
Top U.S. cities have seen internet speeds decline this past week - arcamax
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/25/88-out-of-top-200-u-s-cities-have-seen-internet-speeds-decline-this-past-week-3-cities-by-more-than-40/
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gok
The actual report: [https://broadbandnow.com/report/internet-speed-analysis-
marc...](https://broadbandnow.com/report/internet-speed-analysis-
march-15th-21st/)

"But New York City, now considered the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., saw
download speeds drop by 24% last week, compared to the previous 10-week range.
That said, NYC home network connections, which have a median speed of nearly
52 Mbps, are managing."

It took me a few times reading it to understand what this is trying to say.
What they mean is that many of these cities that are showing slowdowns already
had higher-than-average median speeds. Many of the cities that aren't seeing
slowdowns were already pretty slow to begin with. E.g. Chicago has only slowed
down 10% but its median speed is only 26.79 mbps.

~~~
wtvanhest
It seems more like a mix shift issue, than a real issue.

If most of the fastest internet speeds are in offices, and people start
working from home where slower speeds are located than average speed will
decline.

~~~
irrational
Is that true? My home connection has always been far faster than my office
connection. Sometimes I go home just to download a particularly large file.

~~~
jlokier
Ha!

If I want to download a particularly big file, I use tethering via my phone.
Seriously, about 90Mbit/s download on the phone, that's faster than most
places I've worked and also faster than my home connection.

It was so obviously better, that I switched home to be on 4G instead of ADSL,
because the 4G was both cheaper and faster. It's working out well, but the
phone still manages to be faster than the router.

~~~
wenc
Yes. Most people don't realize this. (4G phone >> home internet)

I tether my iPad to my 4G phone because the latency/bandwidth is much higher
than my home internet (40mbps).

I ran Speedtest on my phone vs my desktop with a wired connection to the
router and learned that my 4G wireless connection was faster.

~~~
stOneskull
I think most of my town must use 4G at home because between 4pm and midnight
my ping is too annoyingly high to play counterstrike

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zeckalpha
> 112/200 top U.S. cities have seen internet speeds increase this past week

And no matter how hard we try, half are below the median!

~~~
mstibbard
Statistics are unforgiving!

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dumbfounder
So am I the only one that's happy and amazed it's working at all?
Unprecedented demand and it's still running, just a bit slower than normal.
Imagine if it all fell apart.

~~~
Ajedi32
I'm having trouble imagining a failure mode that would cause total collapse
under load rather than just reduced per-user speeds. Networks have to deal
with spikes in demand pretty frequently anyway, usually during the evenings
when lots of people are streaming video. A sudden increase in overall demand
throughout the day doesn't seem like it should be that big of a deal; and so
far it seems like it isn't.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
How about the mode where, video streaming makes normal browsing impossible for
some users? Their packets just don't survive the public net in the blizzard of
video packets? That would cause apparent collapse for some at least.

Not sure how 'net neutrality' would factor into that - a free-for-all would
mean it might happen more, but a pay-as-you-go would eliminate a whole class
of users. A hard problem.

~~~
freehunter
Networking isn’t magic, it’s pretty well understood. And ISPs are pretty good
at QoS to make sure that doesn’t happen.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
When it gets full (like it is some places), then the only strategy is to drop
packets. If they are dropped systematically (by some rule) then some
demographic loses some part of their internet entirely. That's also well
understood.

Its a product of non-neutral nets, where by definition they do something by a
rule (instead of randomly for instance).

And even randomly dropping (neutrality?) stresses certain subsets of network
traffic more than other e.g. video can recover from dropped packets; TCP
traffic not so much. Again stymying certain classes of activity more than
others.

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rooam-dev
It's just a reality check on how much your current ISP has oversold their
capacity (similar to overbooking of airplane tickets).

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ganoushoreilly
If anything it shows how over subscribed the lines are by the providers. I'm
sure they'll use it as an argument for gov. investment. :/

~~~
willis936
They already burned money given for them to do that. The next logical step is
to simply take the infrastructure for the public.

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topkai22
So thoughts on rural areas- my experience is that they generally have more
workers that will be considered essential than in urbanized areas-
agricultural workers, truck drivers, people in the supply chain, etc. That
might provide some moderating forces on the lower bandwidth options they are
often stuck with.

That being said, schools doing distance learning over low bandwidth dsl or
fixed wireless is going to be interesting...

~~~
dredmorbius
Time for the rural broadband administration to shine:

[https://www.ntca.org/ruraliscool/who-we-
are](https://www.ntca.org/ruraliscool/who-we-are)

See also:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Utilities_Service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Utilities_Service)

~~~
Accujack
If by "shine" you mean "be as ineffective and underfunded as they have been
for decades", then yes.

~~~
dredmorbius
Rural phone and electric service exist largely by government based efforts.

