👏 Make 👏 ALL 👏 connections 👏 Symmetrical 👏
If only it were easy to do. Technical limitations on copper is what causes low upload speeds. ISP’s prioritize the download speed, which is what people utilize the most. As fiber continues to be rolled out it should get better though.
Tell that to our beautiful German Telekom who’ll sell you 1000down/200up FTTH for ridiculous 80€/month.
Is there a legit reason they do not do this?
Just to prioritize download in limited bandwidth cables. Like a neighborhood might get 2Gbps total, but instead of doing 1 down 1 up they instead do 1.8 down and .2 up, then split that amongst a bunch of houses.
Because they can. Most people’s typical usage isn’t impacted by low uplink bandwidth. Very few people are uploading 4K content or live streaming or hosting a high traffic webserver from their garage. Less bandwidth means less expense, thus more profit. Capitalism, baby.
In the old world of the internet, people didn’t upload much anyway.
Nobody worked from home. Nobody had their phones constantly syncing photos and videos to 1 (or often more) clouds. And even then, the photos and videos that you could take digitally were very low resolution and not very large files.
That has changed, and nobody forced ISPs to keep up. In a lot of markets, the Cable ISP is a monopoly and they don’t have to do shit about it.
@dingus @worfamerryman On DSL you have a limited set of frequencies that you can use for either upload or download. So you have to split these frequencies between upload and download. Also the DSL speed is highly depending on the length of the copper between your home and the switch cabinet on the street. (Just remember: DSL is the transmission of high frequencies over unshielded cables that never meant to transmit high frequencies) So the longer the cable, the lower the total possible bandwidth. And most people have a demand for a higher download than upload. So most people will prefer some 16 down, 2 up instead of 8 down and 8 up.
What about on a fiber connection? I wonder if the slower upload speed is artificial.
@worfamerryman Fibre is not my field of expertise. But it seems as if we have got some experts here in the thread.
Thanks, I’ve read the comments. I was just curious if you had any additional information. I’m mainly interested for personal knowledge.
Some service-provider level technology is not symmetrical at the access layer. An ISP serving exclusively fiber may have values like below:
GPON (GIGAbit passive optical network): 1.24416 Gigabits/s up, 2.48832 Gigabits/s down
XG-PON (10 gigabit passive optical network): 10G/2.5G
xgS-pon (10g Symmetrical optical network): 10g/10g
Note that on all of these technologies, you are also sharing bandwidth with neighbors on your PON. Sometimes up to 64 subs on one gpon. I think 128 on xgs-pon Until more providers make fiber available, as well as are willing to fork more up for the latest equipment, and reduce the over subscriptions of pons, symmetrical services for everyone just won’t happen.
Will this ever happen at mega providers / baby-bells? Probably never unless a regional or startup pops up, and then they will only attempt compete in that market.
It is pretty dumb to me that symmetrical is not the standard way.
Quick! Give the ISPs a bunch of federal dollars to build out their networks so they can quietly pocket it and do stock buybacks!
Why weren’t those monetary subsidies just after the fact instead of just paying out on promises? “You’ll get x billion dollars when y% of this area has access to z Mbps.” But then again I’ve heard there’s monopolies for that in the USA, instead of actual competition.
But then again I’ve heard there’s monopolies for that in the USA, instead of actual competition.
Government granted monopolies. It’s the worst. City / county/ state signs deal with ISP X and give them exclusive rights. Then for some reason they don’t spend a lot of time updating anything because they have no competition because of the fucking morons in the government.
I mean, I understand the original rationale: building out infrastructure is super expensive, so the monopoly gives the company an assurance they can recoup investment. But then there’s no follow-up! There’s nothing requiring the ISP to evolve, so we end up with the same tech as when the contract was signed 20 years ago. At least wireless (LTE, 5G, etc) is promising for competiton, but buying spectrum from the FCC is also f’ing expensive.
Dude, 100Mbps isn’t good enough anymore either
What? That’s plenty for the average person.
I think person* is the keyword here. Many families have several people concurrently watching streaming video, listening to music, and playing games that are required to have an internet connection. 100Mbps is not enough.
