[sneak]

My home in Las Vegas is 2000Mbps down and 100Mbps up, and it's $200/month. $50/month of that is an add-on for "unlimited" usage, but Cox still writes me letters and threatens to cancel my service if I upload more than 2-3TB in a calendar month, despite having paid well over $3000 in "unlimited" add-on upcharges.

Internet pricing is a scam in the USA.

[martinald]

I assume you are on DOCSIS coax internet? The problem is upstream on DOCSIS is (very) constrained and if you hammer it causes huge problems for everyone on the segment (TCP ACKs start getting lost/slow, everyones ping rises massively and huge packetloss starts occurring).

Obviously no excuse to claim it is unlimited, but if the major US cable companies speeded up moving to true FTTH it would really save them a lot of trouble in the long run.

[sneak]

There’s no need for them to move to FTTH; 99.9% of homes don’t need more than 10-20Mbps upstream.

I was on 1000/40 for most of my history with them ($100+$50) now I have 2000/100 ($150+$50). I would be fine with 40Mbps upstream unlimited; the issue is not the throttling but the threats resulting from bait-and-switch.

[icedchai]

The problem with cable internet is that the shared medium (coax segment) has relatively little upstream bandwidth, shared by 100's of users. FTTH has much more bandwidth and a smaller amount of homes sharing it. Typically there is a passive splitter / fiber distribution for 8 to 32 homes, at least an order of magnitude better than cable.

I switched to fiber a few years back. But at one point during covid, my cable modem upstream was getting less than a megabit (I was paying for 500/30.)

[martinald]

Correct, and in reality it's likely to be 100-1000x the capacity. Probably say 16 users on average on a PON segment, with XGS-PON having 10gigabit/sec symmetrical.

Compare that to docsis 3.1 - maybe 200mbit/sec between hundreds of users.

DOCSIS 4.0 is better but just basically brings the split much closer to the home, in which case you'd probably be better off finishing the job with FTTH instead of having thousands of expensive active DOCSIS terminals every few hundred metres.

Also, you can easily upgrade capacity on FTTH, just add a new OLT and you can run that side by side with the old one while you upgrade everyone's ONTs.

[martinald]

I disagree - video conferencing and screensharing with a couple of calls at once will quickly eat up 10-20mbit/sec. 50-100mbit/sec I would agree is enough.

Regardless you're missing the point. DOCSIS has maybe 100-200mbit/sec of upstream shared between hundreds of homes - this will vary depending on config, and keep in mind a lot of that will be used for TCP ACKs from the downstream. So you probably have say 50-100mbit/sec "real" upstream available, or less than 1mbit/sec per subscriber.

If you hammered 40mbit/sec hard you are using nearly the entire 'usable' upstream of your entire cable modem segment.

DOCSIS is just massively inferior to FTTH for this reason.

[alostpuppy]

I’m in Vegas. It’s the first time I’ve actually had meaningful ISP competition and incredibly I can get fiber for 50 a month without caps. (Using quantum)