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by sologoub 819 days ago
25Mbps up may be adequate in a pinch, but it’s laughably outdated. Symmetric down/up enables a lot of great use cases including seamless backup. I briefly lived with AT&T fiber symmetric 1gbps (actually more like 940mbps at the router, but close enough). It was a game changer and losing it definitely undid a bunch of great use cases. If you WFH, it’s even more important.

Meanwhile our Swiss friends have 10+gbps to home…

2 comments

I've seen urban condos in US offering 7gbps to home. The high end is there.

After I first experienced symmetrical gigabit fiber I have only lived in residences that offer it -- it is a prerequisite for me choosing a domicile similar to trash pickup and electricity. My argument isn't that we shouldn't offer faster internet. We should have more places that offer faster internet. My question is what is the minimum viable upload speed for residential service.

Yep. I've never had more than 35Mbps up from home, and it sucks. When talking about WFH, a lot of people focus on the uplink bandwidth needed for 1080p video calls (another commenter said Zoom recommends 3.8Mbps), but there's a lot more to it.

I might be building some software locally and uploading it to a cloud server to test it. The built artifact might be tens or hundreds of megabytes and take several minutes to upload.

This isn't even solely a software developer thing. Someone who does video production certainly needs to send around large quantities of data as well. I'm sure we could come up with examples from other industries.

It's pathetic how limited the coax infra is in the US these days. Supposedly this will be improving soon with DOCSIS 4.0, but c'mon, it's 2024...