
Faster internet is coming, but only for a few - JumpCrisscross
https://www.axios.com/faster-internet-5g-rural-gaps-a4658995-3629-4f23-a391-d94941481dda.html
======
mabbo
I don't think I need Gb internet.

I recently upgraded from 30Mb to 75Mb. I don't really notice a big difference.
Very little I did before needed a full 30 Mb connection. Is Netflix higher
quality now? I can't tell.

I doubt I'd upgrade again anytime soon. I've reached a point where my internet
speed's bits per second has exceeded my ability to consume data.

~~~
Aaargh20318
It's a chicken/egg problem. No one is going to develop mass-market services
that require users to have a gbit internet hookup if there are hardly any
potential customers. Which leads people to think they don't need gbit internet
because there is nothing that requires that kind of speed.

Just like there was no need for most people to have >10Mbit internet without
the likes of Netflix or Youtube existing, and no way for those sites to
survive if everyone is using a 56k modem.

~~~
tialaramex
Yeah No. Exponential curves always mean you've zoomed in too far on the chart.
There will be a plateau, and the exponential bit of the curve tells you
essentially nothing about where that plateau will be. In the case of home
Internet the plateau is likely somewhere in the 100Mbps ballpark. It's
probably more than 10Mbps and it's probably less than 1Gbps.

\- The most important change was NOT the bandwidth increase from 56kbps to low
megabit speeds. The most important thing is Always On which for most people
arrived at the same time. Omnipresent Network Access changes how and why
people use the network. I lived in a house that had 24/7 56kbps Internet
access in the mid-1990s and it was basically the _same_ as now [except video
was much poorer quality] because it was _Always On_. People who had to wait
maybe a minute for Dial-up had a completely different experience because
dialing up is a thing you do, like watching TV, whereas being connected 24/7
is an inherent thing like being able to understand Spanish. It felt weird
_not_ having the Network if I was away. That feeling finally went away when I
got a smartphone years later.

\- All the applications already existed. Youtube is a refined version of
technologies that already existed back in the 1990s. It's video on web pages.
Yes it's much higher quality video, and it's better integrated and so on, but
those are refinements, the basic idea wasn't created when enough people had
"high speed" Internet access, the idea is decades old. If your hypothetical
killer app for gigabit home Internet was going to appear it already would have
done so, at least twenty years ago.

~~~
lonelappde
Maybe I want to watch every NFL game live, simultaneously, in 4K.

------
thebigspacefuck
I’m still on 15 Mbps at my home, for $30/month. I haven’t found the need to
upgrade even though according to the FCC, I don’t even have “broadband”
(defined as 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up). I don’t often hear people complain
that their internet is too slow, only that it’s too expensive. I hope that
more bandwidth translates to cheaper internet, but it seems like the past 10
years my ISP has had the business model of raise the price and the speed at
the same time and remove slower tiers of service, basically forcing people to
pay for speeds that they never use.

~~~
beatgammit
Interesting. I didn't realize that I don't have "broadband". I haven't had any
problems streaming video or anything because our internet is super consistent
at 20 down, 10 up. I'm on a fiber network with 100-BaseT for the last mile, so
unfortunately I'm unlikely to get a big speed upgrade, and the top tier is
just 10 mbit faster.

I've considered switching to another ISP, but the service is so reliable and I
only occasionally want faster download speeds. I also like that I don't have
to deal with cyclic deals like cable and DSL providers do, I just pay a flat
$40/month.

------
alexkiritz
Verizon sold most of its landline business to Frontier over the past decade.
While the few remaining Verizon FiOS customers got upgraded to gigabit, the
Frontier FiOS customers were left with the old technology. Our Frontier
contract just expired and we’re upgrading from 150 mbps to 500 mbps for about
$5 more tomorrow. But I’m not optimistic about the speed. I tried paying
$150/mo for the Frontier 500 mbps package two years ago and downloads never
came close to that speed, the only thing that did were speed tests. Hopefully
they’ve optimized more.

