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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Maybe, but most US households don't even have the "bandwidth" that they say are advertised as getting. Just because Comcast says you are getting 200mbps doesn't mean you are, it's probably just boosting it temporarily and allocating it from other houses in the neighborhood. And the uploads are laughable, try having multiple FaceTime video calls going in the same house, they degrade quite quickly because they barely have a solid 2mbps upload.

Also, behind all these NATs and blocked ports, the whole system is designed to not be used. Update it so everyone has strong connections with consistent bandwidth and low latency with IPv6 and perhaps we would see more possibilities with home internet use.

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Comcast's 150mbps down includes 10mbps up - it's not terrible for one or two people but as a power user I had to upgrade to 450down/20up.

The upload is so pathetic because cable doesn't have symmetric bandwidth, you have to choose if you want more download channels or more upload channels. Most households don't need much upload, thus the ratio.

10mbps up is a minimum requirement for me though IMO.

If it's not fiber to the home, I don't believe the advertised numbers. Most households don't need a garbage coax connection that can't provide a consistent bandwidth, but imagine if households had decent connections. Then you can create hardware and software that let people host their own media and backup their own devices, instead of handing it over to giant corporations with government backdoors.

> Then you can create hardware and software that let people host their own media and backup their own devices, instead of handing it over to giant corporations with government backdoors.

I have 3 gbps of upload bandwidth at my house. (1 Comcast fiber line with 2 gbps symmetric, and one Verizon fiber line with 1 gbps symmetric.) I still host everything on One Drive because what the heck is the point of hosting your own servers as a consumer?

What are you using that kind of bandwidth for?

Netflix? Instant iOS upgrades? Unless you’re transferring something bigger than about a gigabyte, the TCP slow start won’t even ramp the connection up to full speed before the download finishes. In this age of AWS there is little point in having that much upload capacity at home. Really, I was just tickled that Comcast would agree to build what’s basically a Metro-E line to my house so I ran with it.

I have gigabit up and down, and wired gigabit throughout out our house. The only time I come close to saturating it is when I’m “downloading Linux distros” via bit torrent. Netflix maxes out at I believe 10-15Mbps per stream, my son has both his XBox and PS4 on a wired connection in his room, we have a combination of Roku TVs and Apple TVs through out the house.

Even when I’m working from home and uploading large files to S3, it barely hits 100Mbps on a good day and the CLI automatically uses multiple streams to upload.

My VPN connection to our AWS network also rarely hits 100Mbps.

> Then you can create hardware and software that let people host their own media and backup their own devices, instead of handing it over to giant corporations with government backdoors.

Actually low upload bandwidth makes it harder to give 3rd parties data :P

Question, does AT&T fiber do fiber all the way to the home? Because I know one of my family members has their fiber offering, but they have serious bandwidth issues around normally busy hours - suggesting even with fiber they're over provisioned.

FTTH != dedicated fiber. Most residential fiber is a shared service based around passive optical networks which will turn one fiber line into many endpoints for residential customers. Poorly managed PONs can give poor performance.

That said, AT&T has been selling their U-Verse FTTN (fiber to the node) service as "fiber home internet" for many years now. This is still based around DSL technologies but have fiber terminated much closer to the house than at a central office. If they're not on a Gigapower plan with a true optical network terminal inside their house, they probably don't actually have fiber.

They do have installations of Fiber all the way into the box in your home. I don't know if that is uniform although I assume it would be. And of course they are over provisioned.

i had comcast 250mb down package for years. I could easily download 2TB a day for multiple days straight without a problem. In fact, there were times I did.

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