[HN Gopher] England just made gigabit internet a legal requireme...
___________________________________________________________________
England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new
homes
Author : lbres
Score : 266 points
Date : 2023-01-09 19:52 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| jossclimb wrote:
| I am shocked that my country is doing something progressive for a
| change, I don't expect this will keep up for long though.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| I get 100Mbps symmetrical (Fiber) in the UK living in a city.
| Honestly, I'm not sure I could go back. Most residential homes
| struggle to average anything near that with ADSL.
|
| Welcome news. Fast Internet is important to the economy in an
| increasingly information based society.
| shmerl wrote:
| Good. They should also require fiber optics when cables are used.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| It's extremely challenging advocating for this in the USA because
| most people have no idea the difference between upload and
| download, and how data caps play into it.
|
| You can get gigabit 5G in many areas but it's manifestly a
| different animal than symmetrical gigabit fiber internet without
| caps.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Fiber has caps too, although hidden under "Fair Usage Policy".
| I know as I see some stories on /r/DataHorder, some starting
| from 1TB/month. Ofc they are much higher than cellular/5G caps.
| lazide wrote:
| This is in-home/last mile. It's basically a law requiring every
| home have a minimum degree of ethernet or equivalent done and
| pulled to somewhere it can be connected to a provider, not a
| requirement that a provider of a specific speed be available.
|
| Which is pretty good, and about time! It's like requiring the
| house be wired for electricity to a bare minimum (1 outlet per
| room, 1 switched light per room, that kind of thing).
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I'd be super impressed if the requirement was for symmetric
| gigabit.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| So, will I have to stick coins in the modem before it works or is
| that just for the power?
| agilob wrote:
| Just more admin fees and paperwork to build a building, making
| them more expensive. Make 30cm insulation a requirement so we
| don't pay PS2000 per year for electric heating. I asked my
| property management company if they would, eghm, _consider_
| improving external insulation, they responded they have no such
| legal requirements, so they won't. We pay 4x more for heating and
| warm water than in 2018, and have it colder and dumper, meanwhile
| I have 37mbps connection by choice, it's not like I'm going to
| use more, even when working from home.
|
| In here we literally get NHS money paying for our electricity
| bills because that's cheap than hospitalisation. Thanks for 4k
| Netflix tho.
| leoedin wrote:
| This isn't really adding much cost. They were always going to
| run some sort of communications cable to new houses - the
| government is just making sure it's a future proofed one.
| Providing gigabit internet when there's a fiber running to the
| property already is trivial.
| alias_neo wrote:
| Insulation is pretty good in new build flats. I bought a new
| build in London where I lived for 5 years, I used the heating
| all of about 10 days in 5 years, the gas bill was a rounding
| error; what they really need it cooling; that place was 38degC
| in my living room with all windows and doors open in the
| summer.
|
| To put that into perspective, I just moved to a 1930s house
| where I'm paying PS600-800 a month for the heating right now.
|
| For the record, I'd rather spend that on heating than live
| under the absolute racket of London leasehold ever again.
| bpye wrote:
| Most new builds are a B on the EPC scale [0]. I guess they
| could require that all new builds meet A?
|
| 0 - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-
| performance-...
| c294f417-3c8a wrote:
| Our new build house had this 6 years ago (house wired for
| gigabit) What it means is there is ducting to the manhole for
| fibre. That's it. We had to suffer 2.5 megabit asdl for 2 years
| until openreach finally put fibre into our area. This
| announcement is meaningless, they should ensure all new build
| estates are connected to fibre and make the developer pay for the
| connection. Oh, and the ducting was filled with red stone chips
| so openreach had to reroute the fibre cabling anyway
| rayiner wrote:
| > Connection costs will be capped at PS2,000 per home, and
| developers must still install gigabit-ready infrastructure
| (including ducts, chambers, and termination points) and the
| fastest-available connection if they're unable to secure a
| gigabit connection within the cost cap.
|
| This approach makes a lot of sense. In my county in Maryland,
| building a new house involves at least $20,000 in fees for sewer
| and water hookups:
| https://www.aacounty.org/departments/inspections-and-permits....
| Building out fiber to the house is much cheaper in comparison. It
| seems like a drop in the bucket to integrate a couple of thousand
| in additional fees for a fiber hookup.
| jmcnulty wrote:
| I live in Northern Ireland (also part of the UK) and we're very
| well served here too. I switched from copper to fibre about a
| month back. Could have gone 1Gb but chose a cheaper 500Gb DOWN /
| 75Mb UP package (no data limits) as I didn't think I'd notice the
| difference. Speed tests show I get very close to both. Very
| happy.
| shinycode wrote:
| In France with a Freebox Delta I have unlimited 10gbps speed down
| and 700mbps up for less than 50EUR a month. Netflix and Amazon
| prime are included and I live in a 15000 people town. The
| subscription can be canceled any time. Plus the box has a built
| in NAS, Wifi 6E, and a 4K HDR player among other things
| stunami wrote:
| Yes... I have the same just moved here from Australia. Im in an
| old building but close to Paris. I've been blown away by what I
| can get with a "bargain provider".
| shinycode wrote:
| Too much people complain about Free here but it's actually
| amazing what we can get for the price compared to other
| countries ...
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Can we maybe edit the title to say "UK" instead of "England"?
|
| Also, we nearly had gigabit fibre to the home 40 years ago
| (before anything even needed to run at 1Gbit, or you could afford
| the transceivers, admittedly) because BT's vision for the future
| of telephony was to rip out all the copper and run fibre to every
| single house.
|
| Then the right-wing extremist Thatcher government got wind of the
| idea and decided that this was too big a monopoly to be allowed
| to stand, so they stole the entire public property that was BT,
| smashed it to bits, and sold it off to private industry.
|
| This put back everything by *decades*. Now it's a battle to work
| out wayleaves, interoperability, who's responsible for what
| physical plant, and all sorts of other messes. Thanks,
| Conservatives, fuck you very much.
| makomk wrote:
| No, we didn't. I looked up the specs when the topic came up and
| I think the data part was something like 2Mbps shared by
| everyone. The big "broadband" content that BT were hoping would
| fund the whole thing was analog pay TV, basically leveraging
| their telephone monopoly into a cable TV monopoly as well.
