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.
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.
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.
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!)
But my impression of London (from living there for a few years in the 2010s) was that it is very much a 6am-11pm city and everything is shut at night. Surely infrastructure work can take place during night shifts?
I found the experience of working in the city and living in Westminster frustrating, because shops, public transport and even pubs(!) would effectively have closed by the time you finished work.
It's a bit later nowadays, at least in the normal sorts of places you'd go out (Soho, Shoreditch, etc.). Though, what are you doing working until 11pm?
In any case you'll still find the roads can be busy at all hours. The night is used, as you say, for a lot of infrastructure type stuff which means the main roads are still busy, getting the city ready for the next day.
I no longer do - working in the City wasn't for me. And neither was living in England. A week in the summer and over Christmas turned out to be just the right amount of blighty for me.
Hyperoptic we're great. I could pay £5/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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been using their IPv6 for years on my Turris Omnia (TurrisOS is based on OpenWRT and also open source) plugged directly to their switch. Everything works via DHCPv6 and RA. I get a /56 PD that I can use for my LAN subnets as I wish. The IPv6 Internet is fast and stable.
I also used their IPv6 setup for years. But then it got broken after they did maintenance, and I’ve never been able to get it fixed.
I’ve talked to insiders about this stuff, and there’s a number of known long running misconfigurations issues. Which unfortunately I’ve probably been hit with. I’ve also been told the odds of it getting fix via support is zero at this point.
In my case their switches refuse to assign an IP to any of my gear. My config hasn’t changed, and I’ve done some pretty in depth debugging. TL;DR I need to spoof some non-compliant with my gear to get their gear to play ball. I’ve zero interest in playing that game, I need IPv6 to be rock solid reliable, or it’s just not worth the effort.
> Country-level generalizations about internet speeds are basically useless in 2023.
I'm not sure that's true. Nobody in Australia on a residential grade NBN connection (which most people are on, and those are aren't are being forced onto) has > 1gbps, and none of them have syncronous up.
This is absolutely run in lock step on a country level.
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.
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."
>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
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.
The cable companies are incredibly slow to deploy new hardware because of the legacy infrastructure. Example: Where is the DOCSIS 3.1 upstream support? Many of the modems are capable, the cable plant is not.
which just goes to show that they are not truly using fiber. which is my point. if you're using fiber, it is designed to be bi-directional full duplex or whatever to call it technically. if you are offering a true fiber connection with asymmetric speeds, then you are doing something artificial to it.
if you are actually using coax cable, then it's 100% artificial since it's supposed to be fiber.
oh i don't know. somewhere in the multiple responses in this subject got to talking about fiber, so that's what this is in my head. re-reading, i see the title as they are only requiring gigabit speed, not what medium is sent.
fuck'em anyways!!! their all shit companies and deserved to be yelled at for something they're not doing to make up for all of the yelling they are not getting for something else they are doing. /s
Hey remember when Google delivered kick ass fiber service all over their own back yard in Silicon Valley to show Comcast and Verizon how it should be done?
because that's no where near gigabit. and what large majority of users do is that really the metric we're going for here?
also, when's the last time you transferred a large amount of data over that slow of a connection? i don't care! I do it every day, and i'm all that matters!!! /s
This seems like circular reasoning. Why is being nowhere near gigabit tragic?
> and what large majority of users do is that really the metric we're going for here?
Well I don't know what your metric is, which is why I'm asking.
> also, when's the last time you transferred a large amount of data over that slow of a connection? i don't care! I do it every day, and i'm all that matters!!! /s
I'm sure there are people who upload a lot of content and need > 100 I'm not trying to invalidate those. But they're also the people who know what they need and can pay for it.
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.
Speaking of coax -- does anyone know if there's a way to hang multiple wireless access points off of coax run through the home, or would one have to get multiple modems to make this work?
I've run into a couple of housing situations for myself and family where wifi does not covers the whole household well (combo of wall composition and local interference). In these conditions repeaters sometimes don't help as much as you'd like. But in every one of these conditions, there's been coax already run through the walls to support TV-cable hookups in different rooms... so if there's a way to hang other wireless access points off it, the problem could be pretty handily solved at least the 100MB/S order without having to run new CAT.
