[pdx6]

With how slowly these proposals roll out, 100/20 won't be enough. As others said, there is a lack of both competition and pricing to worry about too.

In a major tech hub like San Francisco, where I live, it's possible to get 1gb/1gb in some areas for under $90, but which those are isn't consistent nor wide spread. Home cell coverage at 100/20 is spotty at best, and there is only one flat rate vendor (T-Mobile Home, no Verizon Home yet). For those outside of the Bay Area exurbs, I can only imagine the horrors of Comcast/Xfinity or only DSL people must deal with.

Looking forward, the FCC is assuming that people are just watching Netflix, Tiktok, and making angry Karen posts on Nextdoor. We're not sure where web3 will lead, and how much bandwidth will that take: Distributed file systems/data privacy? Fast crypto transactions? Metaverse/VR/AR glasses/contacts? And what about latency?

1000/500 should be the FCC goal.

[josh2600]

This.

I am insanely embarrassed by the third world telecom infrastructure many Americans have to live with.

100Mbps symmetrical is just on the edge of what telcos can jam into dsl over their existing install base. The goal of the telco is to keep the FCC speed goal at copper limits for as long as possible to avoid paying the fiber they were paid to build in the 90’s.

Om Malik wrote a fantastic book entitled: “Broadbandits” which covers the $750B telecom heist (way back 30 years ago when a single billion was a lot of money for a business).

https://www.amazon.com/Broadbandits-Inside-Billion-Telecom-H...

[5e92cb50239222b]

I live in Kazakhstan and am paying just a little over $10 a month for a 500 Mbit/s symmetrical FTTH link (no caps either). It's even faster and cheaper in Russia (at least it has been until now, I don't know how long it's going to be true since they're sanctioned to the moon). Both countries pretty much have (their own) monopolistic internet providers, and yet. Why do Americans tolerate this bullshit?

[Strom]

When comparing local production prices between different countries it is important to keep local wages in mind. The ISP employees in Kazakhstan are not getting paid US salaries.

To do some quick math, let's take the median monthly salaries of both Kazakhstan and USA, 364,000 KZT ($755) and 3,500 USD per month respectively.

That means that the $10/month 500Mbps symmetrical fiber is about 1.32% of median monthly wage in Kazakhstan. For the US, 1.32% of 3,500 USD is about $46/month.

Looking at the AT&T website, they offer 500Mbps symmetrical fiber for $65/month + taxes. So yes, the US internet is more expensive by about 50%.

However one should still ask - well, maybe AT&T provides better service? I don't know whether AT&T is a better provider than your Kazakhstan ISP, but some points to consider are:

- Can you have a connection uptime of 6 months without interruptions and it's just business as usual and not an achievement? (In Estonia I have router & connection uptime measured in years. When I lived in the US, my Xfinity connection dropped for a few minutes every week.)

- Does the ISP have excellent global peering? Poor peering can result in much higher latencies to international destinations, and also much lower bandwidth. (In Estonia I know all the budget ISPs buy (as opposed to build) their international traffic and oversell it, which means connections across oceans are at quarter of the advertised speeds at peak hours.)

- Is the last mile cabling cost eaten by the ISP, or will they demand you to pay for its building?

[5e92cb50239222b]

> are not getting paid US salaries

Sure, that was implied. All hardware and software used to build networks is imported though, and is bought for 'hard' currency (and a lot of it is needed to build networks in a country with an extreme climate and such low population density).

> Can you have a connection uptime of 6 months without interruptions

I've been using this provider since 2008 (and switched from ADSL to fiber-optics in 2013). It's been pretty great actually, I believe we had two service interruptions in all that time, roughly half-hour each. I don't remember the exact time since the last one happened some years ago.

No idea about 100% stability across many months of use since I don't host anything at home. This sounds like something you'd want if you were getting remotely operated on.

The router keeps the same IP for months, and I've never had the connection break from under me (besides two occasions mentioned above).

> Does the ISP have excellent global peering

Well, it's definitely not going to be as good as what you have in Europe. I mean, look at our geographical location, it's right in the middle of freaking nowhere. I guess it's pretty similar to what they have in NZ, only they are surrounded by water, and we by a thousand miles of steppe.