| Without that extra shared pay TV money it wasn't feasible to
| install an individual optical network terminal in everyone's
| house with the tech back then, and that's the big monopoly
| Thatcher's government balked at. In the end they did end up
| using another version of the same tech in some areas which used
| shared optical terminals between multiple houses that was
| telephony only - and I mean literally telephony only. A bunch
| of people found out about their high tech fibre optic lines
| when they couldn't get anything faster than dialup internet
| whilst all the people with normal copper lines had ADSL.
| coob wrote:
| > Can we maybe edit the title to say "UK" instead of "England"?
|
| No, because the law only affects England - Building Regs a
| devolved matter in Wales and Scotland.
|
| There is a separate law mentioned in the article which is
| telecoms related and not devolved in Wales - but that is about
| landlords not needing to grant access to engineers.
| OJFord wrote:
| > Can we maybe edit the title to say "UK" instead of "England"?
|
| I think it's correct actually, housing is devolved.
|
| 'The Building etc. (Amendment) ( _England_ ) (No. 2)
| Regulations 2022' -
| https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/984/contents/made - my
| emphasis.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| If you wanna hack into the verges servers and change the
| headline of the article go ahead...
| amalgamated_inc wrote:
| Price of new houses just went up
| jen20 wrote:
| Are you suggesting that the cost of materials has any impact at
| all on the inflated price of a house in the UK?
| amalgamated_inc wrote:
| Not just materials, but materials too, yes. But time and
| effort is probably more costly.
| jen20 wrote:
| Land value and inflation driven by supply shortage are the
| actual drivers of house prices in the UK. Especially with
| new builds, the BOM is very small, and houses are built
| typically to an exceptionally poor standard.
| neximo64 wrote:
| Not really. You still have to buy the internet package from the
| ISP which is gigabit speed enabled. This only ensures it is
| available. The law isn't that free gigabit internet is to be
| offered to all houses.
| amalgamated_inc wrote:
| But somebody now has to hire a lawyer and check that
| regulation wasn't violated. Processes have to be changed. If
| the law makes any difference at all, somebody had to change
| something, and that cost is being passed on to the consumer
| (=buyer/renter).
| leoedin wrote:
| It's building regulations - basically what's called "code"
| in the US. The building inspector (should) make sure it's
| followed. No lawyers needed.
| amalgamated_inc wrote:
| Who pays for the inspector?
| _joel wrote:
| I'd say very minimal compared to the rest of the costs of
| building a house.
| amalgamated_inc wrote:
| Sure. Now add the millions of other "tiny" regulations.
| IanCal wrote:
| Not particularly, there's very little justification for running
| copper to new houses given we're in a nationwide rollout of
| fibre and there's a big cost saving to moving entirely to
| fibre.
| mhb wrote:
| So no need for a law then...
| izzydata wrote:
| To me it seems like a way to really consider internet to be
| a public utility such as water and electricity. I'm sure
| there is a law that says any new construction requires it
| to be connected to the electricity grid, even though it
| would be pretty unreasonable to not connect it to the grid.
| Does that mean there is no need for it to be a law?
|
| At least this way you can have a good expectation of a new
| buildings utilities.
| mhb wrote:
| When you set a minimum standard, something that could
| have been bought for less that didn't meet that standard
| will no longer be an alternative. So some people will
| have something better and others will not have an option
| that they once did.
| paxys wrote:
| I bet there was a vocal group of people who had the same
| complaint back when they mandated electrical circuit breakers
| and water/sewer hookups.
| ortusdux wrote:
| Is this symmetric gigabit or just download? I pay for gigabit
| down, 35 megabit up. My only other options are starlink or a $10k
| fiber install.
| OJFord wrote:
| That seems really poor; they clearly thought (probably
| correctly) that 'gigabit' was an easier sell (to the masses)
| than '500Mbps symmetric' or some other split.
|
| It doesn't help you, but Hyperoptic are an ISP in the UK with
| all plans except the lowest being symmetric. I used to pay
| (moved out of the area^) PS28pcm for symmetric 100Mbps, or
| maybe 150 - either way it was fairly consistently 160/180Mbps
| as measured. A&A are also by all accounts amazing, but only HN-
| browsing nerds more impressed with 800M symmetric than 1G are
| their customers anyway. Hyperoptic I like because they're
| primarily serving 'the masses' but seem the only non-shitty
| ones.
|
| ^I now use a Mikrotik 4G modem & router. It's not as fast but
| it's enough, (ongoing) costs even less; I think with some
| tweaking - especially mounting it outside - I can do better,
| but it's been so fine that I haven't bothered yet, over the
| course of months. A lot more asymmetric though, I wouldn't
| build and push images quite as casually as I might have before.
| izzydata wrote:
| I'm pretty sure all fiber is bi-directional and achieving
| gigabit without fiber seems silly.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Gigabit over DOCSIS won't be symmetrical any time soon, but
| it's still gigabit internet.
|
| Not all homes are hooked up to fiber, sadly, although
| especially in new homes you'd really hope they'll be.
| core-utility wrote:
| Is paying for your own fiber install common? I'm in a mid-90's
| home in the US and AT&T just recently decided they wanted to
| enter our market with Fiber and will install free of charge
| with no contract to whoever wants to switch. Certainly no easy
| task, but I understand that homes/infrastructure outside of the
| US can also be significantly older.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Enterprise-grade leased lines typically make you pay at least
| part of the install cost.
| paxys wrote:
| Your home networking setup (which this law is about) has
| nothing to do with symmetric/asymmetric bandwidth allotted to
| you by the ISP.
| cstejerean wrote:
| I'd pay 10k for a fiber install if that was an option.
| sebow wrote:
| UK legislators are really something out of this world. In October
| I will have 10Gbps for 2 years, I can't even remember when I got
| 1gbps. The reason you get such services (and in my case for dirt
| cheap) is because of competition, not because you mandate it.
|
| Just a dumb idea to impose this thinking it will somehow improve
| the situation overnight. Sadly again I'm not surprised given the
| location in question.
| johnday wrote:
| If builders are mandated to make new homes able to access the
| fastest speed available (usually gigabit), then there is
| competition to provide that fastest speed for the cheapest
| price. This mandate _enhances_ competition in the ISP space.
| [deleted]
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| This seems to be targeting areas where one could have gigabit
| Internet already.
|
| Specifically section 1.5.e.
|
| > Requirement R1 does not apply to the following types of
| building or building work:
|
| [...]
