber.
AussieWog93
That's what gets me. Is there a technical reason why symmetrical connections would be more expensive than asymm?
seany
It depends on the layer 1 medium. In a shared RF environment (dialup, cable, wifi, p2p RF) you normally have a shared bandwidth space. This is typically "channelized" and you can pick how many channels you want for "up" and how many for "down". This isn't normally dynamic, it needs to be fixed by the standard or at the very least by the head end equipment. It's more expensive in the above RF spaces because cabling is expensive the more home runs you want to do. With fiber it's a little easier, 1:32 pon splits still give a _lot_ of bandwidth for upstream because it's easier to isolate the adjacent wavelengths (you can pack them in tighter), and the normal noise floor is lower. With 1:1 fiber DIA it's a total non issue and you can do what ever is the limit of the noise of the fiber and the limits of the transceivers (typically optical packages in sfp/sfp+ packaging these days)
aidenn0
Assuming we are talking about Cable internet: If they were starting from scratch all possibilities are equally expensive, but they have installed equipment in your neighborhood which assumes a specific channel allocation.

They have increased the channel allocation for upstream in recent years and DOCSIS 4.0 allows symmetric connections, but the demand is for downstream, and the fewer channels they allocate to upstream the bigger number they can advertise.

epx
AFAIK, PON (Passive Optical Network) has inherent reasons to be asymetric
wmf
Not really. I'm sure asymmetric PON is cheaper but there are plenty of symmetric EPON modes.
godzillabrennus
My assumption is torrents are a threat to streaming services already and potentially a death blow if uplink speeds are too fast.
callalex
Also new media (streamers and tubers) rely on uploads and are eating cable’s lunch. It’s just extortion through monopoly.
hhh
why would uplink speeds being fast contribute to torrents outside of the first few seeders?... you would just have more peers contributing smaller amounts
RajT88
When I worked at a small ISP, this was indeed a threat. We offered symmetric speeds though and dealt with it via traffic shaping.

It really was just the odd teenager torrenting here and there.

paxys
The technical reason is that by restricting upload speed they can offer a higher download speed, and that is what most users care about.
wing-_-nuts
I find that reasoning suspicious. Ever notice how most of the muni and coop internet providers offer a symmetrical speed while att and comcast don't? My bet is that there's no real technical limitation, it's simply price segmentation.
vel0city
AT&T does offer symmetrical speeds. Most PON-based FTTH ISPs I've encountered do.

There are technical reasons for offering asymmetrical speeds when it comes to coax connections. There's only so many channels on the wire, a lot are still dedicated to television, people mostly only care about download, so they prioritize it. PONs don't carry television and are just fundamentally different in design, so its easier for them to support symmetrical bandwidth.

wmf
There is a technical limitation on cable and DSL networks but not on other techs like fiber or wireless.
paxys
Fiber is symmetric, coax is not. This isn't some grand conspiracy, just how the underlying engineering works.
orra
In the UK, Openreach FTTP is heavily asymmetric. Network operators aren't entirely at the whims of asymmetric standards: network operators want asymmetric services.
andersa
This is nonsense. Fiber cables are always capable of the same speed in both directions at once. The actual reason is so they can sell you an overpriced "business" plan if you need upload speeds from the current decade.
aaronax
Though the fiber system as a whole may not be capable of symmetry. For example GPON with 2.5gbps/1.25gbps up/down and 10G-PON at 10/2.5 up/down.
IntelMiner
Yes, *fiber* can. But the majority of Americans use Cable/HFC (DOCSIS) technologies. These were designed as a one-to-many closed loop TV broadcast on a coax line. Except with the incoming DOCSIS 4.0 deployments it's always been asymmetric as a limitation of the technology
dylan604
No, I think you might be confused. We all know that the fiber for the download link is at least 10x wider than the fiber for the upload channel. There's just no way to squeeze the same number of bits through the smaller "tube" /s
aidenn0
True FTTH is naturally symmetric; PON is not nor is Cable.
0x0000000
Fiber is not ubiquitous. Many of us are still on DOCSIS over copper, in which case the person you are replying to is exactly correct: upload speed can be reduced for additional download speed.
paxys
A very small part of the country is connected by fiber, and fiber connections are always symmetrical. The vast majority of consumers still get internet via coax cables, and bandwidth is very much an issue on those.
derefr
No, a very small part of the last mile is connected by fiber. Trunking is always fiber these days. As are local neighbourhood branch points, if your provider evolved from a telephone company. (If you live in an apartment building served by an ex-telephone ISP, you likely have fiber run all the way to the network closet of your building, with only the per-subscriber in-wall wiring switching over to copper.)

