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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
yeah that’s garbage, we just started rolling 2.5/500 in certain xgs-pon areas. i think minimum now (for fiber, we still have vdsl/adsl) is 500/50. i don’t sell any of it just work on the technical side.
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.
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. Game consoles weren’t online by default until Xbox Gen 1 (and as an add on for GC and PS2) and PC gamers were a minority (and rarely direct peer-to-peer).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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?
But yea these greedy corporations aint gonna change anything unless we get laws passed and actually enforce them.
I stream my own videos from my home server, which would not even work with your upload speed. Some 1080p videos already have bitrates higher than 10 Mbps … and that’s just one stream.
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.
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
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.
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?
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 .
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