|
| > e. buildings in isolated areas where the prospect of a high-
| speed connection is considered too remote to justify equipping
| the building with high-speed-ready in-building physical
| infrastructure or an access point [...]
| ilyt wrote:
| > Connection costs will be capped at PS2,000 per home,
|
| not with those prices. I thought that is so high because it has
| to account for remote areas but if that isn't the case it looks
| huge.
|
| ... or it is a yearly cost and article didn't mention that
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| Just in time for wired internet to be obsolete. Especially for
| apartment buildings, makes much more sense to provide WiFi
| throughout private and common area than running cables to each
| unit. Even for individual homes, neighborhood 5g cells can do the
| trick for most people's needs. Also locking in current technology
| when constructing a building that could last a century is really
| dumb. Better to have access panels in the walls that allow easily
| installing and maintaining any type of cables / pipes / etc that
| may make sense in future.
| toast0 wrote:
| High density living is even more reason to run wired
| connections. The more fixed stations you can get off the air,
| the better everything else runs. Your TV probably stays in one
| spot, so streaming player(s) should be wired. If you do
| anything real time, having lower base latency and nearly zero
| jitter is pretty nice too.
|
| If you want to save costs, it's really not too expensive to add
| one or two runs of twisted pair per room to a central location,
| near the demarcation point, and don't bother to mark or
| terminate the cables. If someone wants to use them, they're
| there and it cost a couple bucks in cabling and staples and
| time to put them in the wall during construction, but would
| cost a lot more to put the wires in later. For a multiple unit
| building, include a conduit from the unit to a wiring room, in
| case someone wants to run something better later.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Wired to my PS5 still delivers way faster (800 Mbps vs 300
| Mbps) than WiFi even with the device being the one WiFi device
| on and transmitting in the house and situated under 1 m away.
| It's the default Comcast modem+router+wifi combo, but I imagine
| most people are using devices like that.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| [dead]
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Wifi is unreliable and laggy, and forcing everyone in an
| apartment building to use it for everything is a recipe for
| disaster. Same for 5g.
|
| As for access panels and pipes, the article reads:
|
| > Connection costs will be capped at PS2,000 per home, and
| _developers must still install gigabit-ready infrastructure
| (including ducts, chambers, and termination points)_ and the
| fastest-available connection if they're unable to secure a
| gigabit connection within the cost cap.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| I think this comes across as shocking to Americans but the thing
| is the rest of the world treats internet as a utility so most
| governments try to get cheap and fast internet for as large a
| portion of the population as possible. Where as US cities and
| towns are stuck under its isp corporate monopolies.
| grammers wrote:
| Yet, it is a utility by now. Who could live or work without it?
| A country cripples its economy in the long run if they do not
| realize that.
| pkaye wrote:
| Though UK median speed is well below US according to speedtest.
|
| https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
| Nextgrid wrote:
| UK has their own problems when it comes to ISPs. One of the
| biggest ones is that it's legal to advertise and sell VDSL or
| DOCSIS as _fibre_ , so as a result most people have
| absolutely no way to compare the market and pick _real_ fibre
| when everything is "fibre", and there's no market pressure
| to deliver it when you can simply sell cheaper copper-based
| tech as "fibre".
|
| Another one is that speeds are always expressed in bullshit
| terms such as "superfast", "ultrafast", etc and raw numbers
| are avoided, making shopping around difficult.
| icelancer wrote:
| Australia and Canada famously have awesome, fast, and cheap
| Internet access compared to the United States.
| lazide wrote:
| It isn't shocking to Americans. It's frustrating.
|
| Keep in mind however, we're really talking about 50 different
| 'countries', when we're talking about laws like this so far.
|
| The EU for instance has no such Europe wide mandate. The
| populations are roughly equivalent.
| rayiner wrote:
| Internet infrastructure regulation varies quite dramatically
| across the developed world. Canada, Germany, Switzerland, etc.,
| do not "treat the Internet like a utility" for the most part.
|
| Also, "treating Internet like a utility" actually means a
| "corporate monopoly" nearly everywhere. The situation in the UK
| is very similar to the situation in much of the northeast US.
| You have a former monopoly provider (there BT, here Verizon)
| that is a private company that was incentivized to build out
| fiber. Its like PG&E in California, not like your municipal
| water or sewer service.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Not really the same though, we have many options that ride on
| top of the BT OpenReach network so most urban places get many
| cheap options for internet. If you want fibre to the home
| then Virgin Media is still your main option which is a little
| annoying.
| rayiner wrote:
| But what are your options for fiber to the home? It seems
| to me like whether you have FTTP available to me depends on
| whether BT decides to build fiber to your house.
|
| Yeah, telephone loop unbundling adds some additional
| competition for the actual internet transit portion. But
| when people say "like a utility" I think they are thinking
| about something like sewer/water utilities in the US, where
| a municipal entity builds and runs the infrastructure with
| taxes.
| mperham wrote:
| Yep, it doesn't need to be treated as a utility, there just
| needs to be competition. Our Xfinity internet was locked at 150
| Mbps for years until the local DSL provider (Centurylink)
| rolled out gigabit fiber. Suddenly Xfinity started offering
| gigabit also.
|
| Capitalism doesn't work if the market is captured by rent-
| seekers. Unfortunately this describes most American industries
| these days.
| baq wrote:
| to be precise: monopoly is peak laissez-faire capitalism;
| regulation is what makes this local maximum easy to get out
| of instead of dealing with an East India Company situation.
| dantheman wrote:
| Capitalism doesn't work when the government grants monopolies
| to local companies.
| sofixa wrote:
| The monopolies in question are natural monopolies
| (basically any infrastructure which is physically
| constrained), so the only way of lessening the damages from
| them is via government regulations.
| dantheman wrote:
| Nope, the monopolies in question are granted by the local
| towns to specific providers so that they will be
| unprofitable connections to extremely rural recipients.
| It's a way to subsidize those who don't want to pay for
| what it would actually cost by secretly taxing everyone
| in the community by granting monopolies to certain
| businesses.
| drstewart wrote:
| Can you list the specific ways the rest of the world treat the
| internet as a utility using the following examples?
|
| - Canada
|
| - Uganda
|
| - Russia
|
| - Cuba
|
| - Australia
|
| Also feel free to reference this:
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-...
| as you discuss these country's results, and why the rest of the
| world fails so bad at beating the US in this list.
| waboremo wrote:
| Why did you select those countries specifically?
| pb7 wrote:
| Why not? Are they not part of the rest of the world?
| ketralnis wrote:
| Because they're trying to make a point without coming out
| and saying it and they're hoping that you recognise...
| whatever it is that those have in common
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Not sure about the countries you mentioned. The link shows
| top 5 for broadband speed:
|
| - Monaco
|
| - Singapore
|
| - Hong Kong
|
| - Romania
|
| - Switzerland
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Come on now, surely you know that when Europeans compare _'
| the rest of the world'_ to America, _' the rest of the
| world'_ is a slang term that means "Europe".