ISPs that evolved from cable companies might still be using cable hubs with a common collision domain, but only a relatively small number of subscribers will be riding the same copper — it’s just cheaper these days to convert the signal to fiber as early in the signal path as possible. Plastic wires are cheaper than metal wires, and you need fewer of them (and so fewer switches.)

phantom784
Or at least require that uncapped tiers be available.
staringback
So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?
antisthenes
This is how consumption of any resource works, in any group where the number of people using it is more than 1.

If I drink less water than you, am I subsidizing your water usage. I'd say so!

Not the hill you want to die on, trust me.

arp242
Except in many places you pay water by amount used (Islamic and some other countries excepted). This is the case for loads of resources.
rasz
No, so that ISPs are incentivized to actually invest in bigger pipes.
antisthenes
So it was a series of tubes after all...
phkahler
>> So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?

While I agree that grandma doesn't need 1Gbps, neither do I and neither do most people. So why mandate such a high speed for the label anyway? It seems like a way to disqualify things like Starlink that will have difficulty providing extreme speeds to large numbers of users at once.

The only time I'll use such a speed is when downloading some data - an ISO file or something similar. Streaming video does not require such (gbps) speeds even for multiple streams in the same house.

paxys
Data packets aren't a limited resource. The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB. Data caps and overage charges are purely a money grab, not some fundamental economic requirement. So no, infrequent users aren't "subsidizing" anyone else.
arp242
> The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB.

I cannot believe how anyone with a straight face can claim that the infrastructure and maintenance required to serve "n times 1MB" is exactly the same as the costs for "n times 1TB". This is so obviously not the case that I genuinely don't even know how to explain it.

You can serve your thousand subscribers on a dingy Pentium 1 if they're using 1MB, because it adds up to just 1,000MB. You wouldn't be able to serve just a single customer with the same hardware. Never mind the cabling etc.

callalex
There is some truth to what you say but Comcast charges me around $1 per gigabyte over my cap. It absolutely does not cost them that much more money to serve me.
arp242
Almost certainly not, no. That it's overpriced is of course a different thing. I suspect part of the reason these costs are so high is that they really don't want you to use more data, so they won't have to upgrade the network.
cortesoft
This just isn't true, though. The limit for a network provider is peak bandwidth usage. When they sell a 2gbps connection to a customer, that 2gbps connection is not reserved entirely for that customer. It isn't like the total bandwidth an ISP has is 2gbps * N number of customers.

They over-subscribe because they know not every customer is going to be using up that full 2gbps 24/7.

Now, you can argue that an ISP SHOULD provision that way, with the expectation that their customers are going to be using the full connection 24/7, but that would raise the cost per customer a LOT, and I don't think people want to be paying for an ISP that provisions like that. It would be a lot more expensive per customer, and it would end up with a lot of the bandwidth going unused most of the time.

If the average bandwidth used by customers goes up, it will require the ISP to pay for and maintain more circuits and cost more money. We can argue there are better, fairer, ways to limit usage, but it is simply not true that every customer downloading a lot more doesn't cost the ISP more money in the long run.

musha68k
ISPs face costs for peak usage / level of “playing with the numbers” yes, but economies of scale and exchange agreements reduce these costs significantly. Bandwidth caps not only have a weak financial justification but also run counter to net neutrality.
cortesoft
How do bandwidth costs run counter to net neutrality? (Unless you are talking about certain types of traffic not counting against the caps)
musha68k
Zero-rating = skewing whole internet playing field, not just stifling small creators; subtly - or not so subtly - influences user behaviour, leading to a constrained experience. Users might feel financially pressured to use certain services, missing out on potentially superior or more diverse options, which goes against the original ethos of the open internet.
BigFnTelly
would it be fair to say that bandwidth is just another product sold like plane tickets?
klabb3
Yes? But with orders of magnitude more difference. Let’s do a back of the napkin calculation:

Say your ISP gives you 100mbit/s = 1.08TB/day ≈ 30TB/mo. On gigabit that’d be 300TB. While you do have some heavy torrenters they are outliers.