Streaming music is a very negligible impact. We’ve had streaming music for 2 decades.
Yeah that one bothers me… The most demanding MP3s are what… 320kbps? That’s 3.3GB per day. That is not really a hard demand on bandwidth at all. 100GB/month. And that’s the max bitrate MP3 does… Most services are probably doing 128kbps…
Spotify has an Audio quality table on their site… https://support.spotify.com/us/article/audio-quality/
Low = 24kbps, 0.2471923828 GB/day
Normal = 96 kbps, 0.9887695313 GB/day
High = 160 kbps, 1.6479492188 GB/day
Very High = 320 Kbps, 3.2958984375 GB/dayThese are very reasonable and easy numbers to obtain on just about any internet connection. The only way this is an “issue” is if you’re running like a couple hundred streams at once.
Right, but this is about setting a minimum standard for it to be classified as broadband. For an average individual 100Mbps is high speed internet.
And most families probably have cheap wifi routers with poor snr as their main bottleneck.
I would like to disagree, since every “news” site started adding auto playing videos and ads on each and every page. what should be a 2kB text now comes with a 50MB video Download…
That’s like two people streaming high def TV at the same time.
No way, that would be 6.25 MB/s for tv. For a two hour movie that would be 50GB. Is a 4k movie really 50GB?
Depends on the quality. YouTube 4k is about 25mbit/s, so that’s 3-4 4k YouTube videos playing at the same time on a 100Mb/s connection.
4k Blu-Rays OTOH can be about 50GB or larger even. You wouldn’t ordinarily stream that but you could stream one or two blu-rays with a 100Mb/s connection.
100Mbit/s is plenty for current use-cases.
Is a 4k movie really 50GB?
I have a number of movies (about 100-ish titles) in my library that are well above 50Mbps.
Back to the future (1989) as an example is 72.24 GB in my library.
Meh, it’s good enough to be usable. I have 50/10 Mbps down/up and I can watch 1440p videos just fine. What do y’all use your internet for? Do you have like 5 family members watching stuff at the same time?
The average US household has something like 2.5 people in it. It’s safe to assume (statistically) that at least two of those people are old enough to consume web content unsupervised.
Then there are edge cases that aren’t quite so crazy, like 5 person households where everyone is over the age 14.
So yeah, for one person 50/10 is likely just fine. But for the average household 100/15 is likely closer to baseline.
With the increase in WFH and distance learning, I think up/down parity should be a priority as well. Not everything is just about your ability to consume mass-marketed entertainment.
Here’s an interesting article about it. It’s really a limitation of current DOCSIS (fiber is a lot simpler) tech/equipment, but it’s being improved.
One major AAA game update will likely break your connection for hours for all intents and purposes.
Bitrate of a 1440p youtube video is going to be around 20mpbs (±4). Your 50 down connection couldn’t handle more than 2 streams. The lowest reported bitrate is 16mbps on their support page (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zippy=%2Cbitrate). 50/16 = 3.125, with network overhead you’d be VERY lucky to get 3 streams going without stuttering.
It’s entirely possible that a family of 5 would run into issues if they’re all home and some want to watch videos.
My family of 4 have been Plex trained… So I mitigate a lot of these problems personally.
But it’s more likely that the 10 up breaks things even more. One person in the house uploading anything (or participating in zoom/teams/etc calls) will cripple your ability to make ANY request to the internet.
One major AAA game update will likely break your connection
One person in the house uploading anything will cripple your ability to make ANY requestYou are describing symptoms of bufferbloat, not capacity problems.
You are describing symptoms of bufferbloat, not capacity problems.
No… I’m not. Downloading a 100GB game from Steam for example will gladly eat the full 50 mbps this person claims is “usable”. A 100GB download would be ~4.5 hours at full speed. With ANY amount of overhead it will be more than 5 hours.
A download saturating the full connection is a capacity problem.
To the second point… If you are on a zoom call and are uploading the full 10 mbps of your connection speed. You will have problems uploading requests to fulfill for download.