The saddest part is that the sales rep insisted that we’d need a modem, I’m
sure because the majority of their service areas have been left on DSL.

~~~
kgwxd
Don't most servers throttle how much bandwidth outbound traffic gets? I never
expect to get full speed downloading a random file. Even a super popular
torrent might not have enough peers to reach full potential before it's done
downloading.

~~~
alexkiritz
I remember never getting more than a fraction of the speed. Like maybe 200
mbps max on a 500 mbps connection when downloading a file. I assumed with the
number of people with gigabit connections two years ago I’d have at least run
into a few servers that didn’t throttle that low.

~~~
lonelappde
Those servers have more than one user, perhaps.

------
hugh4life
I live very far from any major town(10 miles from post office, 15 miles from a
high school, 20 miles from a major retail outlet). Our current internet is $35
for a 5Mb connection and the best I can currently get is $70 for a 10Mb
connection. But sometime next year I will have fiber available to me. IIRC,
it'll be something like $60 for a 250Mb connection and $110 for a 1Gb.

It'll be interesting to see how fiber transforms rural areas compared to areas
that don't get it.

~~~
duxup
There is a weird dynamic in the US where many rural areas have garbage level
internet access ... and some pockets have insanely high levels of service.

Somehow some random telcos have found a way (presumably government subsidies
(I don't think that is bad)) to provide some amazing service, while others
wallow in absolute trashy telco service.

I know folks with consistently low latency 1Gb service that is just amazing,
and folks where the local telco literally left lines lying across their lawn
providing terrible service claiming they'd get back to it and never did.

I worked with one rural telco provider who had datacenter grade switches
running 1G sfps (they could have run 10G sfps on all of the ports if they
chose to do so) ... one port per household. I talked to the guy running the
show there for a while and he said they just had this massive budget so "why
not?". He noted almost none of the houses used their service to its fullest
extent with the exception of some local teens ;)

~~~
alexkiritz
With the amount of money Americans have spent on internet everyone could have
100 gigabit by now.

The real question is how telcos have managed to spend all of their income. I
know mine Frontier spends it all on interest payments for the service areas
they’ve bought.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
> The real question is how telcos have managed to spend all of their income.

It is returned to investors.

------
pimterry
Interesting, but purely US focused. Anybody have good data on progress in the
rest of the world?

~~~
philjohn
UK Has good coverage except in rural areas, and in some rural areas they've
done their own FTTP (B4RN for example).

There's a big "full fibre" push from various different providers (Hyperoptic
(FTTB), GigaClear, CityFibre, BT OpenReach).

Most densely populated areas have the choice of FTTC (the infrastructure is
ALL BT OpenReach, however you have a choice of providers who piggy back on
this), and in bigger cities/towns Virgin Cable up to 380Mbps down 37Mbps up.

Pricing is very competitive, because even with areas that are all BT FTTC lots
of providers use their infrastructure and OfCom regulates how much OpenReach
are allowed to charge.

I have a truly unlimited cable package for £50 a month, 384 down 37 up.

~~~
qwsxyh
Hahahahahaha.

Openreach is utter shit outside of very very lucky areas. I live in London
(zone 6) and we get 30/8 (after fighting with BT support for two months to fix
it from 22/1). If you're not covered by VM and win the postcode lottery as to
not have it drop constantly, you're lucky to get "tolerable" speeds.

~~~
njs12345
Just count yourself lucky that you don't have an Exchange Only (EO) line, that
doesn't have a cabinet and runs directly to the exchange.. I'm in Whitechapel
(Zone 1) and get 8/1

~~~
tialaramex
There is an ongoing programme to upgrade EO lines to have their mini-cabinet
so they can get vDSL. You are an inadvertent casualty of "unbundling". To
promote competition the Exchange is allowed to have equipment from other
providers in it (most exchanges have only one or two other FTTC providers,
many have none) and that _could_ be ADSL and so the interference from VDSL
_could_ break that, violating the unbundling rules, so, they just don't offer
VDSL.

It would be technically easy to give you VDSL, it would just break a rule that
was put in place to ensure competition for ADSL service, which you now don't
care about because even that close to the Exchange it's only giving you 8/1

------
ehsankia
> Signals from space have to travel a long way, so the connection is slower
> than earth-bound internet options. But in unserved places, it's better than
> nothing.

Is this true for LEO projects such as Starlink and OneWeb? I thought the
latency characteristics were much more reasonable there. Or is this speaking
about bandwidth? The wording is a bit vague.