Last year, I looked at what they paid in Russia to get similar connection speeds. Prices were significantly lower in Moscow and SPb than in Siberia (roughly $5 for 1 Gbit/s versus $5 for 200 Mbit/s IIRC), which makes sense when you think of it. And we're way further down.

Both up and down speeds to US and EU datacenters are stable and close to 100% advertised.

Right now, ping to HN is at 220 ms. Going by the most direct route possible at the speed of light in vacuum, I get 100 ms to that same datacenter (us-west-2). So it's 2.2 times worse than the unreachable ideal. Don't know how much better it could be if we had direct cabling to the US since it's not going to happen for financial reasons.

We have a couple more providers (who seem to have been allowed to the market to make the main one look like less of a monopolist) that are not as popular. They definitely do oversell bandwidth. You'd be lucky to get 10% of what you had paid for, especially on weekends.

> Is the last mile cabling cost eaten by the ISP

You don't pay anything when signing up for the service.

So no, I think US customers are simply getting shafted for their money.

[fomine3]

Mostly agree but add a point: Kazakhstan (or say all country except US) ISPs needs broad international connection to US because many services hosted in the US despite it's CDN era, so transit fee is added, while US ISPs just need national connection.

[leohonexus]

Heh, I guess one thing Borat did learn was how poor US telecom infra is. /s

[toast0]

> 100Mbps symmetrical is just on the edge of what telcos can jam into dsl over their existing install base.

I'm not sure that's going to cover much of their base. I've got a pretty good line, I could probably hit 100M down, it's around 90M now, but not more than 40 or 50M up, it's capped at 16M though, cause fixed profiles :/

Elsewhere near me, there's like a chance of 10M. New technology isn't going to help that, unless it's fiber to the curb; but you might as well go the rest of the way to the premises if you can.

[rejor121]

I’ve never had good internet in America, but my internet has been so good in east Asia. Even japan, which is supposedly worse than other countries, is worlds better than what I ever paid for in the states.

The one exception is China. I could never live there because of their shit internet due to the great firewall

[SamReidHughes]

Who paid them to build fiber and under what contract?

[josh2600]

Telecom act of 1996 paid them to build fiber but they set the speed limits low enough that they could satisfy it with DSL.

There’s new DSL tech that’s ~100mbps, so this is that technique again.

The fatal flaw in 1996, like today, is not pushing for gigabit, and is one of the major reasons the US is a declining global power. Faster internet access is core infrastructure for participation in the 21st century.

[SamReidHughes]

> Telecom act of 1996 paid them to build fiber

Do you have a factual basis for such a statement? Here is the text of the act.

https://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/tcom1996.txt

In fact, the text of the act doesn't mention fiber -- which part involves paying companies to build fiber? -- and one part is very explicit in not referring to a specific form of technology.

> The term `advanced telecommunications capability' is defined, without regard to any transmission media or technology, as high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.

In fact, for a simple sanity-check on the factualness of your statement, we need just one question: If FedGov paid companies to build fiber -- which companies, and how much did it pay each of them?

[politician]

The US is not a declining global power.

[jdhendrickson]

Completely based on the lens through which you are viewing it. I myself am American and have seen the quality of life for the average citizen declining in my life time. If I wasn't a part of the new middle class provided by technology, my children would have a worse life than me, combine that with the recidivism displayed by our judiciary recently and some could definitely argue we are declining. But with a user name like that, you already know all that. You might say our gdp and other metrics still show us as a giant on the world stage, I'm sure there are other metrics we can crow about, Yet it feels like little of that is trickling down to our citizens.

[jl6]

What year would you suggest time-travelling back to in order to enjoy a higher quality of life?

[eertami]

> In a major tech hub like San Francisco, where I live, it's possible to get 1gb/1gb in some areas for under $90

As a point of comparison, I live in a small city in Europe (80k population) and we have 10gb/10gb for $60/month. My internal network is only capable of 2.5gbit, but I can upload at that speed indefinitely. I could honestly not imagine going back to ADSL speeds.

