[HN Gopher] US Internet Speeds 91% Faster in 2020 According to U...
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US Internet Speeds 91% Faster in 2020 According to User Speed Tests
Author : mootothemax
Score : 44 points
Date : 2020-11-24 21:38 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fairinternetreport.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fairinternetreport.com)
| [deleted]
| deadmutex wrote:
| I wish more attention was paid to upload speed and latency to the
| rest of the internet too.
|
| People are backing up more personal videos than ever (including
| cloud connected security cameras, etc.). Latency is also very
| important to lower actual transfer times (since it will allow TCP
| to take full advantage of the bandwidth available). Latency also
| will be helpful for new experiences like Stadia and Geforce Now.
| wishinghand wrote:
| While it's great that the average speed is in the mid-30s, it's
| still just the average. If it was closer to 100 I'd feel more
| elated by the news, since that means the lower ends would be
| acceptable no matter where in the USA a user is.
|
| Also notable is that a lot of countries in the chart they showed
| had a 50% or more increase over 2019.
| noahtallen wrote:
| Good point. I imagine the average is going up because the
| already fast speeds in cities are just getting faster with
| fiber and faster cable connections.
| war1025 wrote:
| What I've concluded from measuring things on my home network is
| that my cheapo old router is actually only giving maybe a third
| of the download speed my ISP is providing me.
|
| I'd guess that is the case for a non-trivial subset of the
| population.
|
| And I mean I get ~15Mbps to my laptop when my connection gives me
| 50Mpbs, nowhere near something like gigabit which I'd guess is
| just an excuse for ISPs to fleece money out of people in all but
| a small minority of cases where people buy it.
|
| But also I have zero incentive to upgrade my router because the
| internet is "fast enough" for everything I need, even with only
| using a small fraction of the available bandwidth.
|
| Edit: Also to the headline of the article, my ISP doubled the
| base internet rate from 25Mpbs to 50Mpbs this year. So I guess
| the report lines up with my reality quite well.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Who cares? With everything capped at 1 or 1.2TB of transfer per
| month, there's no point to having internet any faster.
|
| For anybody who needs the speed, they are transferring large
| amounts of data. If you can't transfer large amounts of data,
| what good does the speed do?
|
| The other big problem is, a huge part of the country still has
| basically no internet. Rural communities stuck with 1.5MBps DSL
| or even slower can't even have 2 kids in school learning
| virtually.
|
| Imagine if you had 1 remote parent working from home, and 2 kids
| trying to do school. Most rural internet just won't cut it. I
| feel terrible for people having to deal with our shit
| connectivity in this country.
| rayiner wrote:
| When web pages are 10s of MBs today, faster Internet speeds are
| absolutely not all about being able to transfer more than a
| terabyte in a month.
|
| Also, the US having "shit Internet" is contradicted by TFA. It
| shows we have faster Internet than the big European countries.
| Only a handful of small, rich European countries--which are the
| size of states like Maryland--are faster.
| paxys wrote:
| > For anybody who needs the speed, they are transferring large
| amounts of data
|
| Uh, no? Regular web browsing, email, SAAS, video calls,
| streaming, gaming - all greatly benefit from faster speeds.
| Data caps are terrible, sure, but saying better internet is
| otherwise pointless is stupid.
| bluedino wrote:
| What would the cost be to provide "high speed" internet to
| rural areas? And what % would we need to cover? 95? 99?
| loeg wrote:
| > Who cares? With everything capped at 1 or 1.2TB of transfer
| per month, there's no point to having internet any faster.
|
| My ISP doesn't cap at 1-1.2 TB (CenturyLink, Seattle metro
| area, "gigabit" service plan). Comcast is often a monopoly, but
| it isn't the only ISP in the US. Your point is certainly valid
| for Comcast customers, and in other areas where all ISPs cap at
| some relatively small amount of 'maxBW x hours'.
| sedatk wrote:
| Sonic and Google WebPass don't cap either. It might be a
| Comcast-only thing.
