👏 Make 👏 ALL 👏 connections 👏 Symmetrical 👏
If only it were easy to do. Technical limitations on copper is what causes low upload speeds. ISP’s prioritize the download speed, which is what people utilize the most. As fiber continues to be rolled out it should get better though.
Is there a legit reason they do not do this?
Just to prioritize download in limited bandwidth cables. Like a neighborhood might get 2Gbps total, but instead of doing 1 down 1 up they instead do 1.8 down and .2 up, then split that amongst a bunch of houses.
In the old world of the internet, people didn’t upload much anyway.
Nobody worked from home. Nobody had their phones constantly syncing photos and videos to 1 (or often more) clouds. And even then, the photos and videos that you could take digitally were very low resolution and not very large files. Game consoles weren’t online by default until Xbox Gen 1 (and as an add on for GC and PS2) and PC gamers were a minority (and rarely direct peer-to-peer).
That has changed, and nobody forced ISPs to keep up. In a lot of markets, the Cable ISP is a monopoly and they don’t have to do shit about it.
Some service-provider level technology is not symmetrical at the access layer. An ISP serving exclusively fiber may have values like below:
GPON (GIGAbit passive optical network): 1.24416 Gigabits/s up, 2.48832 Gigabits/s down
XG-PON (10 gigabit passive optical network): 10G/2.5G
xgS-pon (10g Symmetrical optical network): 10g/10g
Note that on all of these technologies, you are also sharing bandwidth with neighbors on your PON. Sometimes up to 64 subs on one gpon. I think 128 on xgs-pon Until more providers make fiber available, as well as are willing to fork more up for the latest equipment, and reduce the over subscriptions of pons, symmetrical services for everyone just won’t happen.
Will this ever happen at mega providers / baby-bells? Probably never unless a regional or startup pops up, and then they will only attempt compete in that market.
Quick! Give the ISPs a bunch of federal dollars to build out their networks so they can quietly pocket it and do stock buybacks!
Why weren't those monetary subsidies just after the fact instead of just paying out on promises? "You'll get x billion dollars when y% of this area has access to z Mbps." But then again I've heard there's monopolies for that in the USA, instead of actual competition.
But then again I’ve heard there’s monopolies for that in the USA, instead of actual competition.
Government granted monopolies. It's the worst. City / county/ state signs deal with ISP X and give them exclusive rights. Then for some reason they don't spend a lot of time updating anything because they have no competition because of the fucking morons in the government.
Dude, 100Mbps isn't good enough anymore either
What? That’s plenty for the average person.
I think person* is the keyword here. Many families have several people concurrently watching streaming video, listening to music, and playing games that are required to have an internet connection. 100Mbps is not enough.
Streaming music is a very negligible impact. We've had streaming music for 2 decades.
Yeah that one bothers me... The most demanding MP3s are what... 320kbps? That's 3.3GB per day. That is not really a hard demand on bandwidth at all. 100GB/month. And that's the max bitrate MP3 does... Most services are probably doing 128kbps...
Spotify has an Audio quality table on their site... https://support.spotify.com/us/article/audio-quality/
Low = 24kbps, 0.2471923828 GB/day
Normal = 96 kbps, 0.9887695313 GB/day
High = 160 kbps, 1.6479492188 GB/day
Very High = 320 Kbps, 3.2958984375 GB/day
These are very reasonable and easy numbers to obtain on just about any internet connection. The only way this is an "issue" is if you're running like a couple hundred streams at once.
Right, but this is about setting a minimum standard for it to be classified as broadband. For an average individual 100Mbps is high speed internet.
And most families probably have cheap wifi routers with poor snr as their main bottleneck.
I would like to disagree, since every "news" site started adding auto playing videos and ads on each and every page. what should be a 2kB text now comes with a 50MB video Download...
Here in Ukraine we got 1000 mbit even in small villages via optic. For 7.5$/month. For the last 10 years at least. Before that the standard was 100 mbit ethernet. 20 years ago the standard was 30 mbit via coaxial tv cable.
Here in the UK, I can get 1GB up/down for about £30 ($38, or ₴1,434.60).
Must be nice.
Since it takes so long to change the “standard” it should be set to 1-2GB per second or have it set to increase by 10-20% per year or something.
just like things like minimum wage?
Minimum wage (federally) hasn't gone up in almost 15 years
That’s their point, fyi. Not sure why you’re being downvoted though.
Sounds good but there isn't any consumer equipment that can handle 2GB/s. Even 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches are super expensive and I don't think we have anything that can do more than 10Gb/s in the consumer Networking space at all .
No shit. Fuck Ajit Pai.
Biden finally recently got the FCC back to protecting people, and not the damn phone and cable companies. Thank god.
Still a lot of mess to clean up though.
Don’t think they’re gonna undo the damage Pai did though. Dems are always so afraid of undoing the horrors the Reps do. Can’t shake the status quo.
It hasn’t been “good enough” for a while now.
You guys are getting 25/3? Damn. Must be nice.
Man I really hope so. I'm in a 25/3 wasteland. My dad, a town over, is even lower. About 7/0.8.
Meanwhile in the Netherlands, I can choose between several gigabit providers. Symmetrical on fiber or asymmetrical on cable. I've been on gigabit fibre for a couple of years.
Can I have that problem instead of being stuck to a single ISP that charges more for copper wire service than they do fiber in the places they have it?
Beats the 1.5/0.25 centurylink provides us
I live in podunk nowhere, but if the amount of time since I've had that speed could buy things, I think it'd be old enough to buy cigarettes.
Also I'm surprised CenturyLink is even still alive.
They rebranded as Lumen, so they could provide the same shitty service to people who were already wary of them.
Ok but can we actually get 25/3 first? All raising it does is set low hanging fruit for newly "underserved" areas while there are still plenty of communities for whom 1Mbps terrestrial links would be a miracle.
5-10 down does just fine for streaming and video calls from my experience. My ISP is badly configured, so I get like 15-20 up.
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