[inferiorhuman]

San Francisco is an interesting case (and I say this as an SF native). The city government is so unfathomably dysfunctional in large part due to London Breed (the current mayor) bringing cronyism back as fast as she can.

Parts of the city are covered by MonkeyBrainz (microwave p2p), parts by Webpass (fiber), and most of the city is covered by Comcast (cable) or PacBell/SBC/AT&T (DSL and adjacent). Up until Sonic started rolling out 1 Gbps fiber a few years ago all I could get at my last place in the city was 3/1 Mbps ADSL or Comcast.

PacBell was always reluctant to build out RTs compared to GTE/Verizon (who has a significantly smaller presence in the Bay Area) so DSL speeds in large chunks of SF were always shit. Even when they did build out RTs the ILECs were never required to resell RT access so speeds remained shit. I'm not entirely sure why AT&T's U-Verse (FTTN, VDSL last mile) was rolled out so slowly but I expect the need for intrusive sidewalk boxes was part of the problem. Sonic got boned because SF's supervisors were/are reluctant to allow micro trenching. For a while there was some buzz about muni fiber but that never got off the ground (and Sonic certainly helped put a few nails in that coffin).

[xboxnolifes]

You have access to residential internet with 10Gbps up and down? I didn't even know that was a thing.

[Youden]

I've got 25/25Gbps here in Switzerland. I pay ~$65/month.

[pooper]

Can you please elaborate on your experience with it?

Previously, on HN I remember seeing this post

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31134534

[Youden]

Honestly it's mostly a novelty for me, I did it for bragging rights and out of curiosity.

1Gbps to 10Gbps has some tangible benefits like downloading large games in a fraction of the time, or doing super fast backups.

However when you have 25Gbps, you have a pipe twice as large as is common in standard hardware. You usually see yourself limited by 10Gbps peering links or by endpoints with only 10Gbps NICs.

And of course 25Gbps is faster than most conventional storage, you need very high-end NVMe or RAID to keep up.

If I'd have had to pay a bit extra every month, I probably wouldn't have done it. But since it was just the price of the hardware plus installation, I thought it was worth trying.

[pottertheotter]

A lot of Utah (areas that have UTOPIA Fiber) has had it since 2018. It’s still $200+ a month though.

[cbozeman]

I would gladly pay $200 a month for that.

[Kadin]

I'd pay $200/mo for that if it didn't come with a transfer cap.

That's the problem with making bandwidth the only metric that we grade broadband connections on. You end up with "Gigabit" connections that you can only use at that speed very occasionally, because otherwise you'll hit a monthly transfer cap. (E.g. Cox's "Gigablast" service, which pairs a 1Gb connection with a transfer cap worth about 20 minutes per month at gigabit speeds.)

[geraldwhen]

I have ATT fiber.

1000/1000 for $70/mo, no data cap, includes hbo max.

[bigyikes]

Serious question: what do you want that much bandwidth for? I could upgrade from 100Mb/s to 1Gb/s but I haven’t because honestly can’t think of a use case for myself.

[orangepanda]

I upgraded to 1Gbps a while back, mostly because the price was the same. Also though I don’t really need it. Then I realised I can now download AAA steam games in the time it takes to make a cup of tea. No need for a separate storage drive anymore.

[icedchai]

I rarely need that much bandwidth, but it's convenient when available. Example: when I do an OS update. The lower latency and reliability of fiber is actually more important. DOCSIS / Cable networks are very flaky, subject to interference. There will be small periods of packet loss that literally come and go with the weather (or perhaps a neighbor messing around with their wiring.)

95% of consumers won't notice, but if I'm in the middle of uploading a docker image and my upstream bandwidth drops from 30 megabits to 3 megabits due to increased packet loss and TCP re-transmissions, I definitely will. I've had this happen before. Massive packet loss in the neighborhood. It took months to get it fixed.

[cbozeman]

Can't reliably run my personal cloud with just 100 Mbit/s. The best fiber service I had access to was Frontier out in Texas, and my location capped out at 500 / 500, which was great at the time. I could easily run my personal cloud... Plex Media Server, Nextcloud, etc.