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is a pretty annoying way of commenting. If you have
| something to say then say it, don't pretend to make a point
| by asking someone else to do a whole pile of stuff. They're
| not in your pay.
| pb7 wrote:
| Less annoying than constantly seeing easily verifiable
| false statements geared to shit on the US. It reeks of
| insecurity and narcissism thinking whatever small bubble
| they're in represents _the rest of the world_.
| sofixa wrote:
| Cool, great news for England. In France the building regulations
| include RJ45 in every non-wet room (including kitchens!) on a
| weird electrical standard that basically allows cat7 speeds but
| also TV frequencies. So every newly built house or appartament is
| internally wired for 10Gbps, which should be fine for the
| foreseeable future.
| drbeast wrote:
| Wonderful, let's make new homes even more expensive! And to those
| who are downvoting this, every building code requirement like
| this jacks up the price further. Not everyone is a SWE with a TC
| of $250k+ you over privileged ninnies.
| idontpost wrote:
| [dead]
| hgomersall wrote:
| UK house prices in no way reflect the build cost. The
| developers do the least they can get away with, which generally
| means the shittiest fabric with some polish that lasts until
| the end of the warranty period, just about satisfying the
| building regs (which are not really checked properly), then
| they flog the result at whatever the market will bear and
| pocket the difference. What the market will bear is entirely
| dictated by where the identikit houses have been built and
| little else.
| lhnz wrote:
| Everything you say is correct apart from "house prices in no
| way reflect the build cost". The build cost is expensive as
| there aren't many skilled trades people nowadays and there is
| a market of lemons. The few high quality building contractors
| that are trusted can charge huge amounts of money -- all of
| the others charge as much as they can get away with and just
| hope that you don't check their work...
| djbebs wrote:
| Of course they reflect build costs, as well as regulatory
| costs...
| m000 wrote:
| I can sell you a nifty cave, and I'll throw in my top-of-the-
| line 56k modem for free if you want to avoid the price jackups.
| tsujamin wrote:
| _laughs in australian_
| hnick wrote:
| And before someone comes in with the old excuse about
| population density, keep in mind they could mandate it for our
| dense metropolitan areas and service the great majority of
| citizens and businesses. If they'd actually built the right NBN
| in the first place.
| thedaly wrote:
| I wish that countries would mandate symmetrical connections as
| well. This would open up so much more opportunity for self
| hosting web apps and allow for decentralized sites, such as
| peertube, to function better.
| nomel wrote:
| All ISPs I've had specifically forbid any kind of servers in
| the TOS, so symmetric speeds aren't the only problem.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't need to run a server, but in the modern era of work
| from home and connecting to something like S3 to push large
| files around, that symmetric upload speed is required not a
| nicety. when you can download a 65GB mov file in a matter of
| minutes but to push any changes back requires many hours,
| something is just wrong
| dahfizz wrote:
| I disagree. The vast majority of people are never going to need
| or care about hosting a decentralized hoozywhatsit. Mandating
| technical decisions that cause waste is suboptimal.
|
| You get symmetrical speeds with fiber, but if ISPs could use
| the existing fiber infrastructure and allocate 75% of the
| bandwidth as download instead of 50%, that would be a win.
| hateful wrote:
| Don't forget about Security Cameras - if you check in on them
| remotely, that's all upload.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| In what way does it cause waste?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| You are mandating infra that will never be used and isn't
| needed.
| ericmay wrote:
| Well that might be an assumption that it will never be
| used. Maybe if people had it they would use it?
|
| But also I'm interested in if/whether this builds
| infrastructure resilience as well.
|
| Would be interesting to see a well-thought cost/benefit
| analysis there. In America at least given that _every_
| ISP without exception is a giant piece of crap, mandating
| them to do things I 'm going to generally approve of,
| especially if ISPs would be against it since I don't
| trust them whatsoever.
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| Anecdote is not data, but I have a fiber connection and I
| pretty much never use the upload bandwidth I have.
| escapedmoose wrote:
| Not today you don't, but imagine the technologies that
| could take hold if we could take for granted that people
| have decent upload as well as download. More real-time
| sharing/collaboration tools and decentralized social
| platforms would suddenly have a viable platform/market.
| And I'm sure there are other use cases I'm not
| considering.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| As the quality of the centralized hoozywhatsits continues to
| decline, I expect demand for decentralized hoozywhatsits will
| increase, given that they're harder to parasitize.
|
| I agree that it shouldn't be a mandate though. It would be
| enough to mandate that the Up/down speeds both appear on the
| promotional material in the same font size.
| [deleted]
| FredPret wrote:
| Maybe John Q Public doesn't want to host his own
| hoozywhatsit, but what if he starts making VR calls that
| require uploading massive amounts of data? Or some mesh
| technology takes off? Or he takes up vlogging?
|
| I don't like the command-and-control mentality behind
| traditional one-way media (not saying that's your mentality).
| The further we get from that, the better
| diordiderot wrote:
| I can easily envision a future where live 'lidar' scans of
| your body and face need to be streamed as part of a VR
| chatroom
| toast0 wrote:
| > You get symmetrical speeds with fiber, but if ISPs could
| use the existing fiber infrastructure and allocate 75% of the
| bandwidth as download instead of 50%, that would be a win.
|
| That depends on the fiber access mechanism. GPON is usually
| 2.4 G down / 1.2 G up TDMA over a shared medium. The
| downstream direction has perfect synchronization because it's
| a single sender, but upstream synchronization is more
| difficult across the many terminals, so they use a lower
| speed to compensate. I don't know what the common fiber
| connectivity models are in the UK though.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| It's GPON in most deployments. I think they're rolling out
| XGS-PON in some places.
