Ah yes “Obamaphones”

Wait. What?! Obama gave out phones? I was living abroad for the first few years of the Obama administration when smart phones happened. Can you fill me in on this one?

The libraries that many of the people who say this are trying to shutter, of course.

The libraries that will allow me a maximum of an hour, maybe two if I’m lucky?

I really wish symmetric broadband was standard. Having 500 down (as a homelabber especially) means nothing if you have only 25 up 😭

The asymmetrical aspect of cable will be here to stay. Fiber can do it because it was build on a different foundation.

Copper cable transmits data using electric signals in various frequencies. There are a batch of frequencies reserved for phone and TV. ALL of the tv programming is constantly streamed to your lines whether you have TV or not and whether you pay for it or not. It’s encrypted and is only decrypted by your cable boxes when your provider says they can decrypt it. The phone frequencies are reserved so you can make phone calls and still max out your download.

So what about the rest of the bandwidth? Well, way back in the early days of cable it was pretty much everyone for themselves. Every company did things its own way. That’s where DOCSIS came in. It’s a platform that allows modem manufacturers to make modems that will work on any cable network that supports Docsis. And the key part is that DOCSIS is always backwards compatible. The network upgrade to 3.1 did not break the old d2 devices.

When it was developed the download was extremely more necessary than the upload. You’d be sending small single line commands on upload and receiving entire files in download. So more frequencies went to download than upload. In a lab setting 1.0 could reach 40mbps down and 10 up. That’s not what was sold because real life isn’t a lab and there’s loss over large distances. Realistically most people got 10 mb down and upload wasn’t even listed.

Whats changed? Well today those same download and upload frequencies are still used. We’ve added more around them to deliver higher speeds. But we’ve also kept the same principles that people need more download than upload. Docsis 3.1 was released in 2013. We really didn’t start stressing over upload until Covid and work from home had us on zoom calls all day.

Docsis 4.0 is technically released but requires quite a bit of overhaul to work with existing networks. We pretty much need to do away with cable tv. That’s why many ISP’s are pushing IPTv. It removes the need for all that bandwidth devoted to just TV. If everyone in a region drops traditional cable for IPTv they can easily switch to d4. D4 does increase upload but does not make it symmetrical.

Your cable company does not decide their highest tier realistically. It’s the most that medium will offer. It’s gonna be a while too for d4 to be available everywhere. Everyone would need to drop traditional cable (which is honestly a nice move regardless) and people don’t upgrade plans very often. When I worked in tech support I would frequently deal with customers complaining about slow speeds while on plans from 2002.

You get a terabyte cap? Jfc, where I live it’s like a few gigs, and that can cost into the hundreds for maybe 25.

My isp used to offer 10mbps up for like a decade, they have recently downgraded it to 5mbps for new subscribers. I’ve uploaded a few things with it and it’s extremely slow. If it wasn’t that I’m only paying $40 for 1gbps down, I’d have switched.

All right I have 1000 seconds of internet, what a deal

Things with caps aren’t terrestrial broadband. You can have caps on cell based networks and still be considered broadband. One of the biggest issues is it companies like Comcast and AT&t will offer broadband service in an area but not necessarily offer only broadband service or not let you buy broadband service about also having their TV. And then they claim they’re serving the area because they have broadband speeds or you can pay a bunch of money to have your service uncapped but that’s not really the point of having a broadband connection available in the area.

I literally can’t do half of what I want to do online efficiently or in a timely manner because I can barely crack 10 up. I do video work on the side. Takes hours if not days for me to upload something. Even pictures nowadays. Great I’ve got a DSLR for a phone and I can shoot raw. Takes 5 mins to upload a pic.

Worse, they do that crap for my business account. Great for the vpn to the office.

We are between towns in western WA state stuck with 10Mb DSL service. There are a lot of us folks. After moving in (the PO said the internet was great, lol), we discovered that doing anything excessive like downloading AND streaming would not work. One thing at a time. We were able to bond two pair and get 20Mb which is workable, but that’s where we sit. Gigabit service is all around us, but we’d have to trench a mile up the road and pay for that to even think about getting a provider to lay a line. Century Link outright laughed at me.

I was able to get T-Mo’s home internet as a backup since we WFH, but it isn’t stellar either.