| filoleg wrote:
| Yep, we got WebPass, WaveG, CenturyLink, and
| Comcast/Xfinity in Seattle area, and only Comcast/Xfinity
| has any sort of caps. I personally tested both WaveG and
| Webpass, and neither of them have any caps, just like
| advertised (been watching Netflix and downloading/uploading
| tons of stuff, on the order of over 1TB a day, no
| slowdowns/hidden caps either)
| rayiner wrote:
| Verizon doesn't cap, and Comcast doesn't on most of the
| east coast.
| keanebean86 wrote:
| Cox and SuddenLink have caps too. At least for some of
| their plans. In some cases you can pay extra for unlimited.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Your point is certainly valid for Comcast customers
|
| For $30, you can add unlimited data to your plan. That's not
| a terrible deal, if you need it.
|
| I'm more bothered by the crappy upload speeds. Fixing that
| would require switching to a business plan.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| But to reiterate what has been stated every where else over
| and over: for most regions in the US, there are at most 1
| provider with usable speeds available, and they get to do
| whatever they want with their customers.
|
| There are many regions with hardly any competition, and the
| lucky few areas with 2 or more usually comprise of another
| high speed provider that changes in lock step with the local
| #1, and a bunch of smaller providers on DSL or some other old
| technology.
|
| Wireless is even more capped, high latency, and, thanks to
| the FCC, can be more privacy invasive or restricted than land
| line internet.
|
| It's not all roses in the US.
| loeg wrote:
| Absolutely. Hence:
|
| > Comcast is often a monopoly
|
| I live in Seattle and we had a Comcast monopoly for
| something like 15 years until 2017 or 2018. I do not mean
| to suggest that real competition exists in most places or
| that anything about the situation in general is rosy.
| ihattendorf wrote:
| I can choose from Cox and CenturyLink in my area, both have a
| 1TB cap here.
| loeg wrote:
| Thanks. Edited my original comment to clarify that the
| cap/no-cap status of CenturyLink may be local to my metro,
| or related to my particular internet plan.
| tzs wrote:
| For most people, more speed is about reducing wait time rather
| than transferring more data.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Who cares? With everything capped at 1 or 1.2TB of transfer
| per month, there's no point to having internet any faster.
|
| Yeah, that's ridiculous. At least some well-known providers
| allow you to add an "unlimited" option to your internet plan.
|
| > The other big problem is, a huge part of the country still
| has basically no internet.
|
| That's a difficult problem to solve. There has to be incentives
| for corporations to bother laying infrastructure. When
| municipalities try to pitch in and do it themselves, they get
| shot down by the same players.
|
| I guess the only viable option near term is Starlink.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| I worked for a small time WISP for a while, partially
| servicing a town of ~10,000 (but mostly not because of
| interference) and large swathes of the rural surrounding
| areas. He was heavily harrassed by police for various nitpick
| infractions regarding the equipment on his truck and where
| things were placed and whatnot, things that the local power
| company and AT&T blatantly violated with regularity without
| repercussion. He was also met with resistance from the city
| board/mayor, who were trying to require some regulatory fees
| that they (come to find out) didn't even have on the books. I
| think the only reason his business survived this stupid
| pushback is because he is former law enforcement.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| > For anybody who needs the speed, they are transferring large
| amounts of data. If you can't transfer large amounts of data,
| what good does the speed do?
|
| It saves a lot of time. Having a new update/game or sharing
| large files in minutes instead of hours matters. Why not just
| start download earlier? Foresight on a long timescale takes a
| lot of brainpower and is pretty stressful because cost of miss
| is high. I will start this download and go get water is a whole
| lot better than I will queue this update and and it will be
| done in the morning.
| viraptor wrote:
| Also there's not much foresight you can apply when an online
| game gets a required updated 5 min before you want to play
| it. And these days it's only going to get more common.
| munk-a wrote:
| > The other big problem is, a huge part of the country still
| has basically no internet.
|
| Infrastructure isn't free and while it's hilariously
| embarrassing to have slow speeds in "rural cities" (i.e. actual
| cities that just don't happen to be on the coast) simply due to
| capitalism doing it's worst - living in the middle of no where
| is an expense on society.