| type0 wrote:
| Unfortunately ISPs not interested in that, too many legal
| letters because of file sharing users. So instead they they
| usually consider it a premium feature that they up-sell to
| gamers. Imagine how different the web would look like with many
| users with symmetrical connections, Opera Unite envisioned
| something like this https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/opera-
| unite.html
| paxys wrote:
| This law is about home networking, which has nothing do with
| with symmetrical/asymmetrical bandwidth allotted by your ISP.
| thedaly wrote:
| > Additionally, a new law has been introduced that requires
| new properties in England to be built with gigabit broadband
| connections, sparing tenants from footing the bill for later
| upgrades.
| nomel wrote:
| Is this a correction to his statement? Symmetry isn't
| mentioned here, which could mean they're free to throttle
| it. Hardware capabilities rarely match service limitations,
| when money is involved.
| gmadsen wrote:
| agreed. Fiber is the only option for residential symmetric in
| the US, and those locations are far and few between
| wmf wrote:
| Almost all gigabit is already symmetric so this is a concern of
| the past.
| tomalpha wrote:
| Not the bulk of FTTP connections in the UK, to which this
| article refers, which run over Openreach's common last-mile
| or Virgin Media's DOCSIS cables. They're the only National
| operators offering gigabit, or near-gigabit speeds.
|
| There are plenty of smaller ISPs that run their own fibre and
| do offer symmetric connections, but the bigger players all
| off asymmetric connections.
| jayflux wrote:
| Your comment contradicts itself. You mention a bulk of FTTP
| connections then mention virgins DOCSIS. I'm assuming
| you're talking about their Coaxial cables, if so it's not
| FTTP in the first place it will be FTTC.
|
| My understanding is their new fibre lays are all "symmetric
| ready", same with BT. You're right they currently don't
| operate them in that fashion, but they've laid the
| groundwork. See below.
|
| https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/11/first-trial-
| us...
| iMerNibor wrote:
| I'm a customer of virgin's fttp connection, which is
| converted from fibre to coax on premise - so yes, actual
| fiber going to your house, but running docsis in some
| fashion or other
|
| The article you linked covers this as well:
|
| > while more than 1 million of their premises are also
| being served by "full fibre" FTTP using the older Radio
| Frequency over Glass (RFoG) approach to ensure
| compatibility between both sides of their network.
|
| As for them going symmetric in the future: I'll believe
| it when they do, not holding my breath
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| Do you know what makes them asymmetric? Is it just traffic
| shaping at the ISP, or is it some hardware limitation?
| [deleted]
| komadori wrote:
| It's not necessarily a hardware limitation (depending on
| hardware), but the at the physical layer the frequency
| plan for a DSL or PON connection typically allocates a
| narrower band for upstream traffic than downstream
| traffic. GPON is usually 2.4 Gbit down and 1.2 Gbit up
| across everyone attached to the same optical splitter.
| nomel wrote:
| This is a choice, by the ISPs, unrelated to the physical
| layer. It would be nice if it were a requirement.
| jallen_dot_dev wrote:
| Seems like a really bad idea to mandate that download be no
| higher than upload. Would just result in few/no plans with high
| down bandwidth.
| dylan604 wrote:
| but how does a fiber connection even get affected by a
| limited upload? it's just an artificial limit in order to
| squeeze larger monthly fees from the user. it's not like
| extra gear/equipment is needed to give full speed in both
| directions.
| zokier wrote:
| Passive optical networks are usually assymetric at hardware
| level
| jen20 wrote:
| Which is fine if you're also regulating the minimum download
| bandwidth?
| ac29 wrote:
| It should be noted that according to government estimates, 88% of
| new homes were already built with gigabit access prior to this
| law (which seems impressive as an American!). The new rule is
| expected to move that number to 98%.
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| The incumbent cable provider (Virgin Media) offers gigabit to
| virtually every property they serve, which is something like 15
| million homes. That's maybe about 60% of total UK properties. I
| can already get VM gigabit I just don't want to pay for it.
| There's a competing fibre cable broadband company currently
| installing a separate network in my town and the incumbent
| national telco (British Telecom) is replacing all the last mile
| copper in town with fibre.
| adamm255 wrote:
| Yeah my new build had gigabit installed. It has become more of
| a customer demand thing prior to the law, as long as it's
| available. There have been a lot of developments finished in
| the past 5 years with 1mbps copper, hopefully the law will
| prevent that travesty happening!
| sammalloy wrote:
| This is hilarious to me, because it took 25 years from proposal
| to standard. That's a long ass time to standardize gigabit
| Internet. I remember reading a trade magazine in 1998 proposing
| it as the new standard for infrastructure.
| nimzoLarsen wrote:
| And along with that, more tax dollars flowing to ISPs in the form
| of subsidies.
| Veen wrote:
| Tax pounds.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| How i understand is is Gigabit is two parts: the first part is
| your home, router, etc supporting the connection speeds. The
| other is the infrastructure to deliver the gigabit to your home.
|
| I can see a regulation that mandates that you wire any new
| residences up so they can support gigabit, but how is this going
| to work if the municipality / ISP does not offer it?
|
| Not sure about what Gigabit rollout in the UK looks like but I
| know in the US, landlords don't always offer it because the ISP
| doesn't offer it. Seems that it would put the landlord in a
| catch-22 where they depend on the ISP to provide a service that
| they are mandated to provide but cannot because the ISP does not
| offer it.
| paxys wrote:
| Yeah, this fixes 1% of the problem (wiring up your house) while
| the other 99% (getting the service till your house) remains
| unaddressed. Still a good step, but not cause for too much
| celebration. And as the article notes 9 out of 10 new houses
| were already adding gigabit wiring even without this law.
| weego wrote:
| We don't have region/geo locked or infrastructure locked
| providers. If you have fibre to your home then any supplier in
| the UK that supports it can be your ISP.
|
| Caveat: fibre is telco infrastructure and is not limited, cable
| can still be limited ie only virgin media on virgin cable infra
| vidarh wrote:
| Not quite true. Openreach (BT) is regulated and required to
| let anyone offer service over their network.
|
| Any other provider that lays their own fibre is free to offer
| only their own ISP service. I don't have access to FTTP via
| OpenReach, but can get it from one other provider
| (CommunityFibre).
|
| If another fibre provider ever becomes dominant enough they
| might well also end up regulated more tightly, but that's not
| the case for the time being
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| Simple: let's say your house is fitted with a gigabit
| connection but the infrastructure sill isn't there. this means
| that when the infrastructure comes you will have to do zero
| work on your house. no changing of wires, no breaking the
| walls, no wasting everyone's time.