(Some of these places also have phone/CAT3 but I'd guess that's not 100MB/S even if I could get equipment that'd run ethernet over it, and I know there's also networking over household powerlines but would also guess that's 100MB/S across different household circuits in the house which usually coincide with WiFi coverage obstacles)
Honestly, the mesh wifi solutions are pretty decent; I've never had luck with the repeaters at all even without interference. MoCA can work, my last experience with it was 5 years ago but I found the connection to be flaky and unreliable. I actually had slightly better luck with powerline ethernet, but that was still flaky and both systems required fiddling with the hardware at least once a month.
I have the previous gen Eero (with 2x ethernet jacks per station) and have had excellent luck, my desktop is connected to the farthest station from the modem and I have little trouble saturating my crappy residential cable connection. My only main gripe is the hardware is only configurable via phone app and I assume Amazon is spying on me. However, in 3 years I have only had to mess with the system once after one of the stations didn't rejoin automatically after a power loss. Plus, it provides absolutely fantastic coverage to a oddly shaped property that is very long and narrow with a metal sided garage workshop on the end. But the limited options available are seriously annoying, you can basically only set dns and basic filtering/port forwarding.
If you don't need the coax anymore, you really might just think about using the coax runs to pull some CAT6 through the walls. Same goes with the telephone wiring.
That's a good thought, and I guess I could even use it as pull for both replacement coax and CAT6, while I'm at it. But probably beyond what the owner would like me doing in rental situations, and maybe more work than I'd like in the remaining ones if I can even start to approach gigabit order-of-magnitude over coax alone.
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?
edit: just to clarify, is it really fiber if the demarc isn't in/on your house? I get running fiber to the home to a device that then turns that into coax to run to the modem of choice for the vendor. i have fiber to fiber so the demarc is sitting right being my desk with a 6' cat6 cable from it to the modem. if your advertised fiber service brings fiber over long haul to the neighborhood but then breaks that out into standard coax for last mile delivery, is that still a fiber connection?
> 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?
This kind of bullshit is standard practice in the UK too. Pretty much every internet connection you can buy here is "fibre", but in reality most of it will end up being DSL.
I haven't seen them advertise coax service as fiber? Everything I've seen clearly positions their fiber-only service as being a different thing from their standard cable internet.
> Comcast now offers vastly higher upload speeds (10mbps -> 100mbps) so long as you rent their modem, which is an additional $25/month
$25/month is more than what I pay for 100Mbps up, 1Gbps down with unlimited data and a router included. Man, we Europeans have it good when it comes to internet access.
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.
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.
So, the legends are true, and there are actually people south of the river? ;)
Seriously though, in my flat in SE15, I had some decent DSL (as good as it can be, with pitiful bandwidth but it was really stable). I planned to get Hyperoptic to lay some fibre, but then I moved to a different place with 10/10 FTTH.
My pet peeve in London is the patchiness of 4G and 5G coverage. It’s a bloody big city, and yet I regularly get no bars at all in zones 1 and 2. It’s the same for broadband: some streets are great, other very much less so.
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.
There's a pretty big difference between "can't get above 10 Mbps down", which is pretty bad and "can't get above 10 Mbps up), which is not nearly as bad. Most people's internet usage is highly download-heavy!
Pre-video conferencing there wasn't a whole lot that would use upload at all (outside of niche use cases like torrenting). Hard to blame the cable companies for prioritizing download bandwidth. I lived through covid on a normal cable plan of 200/10 and never ran into major issues.
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.
They say we'll have "unlimited" energy but it's really not unlimited, it can be petawatts but it's still finite, and people will invent new devices that will drain all of the fusion fuel as well instead of powering our current lifestyle.
People won't own cars, they'll fly themselves everywhere because it's "okay" to consume megawatts per person, and we'll end up draining all the oceans of their deuterium.
It's exactly what happened when oil was discovered, it was thought of as an "unlimited" energy source in the days of horses.
On the plus side fusion energy is carbon-clean, but its fuel is most certainly finite.
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.
> But why? How many web sites are you going to open at once?
You in 2010 about 10 Mbit/s, probably.
Okay, with less snark, having the capacity just opens up so much more opportunities. Imagine live streaming VR, hosting a video conferencing server, working with remote drives etc.. It really makes no sense to limit our data connections by current use cases, when current use cases are limited by our current data connections. Especially since there is no technical reason to do so.
For a long time in the UK almost all internet providers used BT Openreach's[1] infrastructure, except for Virgin.
[1]
BT Openreach - which all the internet providers except Virgin use.
- This goes back to BT and before it was privatized, the post office.
