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Comment by dbcurtis | Hacker News Reader

Dude, I live in the heart of Silicon Valley and have dealt with AT&T and two different offices and my home. And I can tell you that AT&T are both utterly clueless and shameless liars when it comes to FTTH and FTTN installations. You can not imagine the depth of my anger with those clowns.

I have no idea who you work for. But my personal experience with trying to get fiber from AT&T in what is supposed to be one of the most tech-forward regions of the world is laughable. The government may not be better, but at least I know where to aim my pitchforks and torches.

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I'm sitting here on a Comcast connection that is expensive and AT&T has FTTH in my neighborhood. I just can't seem to pull the trigger on the order because of the horror stories I've heard, and from personal experience. When I had ADSL from AT&T, they absolutely could not give me a connect that didn't drop randomly 2-10 times a day. I had 10+ visits from them over several years and at one point they told me "don't call us anymore" because I was too expensive for them. This, after being told by someone that put a device on my line and found the problem was in the drop cable (from the pole to the house). The new drop cable was ordered and a guy shows up 2 hours later and tells me it's not the drop cable (he didn't measure anything). When pressed, he told me it was too expensive to replace the drop cable. A subsequent tech told me to have a "tree trimming accident" where the drop cable was severed. I was worried I would be charged many thousands of $'s so I didn't do it and just switched to Comcast. (I have had my own issues with Comcast, and I hate them with a passion.)

The situation with home internet is just so shitty.

FWIW, I have had the exact opposite situation in multiple locations across the country -- every DSL (and, once, FTTH) connection I've had has been rock solid -- every Comcast internet connection has been flaky -- in one place, the connection went down every afternoon. Multiple Comcast technicians couldn't figure out the problem.

I so agree with your last statement.

If you're in an area they serve, getting Sonic is much better, BTW. They can operate over AT&T FTTH and DSL. It's a tad more expensive, but the customer service is unbeatable.

Sonic uses AT&T in my area, so I will definitely check them out. Thanks. It's a little annoying I have to get a landline, which basically adds $15-20 to the price. <sigh> I have an asterisk/freepbx system that I will continue to use. I wonder if their TOS require you to hook up a phone. Not looking forward to reading that...

Without debating the technical/cancer type of issues... Isn't 5G supposed to finally make wires obsolete? You'll put a device in your house (from say, Verizon) which speaks 5G on one side, and maybe has an ethernet jack and/or speaks Wi-Fi on the other side.

I’ve yet to experience any wireless connection with fidelity, latency, and bandwidth as good as fiber.

"fidelity" is a new one to me, what does that mean in the world of digital communications?

In this case it'd likely be talking about corrupted, truncated, or otherwise mangled packets. So having to retransmit things. You'd still technically have the same bandwidth and latency on the connection itself even if it's causing all kinds of overhead on upper levels of the stack.

Could also be related to audio transmission, like bluetooth versus wired.

Also, fiber can be analog, too.

I just use the word as shorthand for “it just works in all aspects”.

LOL, and I'm sure Verizon would only charge you $150/mo for a whole gigabyte per month! Er I'm sorry, it's unlimited!*

* Slows down to 2G after 1 gigabyte.

After 6 years of mobile internet with only 1GB per month my ISP basically trained me to not use it for anything unless absolutely necessary. The irony of course is that prices have dropped but I'm not going with a bigger plan. I switched to a "budget plan" and stayed on 1GB per month for which I pay only 5€ per month.

I absolutely despise mobile ISPs.

I was imagining a wireless but not mobile type of device

In addressing this at a political/regulatory level it became clear to me that while it is convenient to beat up on Comcast (however deserving they may be of such treatment), the real problem on the east coast corridor are the trade unions. They have raised the cost of doing business by at least an order of magnitude. It is a heartbreak for me personally - my grandfather was highly involved in the labor movement back in his day and today he would roll over in his grave at the rampant corruption.

Citation needed. Comcast for one is _vehemently_ anti-union. I see only right-wing media claiming unions drive up internet costs.

I'm in Palo Alto - sounds like maybe you are too?

The best networking option available is Comcast Gigabit Pro (2gbps both up and down).

I wrote up details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comc...

These two articles are also helpful:

- https://binaryimpulse.com/2019/11/comcast-gigabit-pro-instal...

- https://medium.com/@Gtwy/comcasts-2000mbit-fiber-to-the-home...

If you're not looking to spend that much, Comcast gigabit (non-pro) is cheap and gets you 1gbps down, but only 35mbps up. They're annoying to interact with, but once it's set up it's reliable.

