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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Also need fat upload pipes (i.e. fiber) to individuals’ homes so they can operate their own backup and peer to peer services.

When 90%+ of people have no upload capacity at their house, and are behind tons of CGNAT, then onedrive/iCloud/google drive become the only solution for storing your things you can access later. Same with chat protocols.

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They just rolled out att fiber into my neighborhood. I was surprised as I live in a older neighborhood. Have overhead power lines talked with att installer and he said that was the reason we go it. Went from 1 gig down 30 mbps upload cable for 100 a month to 70 for gig full up and down and they gave me 400 bucks for signing up. It is pretty awesome having a direct fiber line to the house. My brother lives in Santa Rosa California and is on the list to get 10 gig fiber from Sonic for 65 a month. Hopefully things are starting to change. Once he has it I was thinking of just doing rysnc between us for backup.

What equipment does the fiber line plug into? Can you run your own device? Is it PON or AON fiber?

AT&T's residential offering requires you use their terminal[0] which is apparently a G-010G-A[1], so PON. They also require you use their own gateway+wifi combo unit[2], although you can do full IP passthrough so that the gateway doesn't even do ipv4 NAT. I have an installation tomorrow and will reply in case the box is a different model.

0: https://www.att.com/support/article/u-verse-high-speed-inter...

1: https://www.ebay.com/itm/164939095713

2: https://forums.att.com/conversations/att-internet-equipment/...

ATT Fiber is mostly GPON with some areas that are XGS-PON. They just started rolling out 2gbit and 5gbit service in one city.

There are a couple of bypass methods on the GPON network that let you use your equipment with the ONT and bypass the RG. I don't think I would bother, though, and I'd just use the 'IP Passthrough' DMZ to assign the public IP to your router. The only problem was the size of the internal connection table on the RG was historically very small and didn't clear quickly which really only causes problems if you torrent. The newer RGs don't have this problem.

On the XGS-PON network the ONT is integrated into the RG so it's not possible right now, but again the DMZ 'IP Passthrough' mode actually works well.

They support IPv6 and they give out a /56 if that matters to you.

I don't understand. If my upload bandwidth is sufficient for me to keep my stuff on OneDrive/iCloud/Google Drive, why wouldn't it be sufficient to keep my stuff on any other remote storage service?

You can keep it on other services, but economies of scale, bundle pricing, and security concerns benefit the large incumbents. For example, I stick to iCloud, because all of my data is already exposed to Apple, so exposing it to another entity is just increasing the number of entities my data resides at just increases my vulnerability.

However, as an individual, I could gain great utility by not exposing any of my data to any company. And I would not have to if I could setup a NAS at home with a 1Gbps+ upload that me and my family can setup our devices to backup to, or use in a similar fashion as Dropbox or run a peer to peer chat protocol like WhatsApp.

But all of that is a nonstarter because of the minuscule number of people with 1Gbps+ connections at home with ipv6 and not hidden behind CGNAT, there is no viable market for selling the software and NAS that can cut out the big tech companies.

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