|
| It falls into the same camp as people who live in hurricane
| areas - the government bailing you out once so you can move is
| a fine idea (and the government needs to be providing
| sufficient funds for these people to actually relocate) but
| living in remote areas and living coastally in the south east
| come with lots of benefits to you... and costs for everyone
| else.
|
| I am A-OK with folks who insist on living in the middle of
| nowhere paying for it.
|
| Oh I'm going to add a big old caveat for people who were
| forcefully relocated - if you're living on Rosebud Indian
| Reservation then relocation really isn't an option.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| 4K movie seeking on consumer devices can be dramatically faster
| when you increase from 50mbit/s to 400mbit/s, even though
| you'll still download just as much movie as you would on either
| speed. We're talking the difference between 5-10 seconds of
| buffering and beginning playback immediately. Video game
| updates also accelerate dramatically, allowing more efficient
| use of free time.
|
| Incidentally, here's anecdotal data from a family of two adults
| and two children from today's Comcast thread (where I assume
| you're participating, given the comment), that shows that they
| have stayed below the 1.2TB Comcast threshold for over a year,
| even through the pandemic, while not making any effort to stay
| under that threshold since they aren't on Comcast:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25200882
|
| Just because there are data caps on some providers is no reason
| to tolerate unnecessarily slow internet connections. The speed
| of the connection is an effective and measurable stand-in for
| the modernity and capacity of the infrastructure delivering
| internet to that area.
|
| Sadly, latency isn't a popular measure for Internet
| connectivity, and as my year of testing uncovered, 50mbit down
| and 5mbit up is more than sufficient for downloading + 4k
| streaming + zoom all at the same time, as long as your router
| has smart shaping/queueing capabilities and your connection has
| stable latency in that scenario.
| liquidise wrote:
| > Who cares? With everything capped at 1 or 1.2TB of transfer
| per month, there's no point to having internet any faster.
|
| What? I _definitely_ care how fast my internet is regardless of
| my bandwidth cap. For most people, internet consistency and
| speed is a more noticeable metric than data caps. Speed effects
| video /audio call quality, page load times, etc.
|
| Look, i get annoyed at data caps. I've taken multiple comcast
| employees to task over it. But the idea that speed is
| irrelevant when caps are present strikes me as pearl clutching.
| ozim wrote:
| I have mobile data connection where transfer fluctuates
| during the day. In the morning 15Mbit during the day 5Mbit
| and in the evening might go as low as 2Mbit. It mostly works
| fine but at some point of the day it might just stop working,
| like 2x a day.
|
| I have 50Gig data cap, I am not annoyed by it because I can
| control it. I might watch yt on lower resolution or skip
| netflix binge in the weekend, because I need transfer for
| work.
|
| What I cannot control is transfer speed and glitches. It
| totally depends on what other people in mobile network are
| doing. If they all start streaming at the same time or having
| meetings, bad luck, have to wait it out. It is not making me
| angry because I understand it, but it is uncomfortable. Where
| data cap does not bother me that much.
|
| Going to get better internet soon.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I care; caps do suck but given the choice I'd rather have
| double the speed at half the transfer cap. To be clear, by
| double the speed I mean half the latency between requesting a
| resource and page load, which is a significant amount of my
| usage pattern.
|
| If something (like uploading a backup or streaming a movie) is
| going to run for a long time, I don't care how fast the average
| speed is as long as it's enough to stream 1080p.
|
| But if my next task demands some info from a 20MB datasheet
| that I don't have locally, I want that to load as fast as
| possible. And I'm not going to do that 25,000 times a month.
| dehrmann wrote:
| 1 TB per month works out to 3 MBps sustained over the entire
| month.
| astrophysician wrote:
| For the uninitiated:
|
| https://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/
| kstrauser wrote:
| I wonder how long that'll keep up? I already have gigabit
| fiber, and by that graph he will too. But then what? Faster is
| better, but 10Gb wouldn't be much of an improvement in practice
| over what I have today. Game update servers don't saturate my
| bandwidth, and we can have multiple people streaming 4K video
| at once without blinking an eye. What would be the next thing
| pushing faster speeds?