Pro-tip: Ignore the Comcast website prices/packages. The only way to work with them is to call and get a friendly sales rep, then ask them to look through their options to find the best gigabit only plan (they have a lot more promotions available than they list online). This might take a few tries if you get someone on the phone that isn't very good. Comcast Twitter support is also pretty helpful.

You should be able to get something around ~$80, but it might require a multi-year contract to lock in the price. I also had to add $50/month to remove the 1TB cap because of this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast/comments/dqwsnj/comcast_dat...

Wow, this is awful. I live in Portland, and have symmetric gigabit fiber from CenturyLink for $65/mo. Honestly baffling to me that people tolerate the politics of Silicon Valley.

I come from Western New York, where (at the time) 20mbps was the best available option and it was over $100. I hear things are a little better now (though 100mbps may still be the best available), but the options here are way better.

I think 2gbps is rare to find anywhere?

Sure it's a great speed, but $300/mo plus a $2k install just to get a decent upload? Seems like market segmentation where they're basically just ripping anyone off who wants to run a little server or backup their files to the cloud.

Yeah, it'd be nicer to have symmetric gigabit for less, but the gigabit pro is actual fiber to the home (it doesn't run over coax lines).

Comcast includes a Juniper ACX2100 switch for layer 2 and bringing the fiber into the house. I thought that was pretty cool. (Well 'includes', you have to pay to rent it from them.)

I'm in East Bay and also on Comcast gigabit non-pro only (no TV). Signed up at $90 with no contract and so far it's been as stable as I had in Seattle with CenturyLink (fiber to building). I did buy my own DOCSIS modem so that could be part of the equation.

I saw your future plan in your reddit post and I just wanted to let you know that the UDM Pro is a dumpster fire from a software perspective.

Wait until they've got it stable, likely around 1.8 or 1.9.

Thanks - yeah I ended up holding off because I saw the UDM Pro was unstable (also no NextDNS support yet).

I'm currently still on the USG and regular comcast gigabit.

That is not gigabit. That is 35MB. Big difference. Internet MUST be symmetrical. There are too many essential peer-to-peer technologies for it to be anything but symmetrical.

Gigabit Pro is symmetrical, normal Gigabit is not. Gigabit Pro is FTTH (whereas all of Comcast's other plans go over copper/DOCSIS3), and is symmetrical 2Gbps. For $300 per month with a mandatory $2k install, I might add.

You have to call them to get a quote, but here's a good blog post with the important info: https://binaryimpulse.com/2019/11/comcast-gigabit-pro-instal...

It's not 35mbps, it's 1gbps down and 35mbps up, internet "must be symmetrical" isn't true. 1gbps down and 35mbps up is a lot better than 35/35.

For clarity, the gigabit pro (2gbps) is both up and down.

to me, a symmetric connection is more of a "nice to have" than a "need". I have something like 400/25 right now. if I had 400/400 or even 1000/1000, I might consider reconfiguring my plex server to stream outside my LAN, but aside from that I can't think of any obvious application. can you list some of these "essential peer-to-peer technologies" that a normal person would be likely to use?

Even just backing up your shit to the cloud is way nicer with good upload.

Its also a bit of a chicken egg situation. If the majority of internet users had good upload maybe some "killer" p2p apps would be developed.

I totally agree. The prevailing perception that Silicon Valley (the original MAE-West) and Virginia's MAE-East are the touchstones of high bandwidth Internet is not true either - while they are the peering points for (inter)national networks, the local access Internet offerings in those regions are indeed laughable. Meanwhile the small rural towns in fly-over country tend to enjoy networks that are gigabit to the home or better for under $100 MRC. I know of businesses in Philadelphia that had to relocate to Winona, Minnesota simply to lower their Internet costs from thousands of dollars per month (with Comcast) to under $200 MRC for a direct gigabit optical Internet connection.

Gigabit Internet in small rural towns is very unusual.

I disagree. It would be an exaggeration to say it is ubiquitous, but it is more common than you think: https://www.rd.usda.gov/programs-services/all-programs/telec.... Certainly not VERY unusual.

> AT&T are both utterly clueless and shameless liars

Seconded. We had AT&T Fiber a few years ago, and were having techs out just about every week to fix it and were given a nonsense reason like "this cable was loose" each time. Once we got fed up and canceled service, the tech told us that corporate fucked up the install for the whole neighborhood so they'd basically send techs out, tell them to lie, and have them add whatever bandaid was needed to fix it for just a little longer.

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