|
| I don't have a 10Gb/s switch at home, but I still use Cat6 so
| when I upgrade I won't have to crawl around my house to change
| everything
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>I can see a regulation that mandates that you wire any new
| residences up so they can support gigabit, but how is this
| going to work if the municipality / ISP does not offer it?
|
| If read the article, it says the cap is 2000 pounds, so the
| developer must do all the make-ready work in the house to
| support 1G internet, but they only have to actually connect to
| the fastest option available - and then only if the total cost
| of that is under the 2000 cap.
|
| So it's something, but I suspect many places that are out of
| luck now, will still be out of luck even with the new rules.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| What possible steps would a developer take to "make-ready"
| for 1 gigabit internet? Does the front door need to open and
| shut faster? Are the toilets going to have 4k flushing? I'm
| struggling to figure out how a developer could impede
| internet access if they actually wanted to.
| komadori wrote:
| "such as ducts, chambers and termination points"*
|
| This sort of thing is much cheaper to put in when you're
| building the street/house than after the fact.
|
| * https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2023/01/new-uk-
| laws-bo...
| criddell wrote:
| The fastest option available might be 5G cellular modem. From
| a builder's perspective, it's probably also the cheapest.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Does this mean fiber or will cable be an option as well?
| BayesianDice wrote:
| The amended regulations
| (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/984/schedule/made)
| refer to a requirement for connection to a "gigabit-capable
| public electronic communications network". And a "public
| electronic communications network" is defined in the
| Communications Act 2003 as "an electronic communications
| network provided wholly or mainly for the purpose of making
| electronic communications services available to members of the
| public".
|
| So I expect that either type of service meeting the requirement
| on speed would be acceptable.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Instead of what?
|
| Everything comes instead of something else. Whatever effort and
| resources are spent adding gigabit to new homes will mean fewer
| homes, less food, shoes, medicine, natural gas, cars or whatever.
|
| Many people will be celebrating faster internet speeds for those
| who purchase these new homes, but it's hard to see what goes
| missing when it's a little here and there from across the
| economy.
| pwinnski wrote:
| It is not at all clear that the size of the metaphorical pie is
| as fixed as you claim.
|
| Ideally gigabit internet will come "instead of" a few extra
| pounds of profit in the pockets of the builders. More likely,
| gigabit internet will come "instead of" a few extra pounds
| remaining in the pockets of the home-buyers. It's also possible
| that this will just prompt companies already installing
| equipment for new neighborhoods to install the reasonable piece
| of kit, rather than the cheapest piece of kit possible, at an
| added extra expense of nearly zero.
| ledauphin wrote:
| economies are complex. it may be "instead of spending 3x as
| much to retrofit all these new houses in 10 years when everyone
| else has gigabit".
|
| Sometimes the "economic" decision right now is just punting
| significantly higher cost of rework down the road.
| hgomersall wrote:
| They're still building crappy homes with insufficient
| insulation and a lack of a proper ventilation strategy. This
| should have been stopped years ago and saved buyers of new
| builds the current high energy prices. Well done UK gov,
| obviously the building industry lobbyists know best.
| tjohns wrote:
| > Everything comes instead of something else.
|
| Not everything is zero-sum.
|
| Sure, it takes effort to wire up every home for Gigabit, but on
| the other hand you're employing more telco workers to run the
| cables, creating more jobs. Gigabit costs more, but economy of
| scale means that average prices will be lower. Increased
| bandwidth opens up space for new technology innovation, and
| letting more people effectively work remotely (so less cars on
| the road).
|
| In practice, from what I've seen in the US, I'd guess this work
| was probably going to happen anyway. AT&T has been busy running
| fiber-to-the-home for every major neighborhood in the bay area.
| (I've gotten 10x the bandwidth, for roughly half the price I
| was paying for DOCSIS cable internet before.) It wouldn't
| surprise me if telcos in Europe are on a similar roadmap.
|
| Once the neighborhood fiber line in place on the poles, running
| a line to an individual house has negligible cost - especially
| if it's new construction and you're already pulling copper for
| power/telephone/TV. It took AT&T 30 minutes to do it at my last
| two houses.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| "Not everything is zero-sum."
|
| I didn't say it was zero sum - in fact it's definitely NOT
| zero sum. Adding gigabit to new homes will certainly - almost
| tautologically - come instead of something else.
|
| The question is whether it's worth what you give up or not.
| Maybe it is, and maybe it's not. But it's hard to make the
| correct judgement when you focus only on the gains of the
| gigabit, but it's very hard to count all the things you DON'T
| do instead. There's no great solution to this, but we must at
| the very least be aware that we are giving up other things
| that we might also want.
|
| As far as "creating jobs" - People are already working hard.
| "Creating a job" in one area really means (implicitly) re-
| purposing someone from a different activity of different
| value. This may or may not be a net win. The person could
| have been cutting hair, doing accounting, playing football,
| or simply running a fiber cable in a different area of town -
| but they aren't, they are running this cable right here where
| we "created a job."
| bobsmooth wrote:
| "Everything comes instead of something else. Whatever effort
| and resources are spent adding fireproofing/structural
| stability/longevity to new homes will mean fewer homes, less
| food, shoes, medicine, natural gas, cars or whatever."
|
| I'm honestly surprised to see this kind of narrow thinking on
| HN.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Everything is zero sum to a lot of people on here.
| awestroke wrote:
| Instead of a slightly slightly cheaper but much worse fiber
| connection
| Spivak wrote:
| Glad they're trying something but this seems silly compared to
| "we're going to start a public works project where anyone in
| England can request their home or apartment be upgraded to be 1G
| capable."
|
| This law feels like it was written by someone who wanted to do
| anything except pay for it.
|
| The queue would be massive but that's UK tradition.
| m000 wrote:
| > This law feels like it was written by someone who wanted to
| do anything except pay for it.
|
| This sentences feels like it was written to defend companies
| that want to reap profits from massively profitable areas, but
| systematically avoid investing in upgrading service in less
| profitable areas.
|
| Where self-regulation falls short of serving the public
| interest, government regulation kicks in. Well done UK!
| sgc wrote:
| I think you misunderstood the comment the op made. They were
| saying the legislation does little, and they would rather
| have seen the government also invest in retrofitting older
| homes.
