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Comment by teh_klev | Hacker News Reader

> interestingly they start slow (around 60 Mbps)

For many of us that's reasonably fast ;). In the UK, FTTC provided over POTS (often BT or some form of unbundle), the top end is 80Mbs/20Mbs.

I don't know what you'd expect with cable provisioned areas supplied by the likes of Virgin (DOCSIS).

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Oh 60 is fast around here too. I mostly meant that I've never seen a download start slow and progressively get faster. If anything it usually bursts at the begihning and then throttles back (comcast did that to me the most)

I've observed download starting slow and getting faster on all connection types: dialup, DSL, fibre, mobile wireless from 2g to 4g. It's just how TCP operates. Interesting that your experience on Comcast is different.

I'm not sure that bursting at the beginning has much to do with the underlying tech but more with marketing.

I wouldn't be surprised if it had something to do with trying to trick speed tests into reading higher speeds before it slows down.

It's usually quite common over e.g. 4g. You first have to wake up the radio and attach to a cell tower, which can take 50ms or so. Once you've done that latency for subsequent packets can be much lower (e.g. 5ms).

Downloads are expected to speed up over time. Google TCP window scaling to learn more.

Virgin provide up to 300 or 500 Mbps depending on area

They have trial areas where they do 1Gbps lines as well, and when I was using one it would reliably hit that.

We’ve got that. We were on 200 and it wouldn’t go above 60. Since they finished the upgrade for docsis 3.1 and we switched to 1gbps it’s been what we wanted 200 to be - reliable and invisible. I hate them with a passion, but hate the UK gov more for its incompetent handling of fibre incentives and coordination nationally.

Wow that's nice. Virgin. I never seen any cable in the houses I lived in London. Maybe it's not common in Zone 1?

They provided underlying connectivity to the premises at my prior built-to-rent apartment building in zone 2. The building had its own routers, Ethernet and WiFi infrastructure, and the management of everything was contracted out to an IT consultancy.

200 Mbps to each apartment was offered so I assume they had fibre and not DOCSIS.

I imagine the issue in zone 1 is having to tear up the roads to get cable installed. In new builds you have to do that anyway, so it's good business to get in on the action.

FTTH seems to be fairly prevalent in new builds in the UK now; my house is 5 years old and FTTH is the only option here. This does rather limit your ISP choices somewhat, but you can get pretty decent speeds. BT upgraded me to 950/140 just last week.

FTTH with asynchronous speeds? Thats bullshit. The only reason for that is that they use cable or dsl somewhere in the path from you into their core network

I take it you mean asymmetric speeds.

It is done for market segmentation purposes, not because there is a technical requirement for it. Asymmetric vs symmetric is used to separate residential from business customers, and charge the later category higher prices.

If they offer symmetric speeds to home users, they worry that business customers will try to switch to residential plans in order to save money.

> If they offer symmetric speeds to home users, they worry that business customers will try to switch to residential plans in order to save money.

If their key differentiator between the two connection types are upload speeds then they should adjust the pricing and/or clarify (or actually add some) the value add for the business line. That is just unfortunate

As another user commented, it's about market segmentation and not equipment limitations. I can get near-symmetric speeds from other FTTH ISPs but it was significantly more expensive than I was willing to pay, and I don't really need it anyway.

138/20 down/up for me on Virgin (Google speed test, Manchester to London, using wifi). Was sold 200/20, and have got that in the past using Ethernet.

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