[2]
Virgin, took over Nynex infrastructure and put in fibre optic cables.
Unfortunately, Virgin has some pretty bad caps.
I had pretty bad down speed in London on copper cables, but my provider, Zen Internet uses the FritzBox router - it had good enough diagnostics to tell me there was a problem between the router and the box on the street, eventually got an engineer to come out and I got 70Mbit down and about 20mbit up.
Since I moved to a different road in London, everything is fibre, I could get 1gbit, but I got the 100mbit plan which works out about not so different from my previous plan in practice.
Yes the options in the Bay Area are rough! I just moved to Oakland and I have Sonic with symmetric 1gbps for $40 per month, the first time I’ve ever been able to get fiber after 20 years in the Bay. Anyway seems like there might be more fiber in the East Bay for some reason.
> 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.
Honestly, she was on really hard times already and I didn’t want to make it worse.
I looked for options within the app to disable 4K but couldn’t find anything, I ended up lowering my Netflix subscription to not include 4K but that didn’t kick in until the following month.
Just circling back on the topic of "good enough work" from a few days ago. Spain rolled out 93% of fiber coverage in a relatively short period of time, but that meant tearing up sides of streets in most cases, and/or air cables.
Yeah, the air cables are unsightly, and the roads have a different-colored "strip" on one side. But we have good internet.
If they wanted to do it "perfect, and polished" then we would still have ISDN/satellite internet for many years to come.
Bay Area residents should really consider Sonic as their internet provider. I have gigabit speed, fiber direct to my unit, and a bill lower than Comcast's, with no data cap
Sonic only works some places, specifically where there are overhead power lines they can use to route the cables.
There used to be some discussion about "microtrenching" so they could cost-effectively bury fiber throughout the city but the Board of Supervisors shut that down pretty definitively (or rather: made requirements that made it too expensive for sonic).
So Sonic is really good where you can get it, but you can't get it in much of the city. You also have to be careful, because Sonic has two types of offering: fiber (good) and reselling at&t dsl (pretty bad). Only get them if you get the actual fiber!
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.
Enjoy that price while it lasts and get ready to haggle; the non-promotional rate (found on the "Rate Cards" page linked at the bottom of Astound's website) for your speed tier is $161.99 per month in addition to the Network Access and Maintenance Fee.
At least in former RCN areas, there's usually at least a semi-viable competitor, and after being away for 2 months, you generally become eligible for the new customer promotions again.
More SF/London anecdata: I got reliable low-latency 100Mbps via BT FTTC in 2011 (in SW12), which was better than anything I had ever gotten in the US across 3 states I lived in until 2018 at which point I got 1 Gbps AT&T Fiber in the East Bay which has been fantastic.
Maybe it's a problem with living in a city? I live in a suburb and have had fiber optic internet for nearly 2 decades. Currently I pay for a 1 Gig plan (up and down - unlimited data - I use my own router/modem), but 2 and 5 Gig speeds are also offered.
I bought a house in rural new mexico and forgot entirely to check this until I moved in.
Thankfully, I could get 40Mbps down / 5Mbps up which is enough for me. It is scary to think about what I would have done if the service had been substantially worse (or not available at all).
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.
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.
Is that all over your state? There are places in California, including parts of Silicon Valley, where you can get 10 Gbps fiber Internet service for $40/month.
FiOS is almost everywhere in the state. Comcast 6 gig fiber is anywhere within 1,760 feet of a fiber node that has overhead (rather than buried) utilities.
Similarly, AT&T and Comcast are almost everywhere in California with at least 1 Gbps service for $70. Places with fiber laid by Sonic have 10 Gbps at $40/month. I checked a random address in Redwood City, where Xcelerate was from, and found that Comcast offers 6 Gbps service there too for the same price you get it, as well as AT&T fiber.
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.
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.
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;
£28pm. 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.
It was great. £50/month and I used 1TB of data with no throttling. Two people working from home full time. Only occasionally slow. Not great latency though.
Just more admin fees and paperwork to build a building, making them more expensive. Make 30cm insulation a requirement so we don't pay £2000 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.
New building regulations, Part O, which came into effect in June last year, set out rules on overheating. Those regs impact the minimum amount of insulation required in new homes while ensuring they're designed to prevent overheating in summer.
Keep in mind that prior to that, Part L stipulated that loft insulation had to be at least 270mm thick. That's specifically for mineral wool and similar roll style insulation which is the most common option. PIR on the other hand wouldn't have to be as thick to meet the same performance criteria.