~~~
mabbo
I think the author is remembering 15 years ago when the first satellite
internet companies existed. I remember trying to play Warcraft 3 at a friend's
house in the country and having 2-3 second pings.

Those companies were using Geosynchronous satellites so that dishes could
point at a single spot in the sky. Unfortunately, geosynchronous orbit is at a
height of 35,786 km. That means almost 120ms just to reach the satellite, plus
another 120ms to get the signal back down to earth, then your request hitting
the real internet and another 240ms to get back to you over the same two
satellite hops.

SpaceX's Starlink will be <1000 km up in low earth orbit, so somewhere under
5ms away at speed of light. For any transmission across an ocean, Starlink
will be much faster (so you just know high speed trading companies will be big
customers). How much bandwidth it offers remains to be seen.

------
smudgymcscmudge
This article is written like a powerpoint slide. I'm left wondering what they
are trying to convey.

------
Tetris1
Interesting to see discussion where people say <100 Mbps is enough. No. In
Lithuania, general household internet speed is 300 Mbps. I'am with 1 Gbps and
I can't imagine how other countries have average 10 Mbps per user. Wow.

It's like a car engine: it's better to have 3.0L than 1.2L, because when you
need the power, you will get it.

~~~
lokedhs
I think it's simply a case of not missing what you don't know.

I got my first 10 Mb/s connection around 2000. At the time I found it to be as
fast as I could possibly want. I mean, it's the same speed as the local
network at the computer club just a few years prior.

Now I have gigabit (2 Gb/s actually, but I can't be bothered to configure
network bonding), and I couldn't imagine going back to anything slower.

------
parentheses
This seems purely driven by profit. Retrofitting cell towers has a ROI that is
inverse to density of customers willing to pay (broadcast distance is
limited). Whereas if fiber has already been run and good Ethernet cables
already laid, increasing total bandwidth for wired connections has a cost
~proportional to paying customers.

------
austincheney
Bah, should have had mobile in the title. I have gigabit fiber at the house
and its fast enough that I have no idea what to do with that much bandwidth.

~~~
tialaramex
There isn't anything to do with that much bandwidth.

It's another space where there's a consumer product and consumers have been
taught that the bigger number is better, so you advertise a 1000Mbps service
and consumers think it's worth more than your competitor's 500Mbps when in
reality although those numbers are "true" they're irrelevant.

Eventually consumers get jaded and learn to ignore the number, the way you'll
see nobody cares when you tell them your "hi res" audio is 96kHz at 24 bits -
CD audio with 44.1kHz at 16 bits was more than enough, more isn't better for
ordinary users so they eventually learned to ignore it‡.

I had Gbps Internet access in 1998, and in 2015 I was buying new service for
my new home. Should I buy the cheap 40Mbps package? A bit extra for 80Mbps? Or
spend a lot more for 1Gbps? And I knew, which most consumers don't, that it
didn't matter, 40Mbps is fine, once in a while 80Mbps would be slightly better
(maybe a new video game downloads in 10 minutes rather than 20 minutes) and
1Gbps would just make some numbers bigger that I'd show off once in a while
but make no actual concrete difference. So I bought the 40Mbps service, no
regrets.

The main practical things 1Gbps will do for you is avoid buffer bloat since
there's less need for a buffer, but you could also do that by just buying
hardware that doesn't have buffer bloat.

‡ If you are a recording studio you might actually want 24-bit, and maybe at a
pinch even 96kHz, but ordinary consumers needn't care. Likewise somewhere like
a school definitely wants 1Gbps networking, but my mother needn't care.

------
fmajid
This article is stupid. Urban and suburban dwellers are not “the few”, they
are the overwhelming majority of the population.

------
p0nce
I'm happy on 4G internet.