| habosa wrote:
| Some color about buying home internet in London vs San Francisco
| (in my experience).
|
| I recently moved back from London to San Francisco. In my 3 years
| in central London (N1) I had to use a 5g hotspot (thank you,
| Vodafone unlimited) to get anything close to fast internet in my
| flat. If I went with a wired "broadband" connection I could not
| get more than 10Mbps down. The street next to mine had gigabit
| fiber though.
|
| The reason? Almost all utility cables in London are underground.
| So replacing internet infrastructure requires ripping up the
| street. I lived on the high street near a tube station so I guess
| they hadn't laid a new line near me in 10+ years. I was really
| shocked after calling 15+ internet companies and finding out that
| nobody could offer me higher speeds. Only different prices.
|
| Now I moved back to San Francisco and I was excited to get some
| fast internet in my home. Quickly it became obvious that Comcast
| was my only real option at my address. They had plans up to
| 1200MBps down, but nothing over 20Mbps up! And 50%+ of the plans
| had data caps. I find a 1Gbps plan with a 500GB data cap
| hilarious ... theoretically you could use the entire data cap in
| ~75 minutes if you could saturate it. That's a lot less than a
| month!
|
| So basically internet is a disaster in both countries but it
| sounds like this is a step in the right direction.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| I moved from the Bay Area to a rural place in the southeast. It
| is a mystery how I am able to get 10Gbps fiber here from not
| only AT&T but also the local utility company, whereas in
| Redwood City my option was basically only Comcast with a slow
| upload cap.
| rayiner wrote:
| It's not a "mystery." California makes it expensive and
| difficult to build infrastructure. That's why Google Fiber
| started out in places like Kansas City. I live in a
| historically red county in the Verizon footprint. I have two
| fiber lines into my house, one from Verizon and one from
| Comcast. I get 6 gbps service from Comcast. It's expensive
| ($300/month, compared to 10 gig for $300 in Chattanooga). But
| it's not even an option in most of Silicon Valley.
| donatj wrote:
| > I find a 1Gbps plan with a 500GB data cap hilarious
|
| This is how I ended up paying the extra $20 a month for
| unlimited data. I had 1TB cap on a 1Gbps connection. My wifes
| friend who was unemployed and staying us would put Netflix
| shows on for ambiance all day as she wandered about the house
| (not even watching it!) - streaming 4k Netflix ate up serious
| data pretty quickly and I got quite a few overage charges.
|
| It's just bizarre to me that we live in an age where "turn off
| the TV, it's costing me actual measurable amounts of money" is
| a real thing.
| kccqzy wrote:
| The underground utility is a big reason why, where I live, an
| older house from the baby boom period (1950s) might have fiber
| and gigabit internet but a newer home from the 1980s might not.
| dylan604 wrote:
| yet another example of how they just built things better/to
| last in the 50s! /s
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| How was the 5G hotspot though?
| secondcoming wrote:
| If you are in the right location it's a viable alternative to
| fibre. Here's mine, elsewhere in the UK (not in Newcastle):
|
| https://www.speedtest.net/result/14185051949
|
| Cheaper than fibre and 30-day rolling contract. Unlimited
| data.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. This seems totally fine, if not more
| than acceptable? How much does this cost?
| secondcoming wrote:
| PS28pm. It's great, I originally intended to use it
| temporarily while potentially waiting for fibre to be
| connected, but it was so good I didn't bother with fibre
| in the end.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| I know this probably doesn't help you currently, but if you
| move look for places that have Wave-G (apparently it's now
| called astound). It's available in SF and Seattle and offers
| symmetric gig up/down with no cap for $80/mo. I had it in
| Seattle, and I have a good friend with it in SF and we both had
| nothing but great experiences with them.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Try Monkeybrains.
| paxys wrote:
| Monkeybrains is great for the price, but if you want a more
| premium and reliable service then there are much better
| options. Google Fiber (Webpass) does symmetric gigabit. AT&T
| has 5 gigabit. Sonic 10 gigabit. Of course the real problem
| is that your building likely won't have any of them.
| everdrive wrote:
| That seems more likely to give me a prion disease, so no
| thank you.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| If you live in the Avenues in SF or in certain parts of the
| East Bay (Oakland, Richmond, some parts of Berkeley) - Sonic
| has started rolling out 10gbps Fiber as well. All of those
| places have 1gbps on offer, but people are playing with the
| 10gbps too;
|
| https://dongknows.com/10gbps-internet-unlocking-super-
| broadb...
| dylan604 wrote:
| Are they chilled? Also, does it come after the eyeball soup
| course?
| gpderetta wrote:
| My previous home in London was a purpose built flat. I could
| chose between two different fibre-to-the-home providers that
| had each run their own wire to each apartment in the block.
| They were both quite cheap.
|
| Recently I moved to a terraced house about 300m from my
| previous flat. The only internet option is expensive and slow
| fibre-to-the-cabinet-down-the-street.
|
| Yes, coverage in London is uneven!
| dheera wrote:
| They need to reword the law to keep up with Moore's Law, so
| that if you built a home in 2023 you'd be required to have 1
| gigabit, in 2024 you'd be required to have 1.2 gigabit, in 2025
| you'd be required to have 1.44 gigabit, etc.
|
| The moment internet connections don't keep up with Moore's Law,
| the real estate typhoons would then have no choice but to fund
| bandwidth-related R&D to get internet connections back on track
| with the requirement before they could sell more homes.
| skybrian wrote:
| But why? How many videos are you going to watch at the same
| time?
| barnabee wrote:
| Not sure about the answer to that exact question but I'd
| like to turn my PC on and be able to update any game I feel
| like playing in less than 5 minutes. Sometimes there are
| many 10s of gigabytes of updates.
| whitepoplar wrote:
| Comcast now offers vastly higher upload speeds (10mbps ->
| 100mbps) so long as you rent their modem, which is an
| additional $25/month, but also comes with unlimited data.
| Paying for unlimited data separately costs $30/month if you own
| your own modem, but doesn't yet support higher upload speeds.
| It's unfortunate that this is the case, but for those who need
| higher upload speeds, it's at least _possible_ with Comcast
| now.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/want-faster-comc...