Now I assume everything but TV/movie streaming is a rounding error for average Joe. Netflix says 1-7GB/h depending on quality. Average user watches ~3.2h/day (wtf is wrong with people!) but that’s ~100-700 GB/mo. Now that’s between 0.033%-2.3% of downstream bandwidth.

Of course, people generally watch TV at the same time of day, so it gets more complicated to provision resources. But there’s also no question that pooling bandwidth (over-provisioning) makes sense to reduce costs. The question is more about how much congestion is acceptable, and I wouldn’t trust shitty monopolistic companies to behave. But if you can handle eg Super Bowl or a World Cup final without degradation you’re probably good the rest of the year?

johncolanduoni
With the crucial difference that the equivalent of 7/8ths of a a seat is still useful when it comes to bandwidth, especially for home internet.
phkahler
>> Data packets aren't a limited resource.

No, but bandwidth is. Particularly wireless where you can't just lay down another cable or fiber.

paxys
> No, but bandwidth is

Which is why they already charge for bandwidth

bisby
Bandwidth and data caps aren't hand in hand. If I download a COD update that is 100gb right now at 1gbps. or I watch 3gb of netflix a day at 10mbps, i'm still using 100gb. But the bandwidth requirements are very different.

They either have infrastructure that can handle 1gbps per user, and then they have bandwidth available, and data caps are nonsense... or they don't have the infrastructure, and are banking on their service being idle 90% of the time for most users, and this is why after 5 oclock, my internet goes to crap when everyone is getting home and starting to use the internet. And now suddenly Im drastically overpaying for non-broadband internet because my ISP underprovisioned way too much.

This goes back to the point that everyone is making that ISPs shouldn't be able to underprovision to the point that it degrades performance during high usage times.

My ISP saw $800 million in profits on $2 billion in revenue in 2019. That's an AMAZING profit margin. They can afford to not underprovision, and when they don't under provision, then no, bandwidth isn't a limited resource.

542458
> The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB.

That's only true in a very abstract sense. If everybody went from using 1MB/day to 1TB/day there would be massive congestion issues and costs would increase as ISPs rush to install higher-bandwidth equipment. Put a different way: It is cheaper to construct a network where all subscribers consume only 1MB/day than a network where all subscribers consume 1TB/day, because the former can be done with much lower end equipment.

paxys
Well it should be true in the concrete sense. If they can't consistently serve you at 100mpbs or whatever else then they shouldn't advertise it. "But everyone else is using it at the same time so too bad" wouldn't work as an excuse in any other industry.
ceejayoz
> "But everyone else is using it at the same time so too bad" wouldn't work as an excuse in any other industry.

Go to a grocery store in Florida before a hurricane and try to buy bread.

cortesoft
If you want every ISP to provision the full bandwidth for every customer, so that their network can handle all their customers using their full bandwidth at the same time, it is going to cost each subscriber a LOT more money or get a lot lower peak bandwidth. I think MOST people would prefer to pay less and be able to use the full speed for a fraction of the time.

If you want to know how much more expensive the connection would be if you expect to use the full bandwidth 24/7, just look at the cost you pay for transit in a datacenter. It is multiples of the cost home consumers pay at a per-bit level.

Most users are best served by being told the speeds they will usually get if they stay within average usage patterns, because that is what most people do.

vasachi
Yes it would work in any other industry. Users can overload a power grid. Users can overload a telephone network. Users can overload a grocery store. NO industry can deal with critical overload without problems.
542458
> If they can't consistently serve you at 100mpbs or whatever else then they shouldn't advertise it.

But that's true of almost every industry. Your bank advertises that you can withdraw your money at any time, but if everybody withdrew their money simultaneously there would be issues. A store advertises next-day shipping, but if everybody ordered simultaneously there would be issues. A house might have 100A power service, but if every house started burning 100A simultaneously there would be issues.

