I'm in Fort Collins and have had city fiber for a couple years now and it's a game changer. We got it during earlyish covid and having 4 of us on video calls was bringing Comcast gig service to it's knees, I imagine because of the limited outbound bandwidth. The city fiber service is gigabit symmetric, no caps, $70/mo, or 10gig for $200/mo. They also are introducing a 2.5gbps, I think that's $100.
I'm working on upgrading my internal network to be able to take advantage of upgrading to 10gig.
And one of the best parts is that when I had a weird networking issue, I was on the phone with a legit networking person in 15 minutes, rather than stuck with someone who couldn't do anything more than read from a script.
The issue ended up being a Comcast routing issue, which I told them from the top, but figured they'd like a heads-up about it. Me and one of my coworkers on the city fiber couldn't reach the office on Comcast, but 2 other coworkers also on city fiber could. I eventually got ahold of a Comcast Business network engineer later that day and they had it resolved the next day.
Why do asymmetric plans exist in the first place anyway? I assume connections between autonomous systems are symmetric full-duplex, so doesn't these mean ISPs have the same amount of uplink bandwidth to divide between customers as downlink?
a) Most non-fiber connection technologies have limited bandwidth to split between upload and download. If you are offering connections over those, offering a symmetric speed means you are offering a lower max speed (years and years ago, in the single-MBit days, there was a regional German ISP that let you switch your ratio - was very popular with developers and designers at the time, who could reset their connection to be high-upload before sending large files)
b) Only a subset of users cares about high upload speeds (To a degree it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: people are so used to it that most don't even know why they'd want good upstream because they never had the opportunity to do something that would benefit)
c) Some that really want them can be made to pay a lot extra (e.g. for "business class" service, especially if combined with things like static IPs for hosting)
d) some high-bandwidth uses are more likely to cause work for the ISP: people hosting servers (complaints about content etc, attracting attacks), file sharing (rightsholder complaints). Similarly, a customer machine turning into a DDoS traffic source has worse impact if it has high bandwidth
Before cables modems everything was symmetric. Cable modems were bandwidth constrained and they decided to offer more download then upload.
One could also argue that the phone companies as network companies and wanted to make connections and cable companies just wanted to provide content. Offering symmetric bandwidth could be seen as competition by cable companies becuase anyone can publish.
Finally the phone companies started to offer asymmetric bandwidth when DSL was introduced. One could subscribe to asymmetric DSL or symmetric DSL.
Late 1990s V.90 modems were asymmetric, higher download speeds caused upload speed to deteriorate, and often up traffic would be shunted into a more limited analog channel to keep it from interfering with the down speed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Standardized_56k_(V.90/V...
I remember something in the earlier 14400/28800/USRobotics era being asymmetrical too, but can't find a reference.
Where I've lived, ADSL also predates cable modem, and the A there is for Asymmetric.
One component of it can be the exchange and transit deals that the ISPs make. "Peering" is generally made under the terms of "sending as much as you receive", so in that way it can be beneficial to limit your outbound, if you are trying to slip into available inbound bandwidth to pair with some business-class outbound-heavy.
But, there are also lots of other business and technology reasons as others go into here.
GPON has a bunch of modes, some of which are symmetric. Notably a 1.2 Gbit/s down/up setup for gigabit service. Many modes are choosen to be asymmetric, yes, but the technology is not intrinsically one or the other. Notably, just like non-multiple-access fiber connections increasing upstream speed doesn't negatively impact downstream speed (as it does for copper-based connections).
2.4/2.4 is also a standardized GPON speed... Just not very common.
But either way it's irrelevant to the point that the technology can very well support symmetric speeds and offering symmetric doesn't "need a lot of "active" equipment and that drives the costs up." as the commenter I originally replied to claimed. Also evidenced by XGPON having the exact same amount of active equipment.
For what is worth, I haven't had much contact with technology in the last couple of years and things might have changed. My comment was based on my last experience where GPON by design was asymmetric and if you wanted symmetric speeds you would need an MC on both ends of the fiber, hence de "active equipment" need. And then from the MC to a router or whatever you had there.
On the other hand, more than 300Mbps upload is quite ok even with heavy video conferencing and what not.
Because technologies like GPON or HFC were designed with asymmetry in place because most users download much, much more than they upload. In the case of HFC the asymmetry can be particularly egregious.
Prior to 2 years ago I had been running cat5e shielded cable around the house (security cameras wanted shielded). cat5e for shorter runs apparently can do 10gig. But once I heard I'd be able to get 10gig, I started doing runs as cat6a. Significantly more expensive, but YOLO.
I got an Aruba 2500 PoE switch for ~$100, it has two 10gig SFP ports.