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.
Property prices are based on whatever the local market will support.
Homebuilders may argue that it’ll increase costs that’ll need to be passed on when they’re lobbying against these sorts of measures but once passed, it’s done. It wouldn’t enter into the discussion with a buyer.
“Hey, we’d have sold you this property for £300k but since the government forced us to give you faster internet we’ve had to bump the price a couple of grand”
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 38°C 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 £600-800 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.
> that place was 38°C in my living room with all windows and doors open in the summer.
If your window is open you will have the same air temperature as outside, potentially higher. I saw a lot of that in my apartment block this summer. People don't have experience dealing with high temperatures, and intuitions they have are wrong.
What you want to do is
1. Open windows at night to create draft and cool down your dwelling.
2. During the day close windows and block sunlight as much as possible. Blocking sunlight on the outside of window is better than blocking it inside. If blocking inside with something like thermal curtains you may need to leave window a crack open. Sunhouse-like conditions may cause temperature next to window increse by a lot (60+) which is not good for glass.
3. (1) and (2) can be supplemented with AirCon, but it's not that popular in UK.
We had Venetian blinds but they're inside the windows so all of the heat was already inside by the time it hits them, it didn't help much. We don't live there now so we have different problems.
Electric heating, man. 800£ is still a lot but I think my 2-person 60m^2 flat is doing about 200£/month in electric with only 3/5 heaters turned on (our bedrooms + lounge). With just these three heaters on it's about 40kWh a day mostly in heating (everything else uses almost nothing).
I can imagine a family with kids where you want the house to be heated all over + much more cooking/washing machine use and you could get to the £500-700 range, but 800 is still definitely a lot.
It's such a cool place here. I just wish Brits would fix their political/cultural problems. They like doing things "the good old way" too much hence political parties cater to those people. Gov should have been looking at this energy crisis thing 20 years ago; it was obvious as all hell. They went all in on gas like the scumbags they are, yeah it'll never run out. Sure.
That figure doesn't even include our electricity usage, which is fairly conservative; we average about 12kWh/day when we're not using electric heating and we're working from home.
It's a 4.5 bed detached; solid walls, suspended floor, large bay windows, some of the double glazing is shot, hard wood floor downstairs, high ceilings, some of the radiators are too small or too oldz some of the piping is too small and not insulated and runs under the house where it's extra cold.
Yes this all needs fixing, yes we working on it, but we only moved in a few months ago, it takes time, and money.
The ~£800 is just for gas and just for heating and that's without having it on enough to be warm most of the time.
When the children aren't home we just use an electric heater in two rooms; we both work from home in our own office spaces.
That's crazy having to spend so much on heating alone, hopefully it gets warmer soon.
Maybe try electric blankets - I've seen ones where you can use them like a poncho - keeping you warm while working. Must be cheaper than having to heat an entire room.
We've gotten some electric blankets for the kids and some heated throws for ourselves, also the weather is a bit milder in the positive single digit range so it's easing up a little for now, but who knows what's to come.
In my experience, new builds have very decent insulation, which works well during Winter. But they are an absolute nightmare during Summer.
British Summers are not so cool anymore. New regulations should account for this. My previous neighbor had a heat shock because her bedroom stayed over 33 C for a few nights in a row.
The standard is really low, I bumped by flat from average D to B with £300... It didn't change much, because the building is from a naked, not insulated brick. This aspect isn't part of EPC benchmarks.
I think you're way over-estimating the impact of this regulation on costs. Every house today is going to be hooked up to the internet, so the only change this mandates is slightly more expensive equipment. When you compare this to the massive costs of land, the massive costs associated with getting planning permission, and the artificial constraint of supply through planning laws, I think we're pretty far away from this regulation adding any substantial costs. On top of that, it's pretty well understood that fast internet will boost economic activity, so it's probably a benefit in exactly the same way insulation would be.
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.
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.
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.
If you mean setting up a server for each separate thing you want to host--pretty much none of us.
But I imagine it'll be more like bit torrent: Hosting just becomes part of using.
If you don't want to pay for a service, maybe you leave your computer on overnight while seeding and by the morning you've got enough cred to be a premium-tier user.
> 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.
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
Then that would be more of an issue at the exchange end. The current issue is that homes are running copper cable and so the cable needs to be changed for fibre to every street.