Put another way, what you're proposing is dramatically slower speeds for most users. ISPs are profitable, but they're not that profitable. Actual average usage on most lines is probably low single digit percentages, if not sub-1%. I just checked my line - my average use is about 200kB/s (for a total of about 500GB per month), or about 1% of my speed cap.

voakbasda
Yes, for the same reason that roads used by daily drivers are subsidized by remote workers.
Willamin
In the US, we tax roads by usage via fuel (gasoline and diesel) tax [^1]. It's a simple solution: the more miles you drive, the more fuel you use; the more fuel you use, the more tax you pay. Vehicles that use more fuel per mile driven tend to be larger and thus cause more wear on the roads.

It's not without its faults though. Fuel usage isn't directly related to cost of road maintenance, it's just a very rough approximation. Fuel usage has mattered less and less over the past couple of decades with hybrids and EVs – though this is addressed in some places by imposing an extra EV tax (since EV drivers would pay no fuel tax but would still cause wear on the roads).

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...

dghlsakjg
A minority of roadbuilding funds come from fuel taxes in the US. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-road-funding...

The additional problem with this is that road wear scales a lot faster than fuel usage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

arcticbull
A lot more wear on the roads in a lot of cases, as it's exponential (~fourth power) with respect to weight and EVs weigh a lot (~30% more than a comparable ICE car).
paxys
Bad analogy, because it actually costs more to maintain roads that are used more. ISPs don't have to pay extra if I consume more data packets than my neighbor. Overage charges are just a money grab on their part, nothing more.
kulahan
Also a bad analogy because the roads are paid for with gas taxes, which WFH workers typically purchase less of
dghlsakjg
A minority of US road costs are paid for with gas taxes, and it depends tremendously on the location. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-road-funding...

WFH workers likely pay more per mile travelled in taxes than someone who super-commutes.

endisneigh
Ironically roads should also have caps and/or tolls, so this take is strange. This is partly why gas and excise tax is a thing…
c54
The economy wide productivity gains from having tax funded roads mean it doesn’t make sense to have roads be profitable or break even as an individual entity.

Similar thing probably goes for internet access.

NegativeLatency
Gotta be careful what you measure though. If I spend a bunch of money owning and maintaining my car, it's possible that that could've been spent on other things that would be overall better for the economy.
endisneigh
Taxes are not flat, just like caps, so there’s no contradiction.
eganist
> Ironically roads should also have caps and/or tolls, so this take is strange.

We'll set up electronic tolls on your cul-de-sac and every light and stop sign, or toll you by mile driven using an odometer beaconing out to the tax authorities per drive and registered to your tax ID number (US) or equivalent. And then cap you on the number of miles you're allowed to drive per year on all cars unless you pay an additional fee.

Older cars must be retrofit at the driver's expense.

Also the auditing and anti-fraud infrastructure must be instituted for all of this.

---

Or we can just do flat taxes and chill.

vel0city
I'm absolutely down for vehicle registration fees to relate to miles driven and weight classifications, and major highways being funded by extra tolling.

The streets in my neighborhood cost way less per mile for maintenance than giant highways with massive bridges and interchanges. It makes sense they'd cost more to use.

Showing the real cost of these things to consumers might make them change their minds about riding the train. These days a lot of people don't even think about the cost of driving their car across town, but gosh that metro day pass is $5? How expensive!

eganist
> gosh that metro day pass is $5? How expensive!

Nah, metro day pass should cost as much as howevermany miles the buyer traveled. Otherwise people who buy the passes for just one stop would be subsidizing the costs for people who travel from one end of a line to the other.

It'd be pretty shit to meter one and not the other.

endisneigh
Flat taxes are regressive and inefficient, but I suppose we can still chill.
notyourwork
What is ironic about you're opinion disagreeing with the status quo in some countries?
endisneigh
It’s ironic because they’re arguing against caps but talk about roads, but roads in the United States are in terrible shape due to certain groups, such as construction vehicles not paying their fair share to begin with.

This partly why gas tax is even a thing.

superb_dev
Do you seriously want every road you drive on to charge you? Roads should be a public good that we all benefit from
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
Personally, that sounds pretty wonderful. Better yet, charge by vehicle weight. I'd like to be able to ride a bike on the road and have everyone think the guy in the car is imposing inconvenience rather than the other way around.
NegativeLatency
I would happily pay for congestion pricing because it would allow me to go where I'm going faster.

Right now we have this weird sunk cost and lack of obvious incremental charges to driving, that encourages driving when there are other better options for some trips.

endisneigh
You already are charged by every road you drive on, just not explicitly or proportionally.
endisneigh
Why shouldn’t there be a cap? Bandwidth isn’t free.