I have an old Dell R720 coming that I'm going to put a $75 dual 10gig card in. My plan is to hook that up to the fiber ONT, and run Proxmox or Ganeti on it, then run a VM for my firewall. Then hook that to the switch at 10gig.
Currently I don't have any interior devices that will do 10gig, so there's not much day-to-day use I'll see from it currently. When I get there, I'll probably be looking at adding a Mikrotik 10gig switch because they're relatively affordable, though maybe I'll be able to find some old enterprise gear as well. So far I haven't really seen any. The Netgear 10gig switch we have at the office seems to work fine and was ~$800 new, but is EOL, so maybe something like that will be cheap. It's only fallen over once. :-)
So the big question is why I'd go to 10gig... My primary machines are laptops, my work machine stays on my desk, so I could add one of those $300 USB-C to 10gig adapters, but probably won't. My primary personal machine is a macbook I use 100% wireless, so not really going to get any better there until I replace my Ruckus R610 with something that'll do 2.5gbps, but no plans for that anytime soon.
So the Dell could have 10gig fairly easily. Maybe I'll mirror some OpenStreetMap data or mirror media for work to cut down on our AWS costs... That could be done at 1gbps though as well.
Partly, I just want the geek cred of 10gig, partly I want to support the city fiber network through paying more for a bigger plan. Maybe I'll offer my family offsite backup, but that also probably won't need 10gig.
Microtik and Xyzel switches, MM fiber and SFP+ modules, and ConnectX-3 NICs from ebay. I did this last year and it was cheap and has been working great.
> 4 of us on video calls was bringing Comcast gig service to it's knees, I imagine because of the limited outbound bandwidth...upgrading to 10gig
Huh, what? Stop imagining and do the math with numbers, maybe Comcast is shitty in general and other metrics.. but still doing here regularly 2 concurrent video calls with sometimes Netflix on top without any issues... on 50 Mbit still! (also asymmetric btw, I may be undemanding, but so a bit wtf on reading that)
(Or Comcast cable internet? There is often more bandwidth sharing involved than they tell, especially upstream, or what does gig service mean?)
Comcast gig is 1gb/s downstream. I don't know what the upstream rate is and they avoid mentioning it, but based on my experience with them I could see 4 video calls being enough to choke it. It's hard to really appreciate the symmetric data rate until you really start using some decent upstream traffic, then it becomes a day and night kind of difference.
To pile on the examples, I had a Comcast connection in SF that was 1gbit down, 5mbit up during covid (based on regular speed tests and what little I could glean from the plans without being the account holder). With 6 people in the house juggling video calls there was definitely some audio only days when schedules clashed.
I still don't get all the downvotes.. if Comcast is selling "gig service" and you only get thst little upstream that is hilarious even in the most extreme asymmetric scenarios...
If you now have symmetric 1 gig is more than enough for any private use, why would one consider 10 gig for home?
It depends on whether or not they consume more as a result really - think about it, is the number of joules to transmit down a wire different at different speeds? I'd guess probably not
It wasn't that serious... and still need to process 10-100 gigabytes files for work sometimes, and am doing fine with my 50 Mbits... I just cannot imagine one person really.making good constant use of 2.5 Gbit, and in the rare times needed not just invest a little time, so I think it is money wasted in this case. Admitted, my imagination may be too limited and it is a valid tradeoff of time vs money.
But yes, nitpicking, but on the same tech it should be insignificantly more joules also, different techs or hw much more significant though.
In Chicago it was typically 40Mbps but in the last few weeks my scheduled speed tests are running 230Mbps. However, during Covid I had co-workers that lived in communities with a large number of WFH and they were all having trouble with video conf on Comcast so it doesn't surprise me at all.
As others have said, it is the outbound that was really killing it. Sure, we could watch multiple Netflix, but streaming our camera video and audio and it'd get flaky. ISTR I had 250Mbps inbound at the beginning and outbound was ~25Mbps. Upgrading to gigabit got us the fastest outbound they offered at the time, I think it was 40 or 50Mbps. Also, as others have said, Comcast really doesn't like talking about the upstream speed. When I got the upgrade to gigabit, I did their chat support to ask them and even when their support people were directly asked they were reluctant to say. ISTR they kept asking why I wanted to know.
I'm working on upgrading my internal network to be able to take advantage of upgrading to 10gig.
And one of the best parts is that when I had a weird networking issue, I was on the phone with a legit networking person in 15 minutes, rather than stuck with someone who couldn't do anything more than read from a script.
The issue ended up being a Comcast routing issue, which I told them from the top, but figured they'd like a heads-up about it. Me and one of my coworkers on the city fiber couldn't reach the office on Comcast, but 2 other coworkers also on city fiber could. I eventually got ahold of a Comcast Business network engineer later that day and they had it resolved the next day.