Both of these are capacity problems. Not bufferbloat. Quite honestly, this capacity problem can CAUSE bufferbloat. There will be excessive queuing and packet loss.
Multi-hour downloads have been a thing since capacity was measured in kbps. If a simple TCP transfer causes excessive queueing, then the queueing algorithm is broken.
A router with OpenWrt and
luci-app-sqmcan fix this problem, at least for an internet connection with a fixed speed limit.LMAO. No. This has nothing to do with a router. TCP is a “fair” protocol. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/tcp-fairness-measures/
How you can argue about this stuff and now even know how it works… beyond me.
A steam download (which tends to open multiple TCP channels, thus choking other connections on a network)… That’s taking 50 mbps + your youtube video that wants to take 7mbps. 50+7 = 57 which is > 50 mbps. This is literally a capacity problem.
Once again… It would be the fact that you’re using more than your actual bandwidth that you would cause excessive queueing and thus have a bufferbloat problem. But simply switching queueing mechanisms won’t resolve it. especially if you’re using traffic that isn’t prioritized. Nor does switching queueing mechanisms mean that the problem was bufferbloat to begin with.
Well, if you currently have this problem and want to fix it, I’ve shown you the way. OpenWrt is free software.
Otherwise, there’s no point arguing about it.
50/10
good enough to be usable
On a post about how ISPs are literally fucking us all over, overcharging for the most basic connections that are far behind other countries and all you have to say is iT’s UsAbLe lmao
Youre advocating for the SLOWEST avg speed in the nation
Americans are getting nearly 200 Mbps in download speed, but are you?
https://www.allconnect.com/blog/us-internet-speeds-globally
As of May 2023, Ookla’s Speedtest.net shows Americans are getting over 200 Mbps of download speed and about 23 Mbps of upload speed through their fixed broadband connections — good for 6th in the world for median fixed broadband speeds. Considering “fast internet speeds” are generally defined as any download speed above 100 Mbps, Americans are doing quite well by this measure.
In fact, according to a recent Allconnect data report, 9 in 10 households can access at least 100 Mbps speeds.
That’s an incredible improvement from just under a decade ago when the U.S. had an average download speed of just 31 Mbps. In 2013, America ranked 25th among 39 nations for broadband speed.
Sub-100 is not good enough by most standards these days around the world. 50 is not even double the fastest speeds from TEN years ago
We as consumers and citizens deserve better, especially as working from home continues to be a popular and realistic option and our global culture continues to be directly tied to internet culture/media/content.
Honestly, I would rather have universal health care than faster download speeds any day.
I’m currently shelling out about $18,000 a year to have a $2,500 deductible.
You can and should have both, fuck this country indeed
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Here in Ukraine we got 1000 mbit even in small villages via optic. For 7.5$/month. For the last 10 years at least. Before that the standard was 100 mbit ethernet. 20 years ago the standard was 30 mbit via coaxial tv cable.
Here in the UK, I can get 1GB up/down for about £30 ($38, or ₴1,434.60).
In the US you’re lucky to get those speeds and you’re lucky to spend less than $100 for it while also having a data cap of like 10TB/month.
Our government gave cable companies tax cuts and shit to encourage them to provide internet and most of the just bought out their competitors and formed pseudo monopolies.
This is disgusting :( I am greatful that consumer markets in Ukraine, despite the corruption, have always been ~80% open for natural evolution.
The US is a pile of companies in a trench coat masquerading as a democracy. It’s why the average American is 38 years old while the average senator is 65 and the average House Rep is 58. Why something like 70% of Americans support universal healthcare but it never goes anywhere in Congress. Why we have infrastructure that is falling apart but the military gets a constantly increasing budget. Why we have a life expectancy lower than Cuba now with a literacy rate below most developed countries and an average hours worked above the Japanese.
Must be nice.
Damn you got me salivating at the mouth
from Ukraine too, can confirm.
still using 100mbps because it’s dirt cheap and I don’t really need more yet.
No shit. Fuck Ajit Pai.
Biden finally recently got the FCC back to protecting people, and not the damn phone and cable companies. Thank god.
