
Enjoying that 25Mbps internet speed, America? - LinuxBender
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/19/slow_internet_georgia/
======
rayiner
The article is comparing apples and oranges. The 25 Mbps “FCC” figure is
reporting the fastest speeds offered in each census block. This is a really
dumb measure for broadband speeds. In particular, every area served by DSL
will have close-in customers who can get 25 Mbps, but many who can get only a
fraction of that. But that’s the measure the FCC asks for, and has used since
long before the current administration.

The 6.3 Mbps figure, by contrast, appears to be an average of 380,000
consumer-initiated Google speed test runs, geo-located to census blocks by IP
address. It’s not reporting maximums, and it’s also not clear whether any
attempt was made to narrow the results to exclude wireless internet
connections from the average.

According to Akamai, as of 2017 25 Mbps average speed would put you as the #2
fastest internet in the world, just after South Korea:
[https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-
of-t...](https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-
internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-report.pdf). I don’t think
anyone is claiming Georgia has the fastest internet in the world.

The article’s sweeping claims about “America” as a whole don’t seem justified
based on a study done in Georgia. Ookla has the US at #7 worldwide for fixed
broadband speeds: [https://www.speedtest.net/global-
index#fixed](https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed). Akamai has it in
the top 10 (see above). The Ookla data probably is skewed upward, assuming
people doing speed tests probably have faster than average Internet, but the
Akamai data should be very reliable, being based on way more data points than
this Google speeds test survey.

------
wincy
I mean considering the US is 2,959,064.44 square miles and UK is 93,628, I’d
say we’re doing pretty good for having 30x the area and only 5x the
population.

I’m greatly enjoying posting this from my Google Fiber gigabit connection,
thanks.

~~~
rasz
How about NY? or even just Manhattan? lets say 1st Ave. Pretty dense,
populated area right? Wanna guess your ISP and speeds availability there?

~~~
CryptoBanker
Both Verizon and Spectum and possibly RCN offer Gigabit up/down speeds in the
NYC area now and have done so for the last 3 years

~~~
rasz
what area of NYC exactly? because 1st Ave you have a "choice" of DSL or
Spectrum Business _Cable_. Heart of industrialized USA, world finance center,
and lets not forget

"Manhattan's population density is 66,940 people per square mile (25,846/km²),
highest of any county in the United States."

"New York Votes to Kick Spectrum Cable Out of the State"
[https://fortune.com/2018/07/29/spectrum-communications-
kicke...](https://fortune.com/2018/07/29/spectrum-communications-kicked-out-
new-york/)

"New York City sues Verizon for not completing citywide fiber network"
[https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/14/nyc-sues-
verizon/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/14/nyc-sues-verizon/)

------
ezoe
> The official US government definition of broadband is 25Mbps down and 3Mbps
> up.

Seriously? That's a broadband definition of 20 years ago. When ADSL was
introduced. But now is the optic fiber era. My guts feeling definition is at
least 100Mbps both way simultaneously.

I'm enjoying consistent 400Mbps at daylight, 300Mbps at night.

~~~
paulddraper
Honest question:

What...on...earth...could you possibly do with that? I have 50Mbps and feel
like that's kind of absurd.

Netflix recommends 25Mbps for streaming 4K video. [1]

So....streaming a dozen 4K movies simultaneously?

Sub-minute downloads of entire OS images? [2]

[1]
[https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444](https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444)

[2]
[https://www.osboxes.org/ubuntu/#ubuntu-19-04-vbox](https://www.osboxes.org/ubuntu/#ubuntu-19-04-vbox)

~~~
LinuxBender
It depends on how many people are in your household. Even with really good
traffic shaping, 100mb/s can be a problem if there are 3+ people these days.
Game downloads/updates, movies, file transfers, combine that with game
consoles moving away from storing data locally, cloud services, real time coms
such as ssh/rdp. One person can chew up that bw at times and affect others in
the household trying to do voice chat or gaming.

In addition to this, not everyone is doing bbr+fq_codel or cake traffic
shaping, so they need the burst overhead capacity. Even those using fq_codel
seldom have the right options set. And even then, most consumer routers have
low end cpu's and barely any L1/L2 cache. HTB adds a lot of context switching
on the router. If you hit the buffer on your cable modem or CMTS, then real
time applications get a lot of jitter.

The other issue is the mix of operating systems in the household. Not every OS
may be doing fair congestion control or even support/enable ECN. Not every
consumer modem supports ECN properly.

~~~
paulddraper
Traffic shaping, congestion control, etc. is irrelevant to my question though.

My question was not how well a full pipe is handled, but _What can you even
possibly fill it up with?_

