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Comment by readams | Hacker News Reader

It also includes the fact that their network may be oversubscribed.

There's no "may" about it: they are oversubscribed for consumers so as to get the price points down.

If anyone wants to have an unfettered pipe then call up a Tier 1/2/3 ISP and ask for a commercial connection via a single-mode fibre, and be ready to pay quite a bit for it.

This varies wildly by location and company. Approximately half my family is subscribed to Cox, and the other half mostly to Spectrum. The Cox connections never drop below 80% of their advertised speeds and the Spectrum ones rarely rise above 50%. Huge swaths of Spectrum's service area are so resource-starved they don't rise above 10% of their advertised speeds during daylight hours.

IMO, there should be some regulation where they should be forced to mention the current and maximum allocation that they are willing to make as well as the average/median bandwidth that the active users enjoy per hour.

The UK has a rule which requires ISPs to only advertise speeds achievable by 50% of users during peak periods. Customers are also allowed to leave contracts without penalty if ISPs are unable or unwilling to provide advertised speeds to the end user[0].

Such rules are not within the American Overton window for the usual reasons.

[0] https://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/ask-our-expert/broadband-...

Germany has a website that lets you automatically file a complaint if your provider doesn't reach 90% of the advertised speed in measurements over two days

> If anyone wants to have an unfettered pipe then call up a Tier 1/2/3 ISP and ask for a commercial connection via a single-mode fibre, and be ready to pay quite a bit for it.

You might be surprised to find it surprisingly affordable. Cheaper than colocation, even.

> You might be surprised to find it surprisingly affordable.

Assuming you can easily get hooked up at a residential address. Perhaps if you live in an apartment/condo tower, then fibre may have already been run:

* https://www.fibrestream.ca/locations

Some random house, on some random street? Unlikely.

If you get in touch with the right department, you would typically have to sign a multi year contract with the net value due upfront in case of termination to get them to run the fiber to you. Or else cover the cost of the run as an installation fee.

> Or else cover the cost of the run as an installation fee.

The community of Ammon, ID, built their own municipal fibre network because of this:

> It all began about seven years ago when the city government, suffering from horrible upload speeds, wanted a dedicated 100Mbps circuit between City Hall and the Public Works building, less than a mile apart. Qwest (now CenturyLink) didn't want the project, while Cable One offered to do it for a start-up fee of $80,000 plus $1,000 a month, Patterson said.

* https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-...

* https://www.ammonfiber.com

At this year's (virtual) NLNOG there was presentation from a fellow who was fed up with slow Internet options in his rural Michigan county and so setup his own ISP by having fibre optic pulled to his house and then redistributing service to his neighbours:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg

Only if you want a complete rack or more at a colo facility.

If you get half a rack or less, that tends to be (quite a bit) cheaper.

I have both, and I think the break even point is probably paying for around 7 or 8U.

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