Well, we didn’t. It wasn’t a utility. Utilities are more regulated by the govt. Thats a big part of why it failed and why electricity succeeded with the same effort in the fucking 1800s.

Most broadband access in the US is via coax. And the coax companies refuse to let cable TV, and the packages they can bundle, die. So the portion of the coax that would allow for symmetrical service instead brings all the channels you didn’t buy because everyone streams now.

I have Spectrum here in the southeast of the United States. My plan is 300 down 12 up. That pathetic upload speed needs to change for the better.

Here in Sweden most people have optic fiber with AT LEAST 100/100 speeds. You gotta try if you want lower than that / if you want asymmetrical speeds.

God I wish we had that here. We are pretty much stuck with Comcast as the only option in many places since they were granted a monopoly for so long and the phone company never really expanded much. DSL is too slow in most places. Like I think I can only get 100/1 where I am now, but the last place I was at which was not exactly rural at all, was max 12m/768k. In my current place I do have one other option which is another cable provider. They offer the exact same as Comcast for slightly less money, but the primary reason I use them is because they don’t have a monthly data cap. With my wife and I working from home plus our personal streaming, we would exceed the cap and have to pay a significant amount to increase it.

Is that the Verion 5G modem?

Cable Internet / DOCSIS splits bandwidth in a way that greatly prioritizes download over upload.

In addition to cable being the primary means of providing service in the US which does allow for this, there are two reasons for doing it. First, down is all that is advertised. Up is only mentioned in small print usually. And second, the major ISPs and the content companies have merged so it’s an anti-“piracy” measure. It significantly impacts torrent seeding and hosting sites using residential Internet service.

And really, 20 mbps at the bottom tier for broadband isn’t all that unreasonable. We’re talking about the floor level here.

Sitting here with my cool 11 up from spectrum 😎

GIGA-SPEEDS!! … Such bullshit

If I understand correctly it’s not intrinsic to the DOCSIS standards, it’s just how more or less every cable company chooses to allocate channels. Think like a cable company has 100 channels they may be able to use on a given line, and they choose to put 90 of them on download and 10 on upload (numbers are made up to convey idea). Now they have only a small amount of available upload bandwidth and lots of download, but they could have set it up to be 50/50 to have it be equal.

If congress passes a bill to improve internet infrastructure, it will be a 10s of billions hand out to ISPs that in turn will do little to nothing to actually improve their infrastructure. Just like when they did it in the 90s to get fiber to most Americans.

Cries in German. (I personally have Speedy Internet but many people I know have internet that really sucks slowly.)

Cries in Brexit

My first thought is you need to buy new network equipment to utilize 10 gbit and new ethernet cables.

That’s crazy. Here in São Paulo (Brazil), wired internet plans start at 100 Mbps and you’ll often end up with 300+ Mbps, because there’s almost no difference in price.

What about full duplex links?

Australia here. 250 down, 20 up

To avoid the Mb/MB confusion I’ve gotten in the habit of writing Mbit and MByte, so there’s really no ambiguity (like, even if I used them right, it’s reasonable that people might not be sure if I’m using them right or not)

At least when talking about network-related things, particularly transfer rates. With storage and things it’s way more rare that anyone might be talking about bits.

We should change to mibibits! We need easily factored numbers of 10, not this old powers of 2 stuff! (/s if it wasn’t obvious)

I say we split the different and go for nibbles per fortnight.

The reason we don’t is because the network does not care how the files you transfer are formatted.

It measure the amount of bits it can transfer.

Whether the file in question is for example a text document (8bit) or a HEIF (10bit)

Mbps, megabits per second, is the standard. No idea why this author opted to use the highly unusual millibit.

👆 Humorless git.

No, that’s like dividing by 1,000.

Anyway, computer scientists split the bit back in 1969, which is how we’re able to make smaller and smaller computers: the bits are all smaller, so we can pack more into a single potato chip.

Good catch but not quite. bps is a rate so it is allowed to be an abstract expression.

How many chickens per hour cross the road?

And more importantly, why.

Information entropy is measured in bits, and the bits are almost always fractional.

If you had really slow Internet, like smoke signals or semaphores across a nation, you could characterize it as millibit:

1 bit over 1000 seconds = 1 millibit/s.

But yeah, it’s basically meaningless in today’s age for Internet speeds.

They were making a joke about units and the use of a lowercase m instead of an uppercase M for Megabits per second…