Still a lot of mess to clean up though.
Don’t think they’re gonna undo the damage Pai did though. Dems are always so afraid of undoing the horrors the Reps do. Can’t shake the status quo.
Man he had 8years to fix this shit when he was vice president what makes you think he’s gonna fix anything before the next election?
That was a decade ago, and broadband needs are constantly increasing.
That said, the Obama administration 100% used the FCC to increase internet speeds across the US.
Since it takes so long to change the “standard” it should be set to 1-2GB per second or have it set to increase by 10-20% per year or something.
just like things like minimum wage?
Minimum wage (federally) hasn’t gone up in almost 15 years
That’s their point, fyi. Not sure why you’re being downvoted though.
Another reason the feds ensure inflation, it makes their workforce cheaper.
Sounds good but there isn’t any consumer equipment that can handle 2GB/s. Even 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches are super expensive and I don’t think we have anything that can do more than 10Gb/s in the consumer Networking space at all .
Probably because there isn’t demand, cause service is so slow.
Kind of a chicken/egg scenario.
Is it fun living in 2008 still? 2.5g exists and is cheap af now.
Eh, 2.5gbps is kind of a dumb move IMO… 10gbps equipment has existed for a really long time at this point… There’s no legit reason to have an in-between with all the 10gbps stuff coming out of production environments from enterprise.
802.11ac can already break 2.5gbps on it’s own (with 160MHz wide channel). My cellphone can get 1733/1733 (2x2 with 256-QAM lock) in the living room (same room as the access point). My access point costs ~$150 right now… so nothing super expensive. Theoretically with 160MHz wide channels on a 4x4 setup at 256-QAM you’d be looking at 3.5Gbps (less in real world for single devices obviously… but total throughput of multiple devices can tally up)
With 802.11ax adding a whole new 6ghz that’s effectively another whole ~3.5gbps that you can push there as well. So let’s just say a second 1.7gbps connection cause we know real world wont get the maximum theoretical… That’s still 3.4gbps, blowing you 2.5gbps out of the water. 802.11be is also supposed to increase the channel sizes up to 320MHz… That will be something like 4-5gbps on it’s own.
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You should start by asking them what they did with the $400 billion (as of 9 years ago) in taxes that we have paid them to build out fiber internet. And yes, you’re probably STILL paying this tax.
It’s just a speed to be able to say your service is “broadband.” There’s probably more to that with subsidies and whatnot, but it’s not an actual hard requirement.
It hasn’t been “good enough” for a while now.
Man I really hope so. I’m in a 25/3 wasteland. My dad, a town over, is even lower. About 7/0.8.
Meanwhile in the Netherlands, I can choose between several gigabit providers. Symmetrical on fiber or asymmetrical on cable. I’ve been on gigabit fibre for a couple of years.
Can I have that problem instead of being stuck to a single ISP that charges more for copper wire service than they do fiber in the places they have it?
$55/mo
Their introductory rates for fiber, last I saw, was $30.
At the moment €30/month. But this was a deal for a couple of months. Regular price is €45/month. This is T-Mobile btw. When combine it with a cellular plan. They give a discount of €5/month on the fiber and €2,50/month on the cellular plan.
Beats the 1.5/0.25 centurylink provides us
I live in podunk nowhere, but if the amount of time since I’ve had that speed could buy things, I think it’d be old enough to buy cigarettes.
Also I’m surprised CenturyLink is even still alive.
They rebranded as Lumen, so they could provide the same shitty service to people who were already wary of them.
You guys are getting 25/3? Damn. Must be nice.
Ok but can we actually get 25/3 first? All raising it does is set low hanging fruit for newly “underserved” areas while there are still plenty of communities for whom 1Mbps terrestrial links would be a miracle.
Yes, baby, right back at you.
Finally, it was embarrassing years ago.
5-10 down does just fine for streaming and video calls from my experience. My ISP is badly configured, so I get like 15-20 up.
i mean, 5 to 10 megabyte (40-80 Mbps) is better definitely. 25 Mbps is absolutely terrible for my partner and I if they’re watching a show and I’m trying to game.