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Comcast now offers vastly higher upload speeds (10mbps ->
| 100mbps)
|
| I mean, yeah, I guess normally a 10x increase is deemed a
| good thing and could be considered "vastly higher". Who
| wouldn't be impressed with a 10x bump in pay?
|
| However, 100mbps is still tragically low. Having anything
| less than full bandwidth up/down on a fiber line is just
| cheating the user artificially. Being fiber, I could see
| offering a cheaper modem because it has a cheaper SFP in it,
| but even those are dirt cheap now for lowly 1Gbps
| vel0city wrote:
| Comcast often isn't FTTP, its is usually coax to the home.
| There are some services they do with FTTP, such as their
| 2Gbit service, but _most_ installs are coax.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >but most installs are coax.
|
| Good gawd! It's like cable is in their DNA and they
| invested heavily in a cable manufacturing company and are
| trying to keep it alive /s
|
| also, is it pushing the limits of marketing to say you
| have a fiber connection if the cable coming into your
| home is actually coax?
| rayiner wrote:
| It's not "cheating the user artificially." Comcast delivers
| service over shared-medium coaxial cable that was
| originally designed for one-way service. The available
| frequencies are split into upload and download portions,
| and increasing the upload speed decreases the download
| speed.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Comcast offers higher upload speeds in the markets where
| there is competition. In the markets where they have bribed
| their way to a monopoly they have limited uploads and data
| caps. Fortunately I don't live in one of those so I can avoid
| them and wish the unholy demise of them as a company.
| Vrondi wrote:
| From the article you link: "Comcast told Ars that faster
| upload speeds will come to customer-owned modems "later next
| year" but did not provide a more specific timeline."
|
| So, no. Do not rent their modem/router crap.
| whitepoplar wrote:
| It's still cheaper than owning your own (if you already
| have the unlimited data add-on).
| [deleted]
| thomseddon wrote:
| For clarity - whilst most connectivity infrastructure in London
| is underground, it's almost always within a primary duct, so
| running new infrastructure is usually a case of pulling in a
| new cable as opposed to "ripping up the street".
|
| In fact, anyone approved can use BTs own ducts and poles via
| their PIA product[1], which has created a resurgent and
| incredibly active market of "alternative" network providers
| ("alt nets"). London for example is now well served for
| broadband by Community Fibre, g.network, Hyperoptic and others
| alongside the incumbents.
|
| [1] https://www.openreach.co.uk/cpportal/products/passive-
| produc...
| alias_neo wrote:
| Hyperoptic we're great. I could pay PS5/month for a static
| IPv4 so I wasn't stuck behind CGNAT, their IPv6 worked great
| and I could use my own network equipment and they're provide
| the configs; though I hear they're less forthcoming with that
| info for people running not-ISP hardware these days.
|
| First monthly contract I've parted ways with reluctantly (I
| moved home).
|
| I got the first year free from one-month discounts by
| referring all my neighbours.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I still haven't figure out how to get IPv6 with hyperoptic
| with my own router. Other than that, I second, good
| service.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Don't bother. Their IPv6 setup is notoriously broken.
| They have a number of IPv6 misconfiguration in their core
| switches which makes using IPv6 with your own hardware
| almost impossible.
|
| Unfortunately it seems they've also let go of all their
| good network admin. It used to be possible to find
| someone at Hyperoptic capable of investigating and fixing
| these issues, but no more.
| alias_neo wrote:
| Something definitely changed around COVID time, they
| stopped providing the info to set up your own kit freely,
| they wouldn't put you in touch with L3+ tech anymore and
| you couldn't connect your own kit without cloning IDs.
|
| I had an issue one time, around 2020 and I couldn't fit
| the life of me get past a zero-knowledge L1.
|
| Back in 2017-18 when I joined they put me in touch with
| one of their network engineers who helped me configure my
| EdgeRouter.
| alias_neo wrote:
| I was using a Uniquiti EdgeRouter and it was fairly
| trivial, then I switched to a pfSense box and it was a
| little harder but not much.
|
| The hard part is that you have to clone the UDID (I think
| that was the value, sorry don't quite remember now), they
| used to allow any hardware to join the network but that's
| no longer the case; so you have the clone the value from
| the hardware they provide you with.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| It may be in a duct, but occasionally the manholes are in
| really awkward locations - like in the middle of an extremely
| busy road.
|
| I've been waiting for symmetric fibre for a year, and they're
| trying to install it, but getting the permission to close the
| road to lift up the manhole is proving to be a challenge.
| thomseddon wrote:
| Yeah it's certainly not without issue, the network is full
| of blockages, collapsed ducts etc.
|
| Traffic management and road closures can be hard work,
| we've had to wait over a year before for a road closure as
| it would affect multiple bus routes. (And as an aside,
| lockdown was extremely productive for network build like
| this!)
| jnathsf wrote:
| try Sonic - I live in SF and have a dedicated fiber connection
| acchow wrote:
| Comcast has a 500GB data cap in SF? Isn't it 1.2TB?
| alias_neo wrote:
| I moved from a village in Cheshire where I had 500Mb/500Mb to
| London Zone 3 where the best I could get was 3Mb/0.2Mb, then I
| bought a new build in Zone 6 where I could get 1.2Gb/1.2Gb, now
| I moved to Liverpool into a 1930s house where I can get
| 1.2Gb/100Mb (FttP) which isn't great uoload (I work remote),
| but is because it's GPON.
|
| I got a letter through the door a week or two ago saying
| they're building out 10Gb/10Gb on my road over the next few
| years, so I've got a bit of time to start upgrading my kit to
| handle 10Gb symmetric, which I'm hoping will push the price
| down of the sub-10Gb speeds, because let's he honest, I don't
| need 10/10.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| My brother has Gig ethernet in London, 1G in both directions.
| Lives south of the river, even... :)
|
| I've got AT&T GigE here in San Jose, but he's had it for longer
| than I have.
| dp-hackernews wrote:
| The beginning of the end of privacy. The beginning of the end of
| freedom of speech. Who will control the conduit to the outside -
| NOT the individual. This is the beginning of a worldwide MITM
| attack on all of society! Tyranny comes slowly, like an aid to
| ones life until you are trapped by it and no longer have the
| ability to reject it. It gives you just enough riches to allow
| you to hang yourself, or to force you throw yourself at the feet
| of the tyrant. Nothing good will come of this if it is allowed to
| be enforced unchallenged. Just who is looking to the future for
| the benefit of the masses?
| bool3max wrote:
| I mean what you are saying is true but how does it relate to
| mandated gigabit internet?
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