[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.

[fomine3]

I wonder is bufferbloat become more problem on extremely fast residential connection.

[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.

[zbrozek]

When I moved in to my house the only available option was AT&T DSL at 18/1 mbps. Comcast quoted $210k to run cable despite everyone else on my street already having a connection. It took me a year, but I organized with a bunch of my neighbors on the two streets behind my house and we trenched to get ourselves connected.

Being in a wealthy area is no guarantee of service. I currently pay $155/mo. It's symmetric 10 gbps. My router isn't grunty enough to deliver that.

[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.

[inferiorhuman]

Pretty much any consumer internet service (including Sonic) will be "up to".

[teaearlgraycold]

Redwood City

[lostmsu]

What's the city?