It’s sad seeing people on a forum called hacker news having no idea how networking infrastructure works.

kstrauser
"It's weird that none of the so-called experts agree with me. The problem is clearly with their understanding of the space, not mine."
paxys
They already charge for bandwidth. People pay more for 500mpbs than 50mbps. We are talking about total monthly data caps, which have nothing to do with bandwidth.
endisneigh
False. A month is a discrete amount of time that yields a potential maximum amount of data downloaded, this amount is clearly related to the bandwidth provided, hence caps.

To think otherwise is to falsely believe they support unlimited throughput. Furthermore the bandwidth itself literally is a function of the transmission material and infrastructure, which also isn’t free…

paxys
I have a 500 Mbps connection with a 1TB data cap, both pretty standard numbers in the US. If I used the connection at its advertised speeds, I would exhaust my monthly limit in about 4 hours. So no, that relationship is non-existent. The data cap math instead is "99% of our users use < 1TB, so we will charge the rest more because we can".
endisneigh
Or more accurately, to disincentive excessive use. They don’t need a cap to simply charge you more money, they’ve been doing that just fine with or without caps.
mjrpes
If that was a big issue, why are smaller ISPs (like sonic.com) able to offer 10Gb ethernet at a flat rate with no caps?
paxys
That would be a valid argument if they defined "excessive" based on infrastructure limits rather than a demand curve and market research.
endisneigh
All prices are based on “demand curve and market research” so I’m not sure what your point is.
paxys
My point from the start has been that ISPs put data caps and overage charges in place to make extra money, not to protect their infrastructure.
musha68k
Peering agreements at internet exchanges make additional bandwidth very cheap to provide and infra costs are spread over years and many users, further reducing ongoing costs..

Bandwidth caps not only have a weak fiscal basis but also clash with net neutrality tenets, go against what made the internet successful in the first place.

Zigurd
Bits that go unused have no value. Caps on numbers of bits in a billing cycle don't make sense. While it isn't exactly pure artificial scarcity, it's darn close. A retail ISP already has to have some fair share mechanisms for peak use times. That leaves very very little usefulness in monthly caps.
guhidalg
Let me throw that question back at you: why should there be a cap? You are paying ISPs for a certain bandwidth speed per month and they sure as hell are not prorating your service based on data that you did not consume. If the ISP is in capable of delivering the agreed-upon band with every minute of the whole month, then they are not meeting the SLA that you’re paying them for.
spiznnx
If ISPs were like an electric utility, we'd see something like a cost per GB transferred in cents, with a minimum charge reflecting the cost of maintaining a connection of a certain speed to the network.

Which is algebraically identical to a monthly charge and data cap with overage charge. The main issue is the overage charge is too high, it should be like 1 cent per GB (Comcast is charging 20x that).

guhidalg
1c/GB would be a decent rate for home data transfer in 2023, but where would you set the free limit? For reference, at my house I have a 1Gbps line and it looks like in 48 hours I have downloaded 1TB of data (looking at the number of received bytes my AT&T device is reporting). Am I normal? I don't know, but AT&T does...
vel0city
1TB in 48 hours is absolutely not a normal residential connection usage.

The average US residential customer uses a bit over 500GB/mo in data. You're doing 2x that in 1/15th the time.

https://www.allconnect.com/blog/report-internet-use-over-hal...

spiznnx
I think that's rather high compared to average, considering the standard cap for Comcast Xfinity residential is 1.2TiB per month, and they claim only "a very small percentage" of their customers use more.

I don't think the actual cap really matters if the per-GB and base pricing reflects the true costs. If it's low it means heavy users pay more, if it's high, light users pay more.

kvakvs
Cost of the traffic is: hardware (staggered cost covered over many months), and running costs (subscription to higher tier internet carriers, electricity, rent of the premises, salaries etc). Most of this is covered by the monthly fees, to have a profitable business one must have those costs covered as a minimum. None of the above affects how much internet data goes through, zero or maxed out capacity, cost is the same.
endisneigh
This is patently false. Given optics can only support so many people at a given latency and bandwidth.
ehPReth
once the infrastructure is there does each byte/gigabyte really have an intrinsic cost? isn't more about the bytes per second and not the bytes total?
cortesoft
Sure, but the argument for caps is that it reduces overall demand and therefore peak consumption, and peak consumption is what the ISPs actually have to pay for.
endisneigh
There’s more to running an isp than simply plumbing electricity.
ehPReth
sure, but is your 'profit' to be made in.. charging per byte consumed/sent? it just feels... gougey?

