I’m more curious about upload speeds. In most cable offerings that’s going to be at best 1/10 of the download speed (so 2.5mbit or 5mbit). I have Spectrum, and their standard plan has gone from 100mbit down/10mbit up to 200/10 and now 300/10. Grrr. That can be a problem if you’re doing Zoom video calls, Twitch streaming, uploading YouTube content, etc. 25-50mbit will generally be OK for downloading, but uploading can be painful if you do any of those things.
Upload speeds are almost universally crap.
For my company I looked into better upload speeds (same speed up and down) and it was waaaay more expensive. It does exist but you will pay through the nose for it.
Fiber tends to be symmetrical. I have AT&T fiber and it’s gigabit both up and down. $90-ish / month.
I envy you but sadly fiber is hard to come by for residential use.
I remember a decade or so ago when fiber was going to be everywhere! Verizon Fios was going to be in your neighborhood soon! Or Google…they were going to flip the market on its head and give everyone fiber. AFAIK almost all such efforts have completely stopped (and I am not sure why…Google has “fuck you” amounts of money…who could make them stop?).
For some lucky few it’s great. For most, they probably will not live long enough to see it.
But yeah…if you’ve got it then great!
I’m holding out for gigabit satellite. Real soon now!
Nanotrenching (and microtrenching). They tried installing fiber in ridiculously shallow cuts in road pavement, like only 2" deep, and sealing it with mastic. Then when they realized how insanely stupid that is, tried going down 6". Again, insanely difficult to prevent damage at such shallow depths, and it still didn’t reduce costs all that much. Look up Google Fiber in Louisville, KY and San Antonio, TX. It really seems like they tried to “Elon Musk” the problems away.
I have a gigabit Comcast service, but AT&T is advertising a gigabit fiber connection in my area. Price is about the same, but I wonder if connectivity will be better. Comcast has a few hours of outage practically every month here. Anecdotal reports from neighbors indicates AT&T fiber might be better.
Thought I’d drop in and give an update.
After months of complaining it was pretty clear nothing was going to be done.
Then ATT went and shot themselves in ….somewhere painful. No one is fessing up but somehow ATT “accidentally“ cancelled the contract with both buildings - 188 units in total. This resulted in the residents’ bills going from 90/month to as much as 400/month for some of us!
Lawyers ensued, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
And we ended up with Comcast of all ppl doing the right thing for possibly the first time in recorded history! They came in, installed a fiber node and wired the whole building in three days at no charge to us.
Now I’m rocking 450Mb down/30MB up with a better cable package for a net monthly increase of 18 bucks. Heck even my Sonos speakers work better now.
Most online games have positively tiny bandwidth requirements, like, they’ll play fine on 56k. It’s the latency (AKA lag, or ping) that’s crucial (though of course those are often correlated).
Frankly I don’t know how to measure latency but it must be low because my online gaming has been smooth and responsive. Far more than before.
Have you tried an online test like https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat
HD streaming needs about 5Mbps, while 4K streaming is more like 25Mbps. If it’s just one or two streams going on and you’re ok with HD quality, then 25Mbps should be fine. Other stuff like browsing or working should be no problem at 25Mbps. But if you do stuff like download Linux operating systems or game programs for local installs, then it will be much slower to download the gigs of data needed.
One problem that can happen with a low bandwidth setup is that it may slow down when lots of people are using it at the same time. Think of a house with a driveway that leads to a road. The driveway is always clear and you can drive down it at normal speed. But the road is shared and speed will vary depending on how many people are on the road at the same time. You may have a dedicated 25Mbps between you and the router (your driveway), but the connection between the router and internet (the road) is shared. If lots of people in the building were using lots of bandwidth at the same time, it can cause congestion on the network between the router and internet. When Comcast put in a system where you get 450Mbs download, it’s like they put in a 10-lane superhighway. There’s so much bandwidth that there should never be congestion.
That’s bizarre that AT&T dropped support like that. They lost all those customers and created a lot of bad feelings. It seems like they could have improved things and kept the contract. Oh well. Sounds like it worked out for the best in the end with a new provider.
My grand daughter recently moved from Washington to a small town in Montana. Her job is online sales and customer service with an international company based in Ireland. In Washington she had cable based internet and had up to 500mps internet. All she can get in the small Montana town is from the local telephone company at 5mps. She resorted to using her cell phone as an internet hot spot but it only took her a week to use up a month’s worth of bandwidth. I told her to look into Starlink and she did, she gets about 200mps which works fine. She went to Dublin a few weeks ago to a meeting at the company headquarters and told her bosses what she had to do with her internet. They said they will pay for her internet which saves her about $150 a month.