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by bhauer 3491 days ago
I wish more geographies had 150 megabit (or even better) symmetric residential service. I will never understand how residential service became asymmetric by default. At my address, the best upload speed I can get is ~5 Mbps, which is utterly embarrassing considering my first DSL connection, in 1999 or thereabouts, was ~1.5 Mbps symmetric. In 17 years, I have only approximately tripled my upload speed. (Frankly, even the download speed doesn't seem commensurate with 17 years of technological advance; such is the tragedy of popular "good enough" syndrome.)

In my opinion, asymmetric residential service is in large part responsible for the centralization of the Internet. I would have much liked the alternate history where residential service continued from 1999 onward supporting and embracing the notions of self-hosting and peer-to-peer communication. The resulting decentralized, federated Internet while no utopia in its own right, would be so much more appealing to my sensibilities.

Putting that wishful thinking aside, your setup sounds nice. Since I can't get that kind of bandwidth to my house, I had to lease a dedicated server at a data center.

1 comments

Thanks.

I'm on Verizon FIOS, and it is symmetrical, roughly. It speed tests about 158 down 162 up. How I got that fast was sorta an accident from moving, and rep handling it looked at the deals. I think it was maybe $10 more than the 50meg service I had before.

I see Google Fiber over there, but what I have is nice too, and deployed wider. I also see Comcast's "gigabit" service with it's paltry 35meg upload.