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I wonder how much of this is an artifact of people increasing
| their bandwidth subscriptions vs. the investment of various
| DOCSIS operators in Node+1 architecture, which at least in this
| area rapidly accelerated over the last year - I don't think that
| has anything to do with COVID per se but just the incumbent ISP
| really getting to the main stages of that project right now.
| tyingq wrote:
| Lots of people home watching TV over an internet stream. So,
| incentive to fix things.
| GNOMES wrote:
| I hate that across the highway near by (Houston) is ATT Fiber
| with 1G up and 1G down for around a 100$/month. I moved across
| the highway, and now stuck with Xfinity coaxial 1GB down and
| around 50MB up if I am lucky for 150$/month including no data cap
| fee.
|
| I don't understand why a company like Xfinity with such negative
| public image wouldn't try to give everyone a speed bump to
| improve their image.
| wmichelin wrote:
| For those too lazy to read the article, it's 91% faster in 2020
| as compared to 2019.
| knightofmars wrote:
| tl;dr?
| lainga wrote:
| year add: speed twice
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| How much of this is people paying for faster connections to work
| from home vs actual infrastructure build out?
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| No idea. As with all truth, you should check with multiple
| sources for corroboration first. I know in Hawaii at least
| there was a massive DCCA (chamber of commerce) initiative
| started way back in 2012 to outfit all public schools with
| gigabit fiber and all universities with 10gigabit fiber.
| Hospitals also got fiber connections though I don't know how
| fast, and there were a few 10gigabit undersea cables laid
| between the islands themselves. The state government started
| offering incentives and subsidies to encourage more cable
| landings on Oahu. This was also the same program in which they
| began installing the FirstNet system and the 5G infrastructure.
| No idea what's going on on the mainland.
|
| https://cca.hawaii.gov/broadband/files/2015/01/Hawaii_Broadb...
| loeg wrote:
| Or selection bias -- people only speed-testing their new fast
| internet plan?
| anonymfus wrote:
| Can it also be people cancelling slow mobile plans?
| [deleted]
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| Given it was shit in 2019... so...?
| Retric wrote:
| Averaging can give some really unrealistic numbers especially
| when people are upgrading their home internet to work from home.
| Upgrading a single connection from 100Mbps to 1Ggbit is hardly
| the same as upgrading 100 connections from 1Mbps to 10Mbps.
| mrlala wrote:
| Completely agree. It would be much more interesting to compare
| the data in a bin fashion from 2019 -> 2020 like this
|
| 0.1 - 1
|
| 1-10
|
| 10-20
|
| 20-50
|
| 50+
|
| And then see how ridiculous quote just the average is in this
| case..
| nightcracker wrote:
| In other words, the interesting comparison is two log
| histograms (or overlaid).
| mrlala wrote:
| Sure although I would say you can't just throw it into log
| bins automatically.. some data you need to massage it to
| what makes the most sense.
| redisman wrote:
| I wish there was some attention paid to upload speeds too. A
| 100Mbps connection often only has 1-5Mbps upload which
| seriously handicaps it for work and hobbyists.
| rayiner wrote:
| The reported number is a median.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| That is very true, not to mention gigabit cable services
| probably rarely have anyone achieve those speeds very often. My
| guess is that most cable companies unlock the DOCSIS channels
| necessary, but node over subscription means that your only shot
| is to download a huge amount at 3-4a.m.
| leecb wrote:
| A geometric mean might make more sense in this situation.
| lame-robot-hoax wrote:
| I get 300 Mbps down from Xfinity, fine by me. But the paltry 5-6
| Mbps I get up with it is BS. Sure, I don't need 300 up, but for
| what I'm paying it would be nice to get at least 50.
| leesalminen wrote:
| Funny, I live in a rural area with a small WISP. I get a solid
| 20dl/10ul all the time. Hard to imagine that I'm uploading more
| quickly than city folks.