Nowadays, with my UltraHD Blu-ray rips on the Plex server, it's not unreasonable at all to require more than a 2 Gbps connection to reliably stream those. I'm often away from home, so it's nice to just be able to log into my own personal server to watch stuff at it's native and highest available quality.

[xmprt]

Just curious but how would you use 10GB up/down for personal purposes?

[cbozeman]

Mostly for my personal cloud... Plex Media Server, Nextcloud, etc., because any service that's offering a $300 connection will also let buy a static IP for a nominal amount.

[thomastjeffery]

To clarify: you are talking about 10gbit.

1gbit symmetric is ~$70-80 from UTOPIA providers, and $70 from Google fiber.

[geerlingguy]

Not in the US :'(

[zbrozek]

At my house, thanks to Los Altos Hills Community Fiber. It's in the US.

https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/b6f39b75-d71a-4d89-b0f5-9...

[_huayra_]

Damn you've got 2 orders of magnitude on me with my bare-bones Comcast plan! What's this run you per month?

[mikeyouse]

Los Altos Hills is one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country, filled with tech millionaires and billionaires.. whatever the price may be, it’s heavily subsidized by extremely rich people who became wealthy due to tech companies wanting it in the first place. On Zillow, the cheapest house there is $4M and will likely be purchased to be torn down, the most expensive property is $40M and looks like a boutique hotel. Not really fair to compare them to the normal town.

[inferiorhuman]

Yeah in the US. I've got symmetric 10 Gbps fiber in Oakland, California.

[binkHN]

Provided by who?

[inferiorhuman]

Sonic

[backspace_]

Actually it is a thing in the us.

[cbozeman]

I don't know why you're being downvoted...

Utah has multiple 10 Gbps up / down providers ranging from $170 - $249.99.

Chattanooga, Tennessee has EPB that does 10 Gbps up / down for $299.99.

Lafayette, Louisiana has LUSFiber that does 10 Gbps up / down for $295.95.

[teaearlgraycold]

TBF I'm in a SF suburb and I get 10Gb/s down and 2Gb/s up for $40/month.

[pottertheotter]

What? Where can you get that?

[retypepassword]

Sounds like Sonic. They're building out fiber in various zip codes around the SF Bay Area.

[inferiorhuman]

It sounds like Sonic, but Sonic's 10 Gbps offering is AFAIK symmetric. Of course Sonic's gotten a lot more cagey about specifics and I don't have any 10G equipment so it's hard for me to tell.

[teaearlgraycold]

It’s actually just “up to” 10 Gb/s. And my 10Gb hardware is pretty janky so my speeds might not be representative of the full capabilities.

[teaearlgraycold]

Redwood City

[lostmsu]

What's the city?

[nanidin]

> Fast crypto transactions?

Is client bandwidth a limiting factor in crypto transactions?

[bogota]

I can’t actually think of any where the client is the limit. However for some having faster server nodes that are hosted at peoples homes would help speed up some currencies such as nano.

[rayiner]

Why is broadband so shitty in the heart of Silicon Valley? Why doesn’t Google just wire the whole place up as a tech demo?

Comcast just upgraded my fiber to 7 gbps. It’s spendy ($300/mo) but I also have gigabit Fios available for $80/mo.

[toast0]

> Why is broadband so shitty in the heart of Silicon Valley? Why doesn’t Google just wire the whole place up as a tech demo?

Google couldn't figure out how to get on poles. When they announced their batch of 20? or so real Google fiber cities, AT&T rolled out fiber to a good number of them before Google got city council approval to do anything. Comcast announced a loss leader 2Gbps symmetric for $300/month program [1], etc. It's not too hard to roll out fiber if you've got access to the poles and enough clout to put your fiber boxes wherever you need to. (sure, you gotta pay the property owner a little bit, but not it's not too bad)

[1] IIRC, it was always delivered as 10G metro ethernet, originally limited to 2G, but I think they increased that over time (I thought I had seen 6, but you're reporting 7). You've got to be close enough to their existing fiber that they're not losing too much on the buildout with their $1000 installation fee cap.

