Enjoying that 25Mbps internet speed, America? | Hacker News Reader

Enjoying that 25Mbps internet speed, America?

theregister.co.uk

27 pointsLinuxBender23 comments

The article is comparing apples and oranges. The 25 Mbps “FCC” figure is reporting the fastest speeds offered in each census block. This is a really dumb measure for broadband speeds. In particular, every area served by DSL will have close-in customers who can get 25 Mbps, but many who can get only a fraction of that. But that’s the measure the FCC asks for, and has used since long before the current administration.

The 6.3 Mbps figure, by contrast, appears to be an average of 380,000 consumer-initiated Google speed test runs, geo-located to census blocks by IP address. It’s not reporting maximums, and it’s also not clear whether any attempt was made to narrow the results to exclude wireless internet connections from the average.

According to Akamai, as of 2017 25 Mbps average speed would put you as the #2 fastest internet in the world, just after South Korea: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-t.... I don’t think anyone is claiming Georgia has the fastest internet in the world.

The article’s sweeping claims about “America” as a whole don’t seem justified based on a study done in Georgia. Ookla has the US at #7 worldwide for fixed broadband speeds: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed. Akamai has it in the top 10 (see above). The Ookla data probably is skewed upward, assuming people doing speed tests probably have faster than average Internet, but the Akamai data should be very reliable, being based on way more data points than this Google speeds test survey.

I mean considering the US is 2,959,064.44 square miles and UK is 93,628, I’d say we’re doing pretty good for having 30x the area and only 5x the population.

I’m greatly enjoying posting this from my Google Fiber gigabit connection, thanks.

Australia is 2,969,898 square miles and 1/13 the population of the US.

I still don't think our internet should be so slow because 85% of our population lives within 50km of the coast (in 2001, probably more now).

Our "average fixed broadband" speed is 33Mbit. I'm really jealous of your fibre. The fastest residential speed available where I live, in a major city centre, is 100Mbit. I'm considering moving to NZ.

When I lived in NZ, I used to pay $40 a month for 250mbps up and down.

Very tempting.

I've seen posts from people with 1Gbit, but I don't know how much it cost.

How about NY? or even just Manhattan? lets say 1st Ave. Pretty dense, populated area right? Wanna guess your ISP and speeds availability there?

Nobody lives there though. It's far too crowded.

Both Verizon and Spectum and possibly RCN offer Gigabit up/down speeds in the NYC area now and have done so for the last 3 years

what area of NYC exactly? because 1st Ave you have a "choice" of DSL or Spectrum Business _Cable_. Heart of industrialized USA, world finance center, and lets not forget

"Manhattan's population density is 66,940 people per square mile (25,846/km²), highest of any county in the United States."

"New York Votes to Kick Spectrum Cable Out of the State" https://fortune.com/2018/07/29/spectrum-communications-kicke...

"New York City sues Verizon for not completing citywide fiber network" https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/14/nyc-sues-verizon/

(Total land area/population) is only be relevant if telecom infrastructure were rolled out in a uniform grid pattern across the entire country. Most of the population lives in a much smaller area.

Sure, but American urban and suburban areas are less dense than European urban and suburban areas. American sprawling metro areas have much larger installation costs because you have to run more fiber to hit each home.

If you compare American options to other large anglosphere countries with sprawling cities and suburbs (Canada and Australia), we do all right in comparison.

> The official US government definition of broadband is 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up.

Seriously? That's a broadband definition of 20 years ago. When ADSL was introduced. But now is the optic fiber era. My guts feeling definition is at least 100Mbps both way simultaneously.

I'm enjoying consistent 400Mbps at daylight, 300Mbps at night.

Honest question:

What...on...earth...could you possibly do with that? I have 50Mbps and feel like that's kind of absurd.

Netflix recommends 25Mbps for streaming 4K video. [1]

So....streaming a dozen 4K movies simultaneously?

Sub-minute downloads of entire OS images? [2]

[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444

[2] https://www.osboxes.org/ubuntu/#ubuntu-19-04-vbox

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5y4ysq/largest...

And you can load news websites that "need" 2000 assets in less than 2 minutes. I think that is mostly it, so that you can suffer more advertisement in higher resolution.

RDP works better for one. I regularly connect with my phone because my 4G connection is better. Out of 4 people in our house 3 work remotely. One requires HD quality upload throughout the day. DSL took a complaint to the FCC to get hooked up. We are about 40 minutes drive from the Atlanta airport about 15 yards from a rural 2 lane "highway"...the State of Georgia's designation not ours. My mother lives on a reservation in Montana, where nobody thought it was profitable to purchase the co-op...they have 100Mbps vs. our 12-15Mbps in ground.

That makes sense. IDK how RDP performs, but high res, low compression video could theoretically consume a hundred Mbps.

Few people can guess what high-bandwidth experiences might catch on once more people have connections that can enable them

Ah, ads.

Not much.

I can download most games from Steam in a few minutes.

I can download twice a year Ubuntu upgrade very fast.

Aside that, I can satisfy 100Mbps bandwidth.

> Steam

Granted, that would be nice. I avoid anything requiring an reinstall like the plague for this very reason.

It depends on how many people are in your household. Even with really good traffic shaping, 100mb/s can be a problem if there are 3+ people these days. Game downloads/updates, movies, file transfers, combine that with game consoles moving away from storing data locally, cloud services, real time coms such as ssh/rdp. One person can chew up that bw at times and affect others in the household trying to do voice chat or gaming.

In addition to this, not everyone is doing bbr+fq_codel or cake traffic shaping, so they need the burst overhead capacity. Even those using fq_codel seldom have the right options set. And even then, most consumer routers have low end cpu's and barely any L1/L2 cache. HTB adds a lot of context switching on the router. If you hit the buffer on your cable modem or CMTS, then real time applications get a lot of jitter.

The other issue is the mix of operating systems in the household. Not every OS may be doing fair congestion control or even support/enable ECN. Not every consumer modem supports ECN properly.

Traffic shaping, congestion control, etc. is irrelevant to my question though.

My question was not how well a full pipe is handled, but What can you even possibly fill it up with?

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