| snazz wrote:
| 15 or 20 mbps up is about the theoretical maximum on cable
| because of how the spectrum is allocated by cable companies.
| Cable TVs didn't need much upload compared to download.
| kortilla wrote:
| No, that's just cable companies allocating significantly more
| to download spectrum than upload. There isn't anything
| fundamental in docsis preventing you from giving more
| spectrum to upload to have way less contention on the upload
| slots.
| nostromo wrote:
| > there is cause for celebration in Dallas, Seattle and Austin,
| after our analysis has shown that these cities are performing
| extremely well relative to most European capital cities.
|
| Seattle has some _actual_ competition now, and many (most?) of us
| can get fiber gigabit to the home for a reasonable rate. It 's
| glorious.
|
| I hope other American cities start courting meaningful ISP
| competition in their cities -- but I'm not holding my breath.
| Many American city governments see ISPs as companies they can
| shake down for fees and concessions, not realizing they're only
| hurting their own citizens by limiting choice and increasing
| costs.
| archgoon wrote:
| Can you expand on when competition came to Seattle and how?
| I've been using Condo Internet (now Wave Broadband) for
| something close to 5-6 years. When was the tipping point in
| terms of competition?
| loeg wrote:
| CenturyLink fiber is relatively recent to the Seattle area
| (2017 or 2018) and serves a broader customer base than Wave
| nee Condo.
|
| Condo was historically only available in a small number of
| buildings very close to the Westin building downtown (site of
| the Seattle Internet Exchange). It is slightly broader now,
| but only slightly.
|
| Here's a big old PDF of Seattle area internet service
| (2019)[1]. Most of Seattle is CenturyLink + Comcast. The
| second biggest portion is Comcast-only. Wave covers very
| little of the city.
|
| [1]: https://www.seattle.gov/tech/initiatives/broadband/gigab
| it-a...
| [deleted]
| nostromo wrote:
| Centurylink now offers fiber gigabit to the home for about
| $65 or so a month.
|
| It happened because a former mayor (Ed Murray, who has since
| left office after a personal scandal) made it easier for ISPs
| to build out their networks and removed homeowners and
| neighborhood groups from the process which previously allowed
| them to block things like communications boxes on sidewalks.
|
| At the time, a bunch of local columnists moaned about this
| "corporate giveaway"[1] -- but it's pretty clear in
| retrospect it was the right move.
|
| 1. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/mayors-centurylink-
| giv...
| filoleg wrote:
| Don't forget about Google Webpass, they started advertising
| heavily in Seattle area starting about a year ago. I
| switched to them earlier last year due to having periodic
| issues with WaveG in my new apt building about 8 months
| into my lease (their technician would come a week or two
| after I report constant outages, fix something in the
| server room of my building, and then the issues would start
| again in a few weeks; haven't had any issues with WaveG at
| my previous apt though).
|
| Service has been great, pricing is even cheaper than WaveG
| (I pay about $50/mo for their gig fiber offering), no
| contracts or any other lock-in (unless you pick the option
| to pay for the whole year upfront for a small discount). It
| definitely does feel like there is a good amount of real
| competition in Seattle now.
| redisman wrote:
| I need to see whats out there. Still using Xfinity in the
| suburbs and it's pretty meh, terrible upload making wfh a pain.
| vmception wrote:
| Has anyone seen how fast Tor has gotten?
|
| Its impressive that so many nodes are better and have more
| bandwidth now
| paxys wrote:
| The title makes it seem like broadband infrastructure in the
| country significantly improved over the last year, but I'm
| guessing people just paid more for faster speeds at home.
| paxys wrote:
| What is up with Stockholm?
| https://fairinternetreport.com/assets/img/research/us-vs-eur...
| [deleted]
| bagels wrote:
| Bad data science. Why are they fitting what appears to be high
| order polynomial curves to these data?
| cm2187 wrote:
| I am surprised France is so low. They are rolling out fibre to
| the premise with gigabit connections in every big city and even
| in many smaller cities and villages.
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