Market solutions don't work for disadvantaged communities, we've learnt that
lesson repeatedly.

Answering your presumption: no, that's not what I mean at all.

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gcatalfamo
It's peculiar how everything that has happened in Italy is slowly also
happening over there.

And weird in a sense that the US actually has/had a chance to use other
country's hindsight and is not doing it.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Italy is 60 millions of people in a country 116,000sq miles.

The US is 328 millions of people in a country 3.8 million square miles.

For different reasons, its playing out similarly?

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op00to
If it was overloaded handoffs or connections, the problem would be cheap and
easy to fix. Unfortunately the problem is overloaded last-mile. Way more
expensive to fix, because it costs money and cuts into profit margins.

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seibelj
Everyone is trapped inside trying to stream HD video and all physical medium
has limits. Especially coax. Why does supply and demand surprise anyone? This
isn’t a conspiracy.

~~~
memco
I used to read about how ISPs were overselling and would be in trouble if
everyone was using their connection to the fullest. It was always talked of as
a hypothetical because it used to be pretty unlikely that every person would
be home and needing to use the internet so much at the same time. Now that so
many people are home and needing to use the internet, it’s not hypothetical
and we get to see how ISPs are actually able to handle the load: and as many
predicted it would not be able to keep up. I think this isn’t news in the
sense that everyone thought it would be fine; I think this is news because
this was a known but not addressed situation. It will be interesting if this
leads to capacity upgrades or if we’ll see more pleas for major content
producers and consumers to constrain their resources to keep the
infrastructure running. I think people would like to see upgrades so that we
can get the previous speeds and quality but we’ll see.

~~~
Laforet
The hypothetical already exists, it's called the evening peak hours. I'm not
familiar with every part of the US however in Europe most ISPs saw no need to
throttle video as the current situation merely makes the usual peak last
longer.

~~~
dehrmann
I could see this being up to 2x of the normal peak because everyone's at home.

~~~
baddox
Why would it be 2x the normal evening peak hours? Yes, normally maybe second
shift workers and the rolling shifts of people going out to eat would reduce
normal peak usage slightly, but I can’t imagine it being 2x.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Because ordinarily, not everyone watches videos in the evening; people go
visit each other, go out to bars, go on dates, etc. Now however, meeting and
outside activities are unavailable.

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A4ET8a8uTh0
Anecdata. Chicago suburb on WOW.D 78 mbps U 10 ( I pay for much lower speeds
). I was able to get Doom Eternal in 30 mins or something. Decent stress
relief.

I am not sure what is happening. It is obvious WOW lifted caps on me and I am
actually benefiting, but I am not sure how that is possible since everyone
near me ia streaming something.

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threwer234234
Seems to be a worldwide thing. I have a 50Mbps symmetric optical fiber line in
Bengaluru, and servers hosted outside India have come to crawl these days,
even while latency/bandwidth within the city are as high as before.

I wonder if the undersea cables have become overwhelmed in the past few days.

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tartoran
Yeah, I wouldn’t be pissed if 4k doesn’t work. If the content is good even
less than HD works for me. Everybody’s on, the network is congested, lets not
be too picky for now. Stay safe everyone

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hokumguru
Anecdotally, here in Nebraska my residential fiber connection remains 1gbps
symmetric. Haven't seen any fluctuations at all over the last few weeks.

Living in less densely populated areas does have its advantages at times.

~~~
kawfey
Likewise, in St Louis on AT&T Gigabit fiber. There have been many outages with
Spectrum cable though.

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sjg007
Anyone use bevcomm? I have fiber to the house at 300Mbps but rarely get it. I
wanted 1Gps but apparently my ONT can’t handle it. I’d get it replaced but
trying to avoid covid_19 at this time.

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bin0
I'd guess this is less of a concern than the services people are accessing
being slow. E.g. even though I've got FTTH, youtube is still sometimes slow to
load the front page.

~~~
tibbydudeza
Fortunately youtube and netflix has a good CDN at our major ISP interchange
node as we are about 12,000 km from New York so all our traffic goes via
undersea cables.

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tibbydudeza
My fiber ISP is doubling my speed for free during the 21 day nationwide
lockdown ... currently on 50/50 Mbps.

~~~
jsjddbbwj
25/25 fibre? That's... Cheap

~~~
tibbydudeza
It will be upgraded to 100/100 in the next few days ... pay about 75 USD but
it is really a luxury for most where I live.

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fonix
i understand wireless is tied to the internet backbone, but i'd imagine with
so many people at home, wireless data congestion must be at an all time low,
with everyone (probably) on their home wireless networks rather than using
cellular data.

~~~
mcny
I think by default some Android-based devices and iPhone in recent years
(since about 2014 I believe but don't quite me on that) can use cellular data
even when we are on WiFi if the WiFi signal is weak like when you've wandered
too far from the access point.