I had to live under an ISP that charged something on the order of $10+/GB after a certain amount and after they were forced to offer unlimited internet it was an actual breath of fresh air just to be able to use the internet and not worry about literally everything in the house, or if I could update my OS, or play this game, or watch this Netflix show, etc.

i'm honestly curious. why not a standard margin on your 'per second' allowances (100/100Mbps, etc) or other 'addon' services?

why should someone with a ring doorbell (or a homekit secure video whatever) be punished over someone who doesn't?

entropicdrifter
Because it's next to free (no additional cost to run the infrastructure we're already running) and we're nowhere near the limits of our existing infrastructure's overall bandwidth limits right now, as evidenced by the lack of caps not affecting quality of internet service for the entirety of 2020, when more people were online per hour than at any previous point in history.
Sohcahtoa82
> Because it's next to free (no additional cost to run the infrastructure we're already running)

Aren't we effectively arguing CapEx versus OpEx?

Sure, an ISP's OpEx is tiny. But CapEx is huge, especially when you've got an old neighborhood that's all wired up with copper and you gotta replace it all with fiber going into the house.

I_Am_Nous
Yes and no, depending on your plant build out you might have great interplant connectivity - 10G between each switch, 10G to the router, but the extraplant connections still cost and have bandwidth limits. So if you only use 2 gbps total during peak, you may not need to upgrade your plant to support higher speeds but you will have to pay more to your upstream provider to support it.

This is actually relevant to my ISP day job, we have a pipe to a well known backbone provider, and dual pipes to a statewide provider. We ran on the dual pipes for a long time before pushing our ISP traffic over the single backbone provider. These days, if that main ISP pipe goes down, it fails over to the dual pipes to keep everything running. But now that we are offering packages higher than 25/3 for DSL, terrestrial wireless, and cable, the dual pipes don't have enough bandwidth to keep up.

If we offer gigabit service over fiber (and we do) just a couple of customers actively using their whole pipe is an enormous chunk of the network compared to the 40 or so customers that same gigabit of bandwidth would serve on previous 25/3 packages. We don't have data caps or even contracts (small town benefits :P ) but there is a lot more to it for smaller ISPs than adjusting the rate limiting and packages we allow people to use.

musha68k
It’s true that smaller ISPs have their challenges, but the cost for both interplant and extraplant connections has been generally decreasing. Economies of scale and peering agreements can mitigate many of these costs.
I_Am_Nous
True, we connect our main ISP pipe to an internet exchange for that reason. It's also interesting to see how the industry is adopting pluggables for a lot of newer deployments because depending on what you need, there's a lot of flexibility now compared to even 5 years ago.
wongarsu
In principle caps help with oversubscribing. If you want to use a 10GBit/s uplink to serve 5000 people with 100MBit/s each, you won't saturate your uplink nearly as often if you add a data cap.

Of course that's not all that different from restricting bandwidth, just that you are restricting average bandwidth while allowing for some burst. Still violates the spirit of having fast bandwidth, unless the caps are quite generous.

NotSammyHagar
They do help push people to use less, but for places like Comcast I see data caps as just a revenue stream increaser. The entire company strategy seems to follow this approach.
atomicnumber3
Also, when caps are implemented, they're ridiculously expensive and limited, especially in an age of streaming video. Expensive comically beyond any reasonable conception of the actual marginal cost of transiting the traffic.

Also - just look at LTE operators. They're also no-cap at this point (though subject to QoS at certain breakpoints, but they're typically reasonable breakpoints ime?). And that's in a SIGNIFICANTLY more capital intensive market - you have most of the concerns with terrestrial fiber, plus the joy of having to own RF spectrum and maintain towers etc.

So I think no-caps-and-required-speed requirements would just make sense and be required to keep ISPs from trying to backtrack on being forcibly dragged into the modern area like balky calves.

