I've never heard of a fiber connection with a data cap like that. I ended up moving to fiber eventually, it was cheaper for the same speed and the upload speed matched the download speed as well.
Bufferbloat was horrendous with Comcast so latency varied wildly depending on what was happening on the network. The only way around it was to cap download and upload to 80%, and that's a large dent on the already anemic upload. And I had to cap client upload too, otherwise one client could easily saturate upload and now not even TCP ACK packets were being reliably sent.
The main problem isn't cable per se, is the asymmetric link.
EDIT: Also 1Gbps symmetric allows me to backup my NAS offsite without impacting anyone else.
For buried infrastructure where the coaxial cable company already sells internet, you will almost never recoup your investment to bury new fiber and run it to all the homes. You can have the superior product, but insufficient people will pay enough more than the existing coaxial cable prices.
I got underground fiber direct to the basement of a student apartment years ago and it was basically a hundred dollars for install fees. They must have already been laying it on the street, but still. Competition?
Probably a main difference is that the Swedish infrastructure was deployed by municipalities with an open access model, so no need for 10 different ISPs to dig their own cabling.
I'm not expecting you to do that, but I want to trigger some discussion on what are the exact reasons we all don't do that.
I work from home 1 or 2 days a week. My current bandwidth is more than sufficient for my personal usage. And I exclusively use Wifi, other than a TV and a Nintendo Switch that happen to be right next to the router so are plugged in. So even if I had fiber, I literally wouldn't know a difference because my wifi would be the bottleneck still.
Back when Google Fiber was rolling in, no one I knew was looking forward to it because they had need for the increased bandwidth. They looked forward to it because the expectation of a 'Google' branded product was better than the expectation of a 'Comcast' branded product. It was more about the expected uptime and consistency.
When I moved there like 10yrs ago I thought I would finally have 1gig fiber, but bandwidth was on par with what I had with my parent's VDSL connection from the country side, and latencies were worse, I went from sub-5ms to 30ms because many servers were actually in LA and the routes were bad (I expected ~1ms per 100km, not ~5ms/100km).
ISP gerrymandering to avoid competition was unexpected coming from the land of free markets
It worked for the French.
> The Carr FCC said last year that the gigabit goal “may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds.”
I don't know if this is so much a handout to Starlink, seems like a way to win the race by moving the finish line.
The ability to download/upload large files without worry, and the decreased latency, are well worth the handful of neighborhoods I’ve declined based on this requirement.
Congratulations to France, for helping to make sure the future is more evenly distributed.
And also the fact that they have crazy low prices which forced the 3 other ISPs to stay competitive
Canada as a whole is expected to have 90% high speed internet by the end of 2026, and 100% by 2030.
Still, cable can get up to 1Gbps, and probably higher, so it's a distinction without a difference.
The push to make sure that 100% of people have access to high-speed internet is the most important thing.
"Cable is equivalent" only if you don't need/want a symmetric connection - until they lay fiber I'm stuck with an awful upload speed.
can government STOP this fucking spectrum(Charter Communications) monopoly.
You have more problems than just the monopoly. Like the FCC, among other federal agencies, being completely captured by big business.
I think France and Spain are the best of the big European countries regarding coverage, but also adoption: If we look at the adoption ranking globally, Spain sits fourth at 90%, behind the UAE, China and South Korea and ahead of France at 83.6%.
Very few European countries convert coverage into subscriptions that efficiently, and I think it's driven by competition. You can get 500Mb symmetric connection for as little 10 euro [1], 20 for 2Gbps. DIGI has just gone crazy and in their own network they are offering symmetric 10Gbps for 25. Most people I know have 1Gbps because when is that not enough?
[0]: https://digital.gob.es/en/telecomunicaciones-infraestructura...
Second a lot of people has still FTTC even if it has FTTH, mostly because FTTC offers a speed that is enough for most people (100Mbit/s) and upgrading may have costs (the installation of the fiber is at the expense of the ISP, but if you need to make modifications, such as put a pipe from your house to the street in which they will put the fiber, it's at your expense). In some cases even if fiber is present it's difficult/not possible to get it into your house (for example you live in a condo and the other tenants doesn't want to spend money to make the modifications that are needed to pass the wires).
In any case they have started to switch off copper (since it costs money to maintain an infrastructure that has decades), so either way customers will be forced to move to fiber or 5G network in the upcoming years. In any case a fault on a copper line is likely not to be repaired...
What did they have though? Optic fiber, high bandwidth, low latency, reliable and for a very low price.
Honestly I think ADSL was already enough for most people, I mean non professionals, but now I think France has the infrastructure for a good enough Internet for the next few decades. I can't fathom normal usages that would need higher bandwidth and lower latency.
It really changes the calculus on some things with large volumes of data on my desktop. Admittedly, my desktop maxes out at 2.5 Gbps, but everything else in the house keeps happily chugging along.
Orange has started decommissioning its legacy copper network.
It is really fast and reliable. You can get symmetric 8Gbps for around $100/month USD ($140/month CAD.)
I had to move to a place that didn't have fiber but by all means should be getting it Real Soon Now (urban, surrounded by fiber build-out, on an arterial) but I'm basically accepting that I'll be doomed to DOCSIS for the foreseeable future.
Never mind that the sharing rules are harshly tilted in Bell's favor. They charge Teksavvy ~$80 a month for that access, but then will sell it directly to consumers for $50/month under their house discount brands like Ebox and Distributel.
It's a very sparsely populated area, we're kilometers away from the nearest village and indeed we've got fiber to the home (since years and years already now).
Now it's not all rosy: they filter traffic/block IPs/force website to imposes checks (like age checks) that aren't done elsewhere, block torrents, etc.
I'd say it's the least open Internet I've seen in any EU country (now of course there's VPN and I can use a SOCKS5 proxy through ssh to one of my server etc. but still: France are complete control freaks and it shows).
Maybe EU should develop rapid deployment constellation capability, a few hundred satellites deployed on a single orbit when needed.
Also the vendors do not commercialize ADSL anymore since a decade ago or so if fiber is installed in the district.
As a result, many rural areas have way better internet than big cities.
Their workers were staying at my hotel, and putting fiber in my community. It was fascinating how frontier practically hires contractor to lay down pipes, and another contractor to pull the fiber, and another contractor to splice it and another contractor to run fiber to the house, and another contractor to come and install in the house.
You can get 8 Gigabit symmetric home internet from Bell but not IPv6.
These sorts of prices are unheard of in the US, so incredibly low.
Something has gone deeply wrong with US telecommunications.
I work at an ISP that gets DSLAM equipment from Huawei, we run one of the few G.fast VDSL deployments in the world using this particular hardware. Huawei has stopped manufacturing this product line (Switzerland is a rounding error ;), which will force us to fully migrate some neighborhoods, only for backup inventory.
Germany being 15 years late, I assume you can still buy similar hardware from AVM though.
Also that's kind of irrelevant because it is free/cheap to get the ISP to pay for bringing fiber into the home (at least if you are in an urbanized area ? But if not, the paragraph above still applies)
samudrijan•1h ago