[bad416f1f5a2]

Google wired my city up as a tech demo. Their microtrenching approach was atrocious and resulted in frequent service interruptions and significant traffic disruption as they patched the same spots multiple times.

Eventually they decided the network was so damaged that they’d have to do a total rebuild, and that wasn’t interesting. They threw up their hands up and left, giving the city a few million to clean up the mess.

So, careful what you wish for.

[cbozeman]

That's because Google has shitty leadership that doesn't understand playing the long game. This is why Google's only real source of income is search, and by that, I mean of course, ads.

Google kills any project that's not profitable within a year. They kill any project that doesn't become a 100x'er in a few years.

Microsoft lost $4,000,000,000 to $7,000,000,000 on their Xbox division until the Xbox 360. That's the kind of loss that Google executives and directors can't stomach, for whatever reason, but it's the kind of loss you have to suffer through to get fiber out to a whole state. Google could slowly conquer state after state with fiber, which would be an enormous benefit to them, but they're too cowardly and short-sighted to see it through.

[google234123]

It worked in SLC. Maybe they dug deeper trenches?

[bad416f1f5a2]

3x deeper - Louisville got 2” trenches. This went as well as you’d expect.

[rayiner]

Why do you have to trench? Have you ever seen Tokyo? Outside some very high density areas, all the fiber is on poles.

[tadfisher]

Pole ownership isn't a clear cut thing, and cities are cagey around erecting new poles. So using existing poles requires paying someone money, or is impossible due to local telecom monopolies. Either way, microtrenching is very cheap and attractive, though it has maintenance issues in areas with large climate swings.

[bad416f1f5a2]

A grab bag of federal/state/local rules and widely varying ownership of those poles.

First, are you in a FCC regulated state, or one of the 21 that have passed their own pole regulations and have very different rules?

Have you negotiated a pole access agreement with the owner of the poles - which might be an electrical company, a municipality, or a Baby Bell? Some of those entities would love to see fiber internet in their community; others will be sure to make your life difficult because you are a competitor. And in some cases the ownership dictates the regulatory framework: a rural electric coop’s poles are handled differently from a municipalities, which are different from a telco.

Does your agreement/regulatory body allow you to do make ready work, or are you depending on the pole owner to do site surveys & line up engineering crews for the other utilities attached to the pole - likely telco, cable, maybe some existing fiber too? Are those poles also running electrical, in which case you’ve got even more headaches to deal with? Is the pole owner or anyone attached to the pole going to try to slow you down by claiming your changes are complex and need additional oversight?

Are you willing to wait, if you are required, for each other utility on the pole to send their engineers out to move their lines so you’re ready to place yours?

Alternatively: you negotiate an agreement with a city to trench in their right of way. One set of local regulators to work with. Looks appealing in comparison, no?

[inferiorhuman]

Depends on the city I'm sure. If a city's already invested in undergrounding utilities there may not be any other option.

[ausbah]

was that kansas city?

[evandijk70]

Fiber was installed here, and they provide three tiers - 50Mb/s, 100 Mb/s and 1000 Mb/s, for 45, 50, and 55 euro each. We took the 100Mb/s.

I have no idea what I would use 1 Gb/s for, using it as definition for broadband would be premature. Than again, Bill Gates said that: '640 kB RAM ought to be enough for anybody'.

[Youden]

At 1Gbps the internet becomes close to indistinguishable from a local network, opening up interesting possibilities like a "NAS" that's actually just the cloud. That extra bandwidth, combined with the low latency of fibre, can make it possible to easily interact with a remote PC as if it's sitting in front of you, so you could do away with a home PC or workstation and use a thin client to access a beefy machine on-demand in some datacenter.

[BenjiWiebe]

For those use cases, latency is IMO a bigger deal than bandwidth. For remote PC, 20mbps 5ms latency would beat 10Gbps 50ms latency.

And due to the speed of light, you can't get latency arbitrarily low.

[cbozeman]

But you can dial it down pretty damn well. When I had Frontier in Texas, I rarely saw latency over 19 ms to any location in the United States. 35+ ms and I was fussy... amazing how quickly fiber can spoil a man.