Szpadel
I think that the issue is lack of competition. on mobile market it's easy to switch operator to any from multiple nation wide ones. for cable ISP AFAIK in US there is usually one. (in my central european country there is at least 3 ISP available ans AFAIK fibers to building are in some way rented to internet providers (?))
endisneigh
Source? Running things requires labor, labor is getting expensive. Pricing isn’t set on simply the marginal cost of materials…
vorpalhex
Running a fully utilized fiber line is.. exactly the same amount of labor as running a 10% utilized one.

The cost to track and bill people for caps and let them pay overages though..

toomuchtodo
Chokepoints are peering exchanges, transit handoffs, and core network gear, which is sized for a percentile of utilization below constant 100%. Having implemented a billing system and utilization monitoring for managed hosting datacenter environment, it is trivial to collect metrics from equipment and bill accordingly. You don't want to nickle and dime or gouge customers, but you do want to ensure proportionality across the customer population.

Some combination of caps, overage charges, traffic shaping, and edge CDN appliances is needed (Netflix, Akamai, etc). Off peak unlimited is also a potential strategy to drive low priority transfer to low utilization periods. Pick your poison. There is a reason most of Netflix global infra is monster CDN boxes closest to customers.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

throitallaway
> There is a reason most of Netflix global infra is monster CDN boxes closest to customers.

Because it would be ridiculously expensive to egress video streams directly from AWS. They've determined that it's cheaper to pay ISPs for rack space.

toomuchtodo
You misunderstand the model. They don't pay ISPs, they offer the appliance for free to the ISP for colocation, reducing the upstream networking costs. AWS egress being extortionate is a distinct issue. The cost to the ISP in the rack (cooling, power, space) is immaterial considering the transfer savings (not only opex, but reduced capex from needing to oversize network gear or specific ports for peak streaming consumption) over the life of the relationship.

If you want to learn more, lurk on the NANOG (North American Network Operators' Group) mailing list. It is common to monitor AS traffic flows to understand whether you can offload with CDN appliance relationships or how to improve your network architecture (which networks to peer to directly or which internet exchanges [IXs] to meetup at). These agreements sometimes happen at a bar over beers during NANOG events. Call Verizon and ask them how much a 1Gbps circuit is. Consider why Comcast built their own national backbone.

Also, some important history to remember. Fast.com measures your speeds to Netflix servers because some ISPs wanted to charge their customers and Netflix for that transfer (or to upgrade peering points) because of the revenue destruction from cable customers fleeing for streaming (net neutrality debate).

https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog45/presentations/Nor... (Peering 101, Bill Norton [Equinix cofounder], NANOG 45)

https://drpeering.net/white-papers/Video-Internet-The-Next-W... (Video Internet: The Next Wave of Massive Disruption to the U.S. Peering Ecosystem (v1.7))

https://drpeering.net/HTML_IPP/ipptoc.html ("The Internet Peering Playbook")

https://arstechnica.com/features/2008/09/peering-and-transit... ("How the ‘Net works: an introduction to peering and transit")

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/how-c... ("How Comcast became a powerful—and controversial—part of the Internet backbone")

https://openconnect.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600361636...

> How much does the appliance cost my organization?

> Appliances, including replacement appliances, are provided to qualifying ISPs at no charge when used within the terms of the license agreements.

jauntywundrkind
Download only, yes? And what about the busy-Sunday night problem? This seems so besides the point.

Cable at an apartment building I visit is often 300mbps, but Sunday evening it can have horrible jitter and lag and much slower speeds. It's incredibly frustrating; common sites can be basically unusable.

This also feels like it's setting a bar where most DSL systems wont have any chance of competing. In cities I can be more sympathetic (put in more pops) but in rural areas, this feels like a barrier that is extremely cost prohibitive to make happen, for not great reasons.

wongarsu
With VDSL and supervectoring you can get 250MBit/s, provided you aren't more than a quarter of a mile or so from the multiplexer. Which is probably not cost-effective in most of America due to the low density of suburbia, never mind rural places.
shortcake27
I usually pay for 50mbps, but I can live comfortably on 25mbps if need be (sometimes I drop my connection speed to save money). However, I have a fibre connection, where QoS is 100% 100% of the time. 25mbps is totally fine for web browsing, gaming, and streaming. The only issue is downloads, which simply take more time. I'd still rather have a rock solid 25mbps than 300mbps with jitter. Cable is garbage. Always has been, always will be.