At least if you start with fibre to the street/house, you can update the backend infrastructure without the customers' involvement
They are that they way for a reason. Legacy copper infrastructure only offers so much bandwidth, and customers would rather have most of that bandwidth be for download.
"Most" is fine. I'm not talking about "most" as the issue.
And I'm not talking about copper either. Legacy coax is the main problem. Because it has components on the wire enforcing upload/download splits that weren't designed for modern internet service. If it was installed today (and both upload and download were openly advertised, if necessary), then it wouldn't have such an asymmetric layout. It's not customer demand limiting upload to 10-20mbps. In theory this will get fixed over time, but I want more pressure on implementing the fixes.
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.
You say you prefer steak to cabbage, but maybe if you had more cabbage you would eat it? Therefore I think we should mandate 50% of your food purchases should be cabbage.
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.
Thank you for seeing it that way, I like to think the same. It’s so sad and disheartening to see such a lack of imagination on a forum dedicated to new ideas in tech of all places. Making better things available just begets things that can take advantage of them. We’d all still be on POTS and dialup if it weren’t for some things pushing the status quo forward and people would still say you’ll never have a use for anything faster!
I get where you and others are trying to go with this, but it's just not a good argument and it doesn't translate at all into discussions about public policy. A more appropriate argument would be showing that it wouldn't be worth the cost or potential upside versus awful analogies.
For example, you can talk in abstract about infrastructure resilience for example with decentralized networks or enabling internet services via fast connections. You can't make such an argument about hula hoops. Unfortunately this "I hate everything and everything sucks" mentality is becoming more prevalent.
> The same infra that lets you download, lets you upload.
Not really. The DOCSIS protocol that runs the cable internet and GPON TDMA which runs fiber both dedicate more channels / bandwidth to download than upload.
We could come up with new communication protocols that are symmetrical, but this would lower download speed in order to increase upload speed. It's a physical limitation of the universe we inhabit. That tradeoff is not worth it for most people.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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 [...]
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.
>>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.
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.
But how would they know what to add before service is brought to the residence? Maybe it is different, but even on new construction where I live the way service comes in is very simple: a technician takes a large drill and blindly drills through the outer wall of the house to bring a cable in. At that point the install is complete. In fact, even if you have existing cabling they generally will elect not to use it unless you make a point of requesting it.
Sure, they're probably not going to lay any actual cable, but there's a lot of infrastructure needed to bring the cable from the head-end to the exterior wall of your house and some of that can be laid in advance.
Ideally, if you're building a new housing development, you can relatively inexpensively put in:
* Ducts to carry the cables under streets and driveways.
* Pavement cabinets for junction boxes, distribution equipment, and optical splitters.
This becomes much more expensive if you have to dig up the streets later.
Some of it will lie within the bounds of individual houses, but, yes, a lot relates to the streets. However, in the UK, aside from smaller infill projects, property developers will construct both the houses and the streets together. The streets will then either remain private roads or be adopted into public ownership by the local authority. So, from the perspective of the property developers these rules address, there is little difference between the two.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
The FTTP roll out is slow for sure but it’s getting there. OpenReach have a lot of funding from the government to do it but it’s wrapped up in complicated requirements is my understanding.
Unless you want to go with virgin media in which case you can usually get fttp with them - but only them.
I live in a small, sleepy, insignificant town in the Netherlands. Usually in these kind of places, there's an attempt to arrive at a democratic decision regarding the installation of fibre to the home in a collective way.
This almost always fails. The people already have broadband by means of cable internet which is pretty fast over here. There isn't really any normie application that requires fibre, which leaves only one immediate benefit: competition. The cable internet providers are region locked and monopolistic. They'll even spam your mail box with propaganda suggesting you don't need fibre.
Anyway, our municipality took a rare stance: you may not think you need it, but we're going to do it anyway. But...what about that odd farmer living 1 mile from everybody else? Makes no economic sense? Yes, him too. Everyone. By principle.
But you'll need to open the streets? Yes, and we will. And here's the schedule by the day about which street opens when. The schedule was met. In the course of 2 months, an entire ring of small towns got fibre to the home. This includes opening up people's drive way and other custom arrangements.
So now in the middle of nowhere we have fibre, and we can pick from 3 providers on this single cable. A rare case of long term government smarts, and competent execution.
> Keep in mind however, we're really talking about 50 different 'countries', when we're talking about laws like this so far.
You're not though. You know other countries also have states, provinces and territories, right? And these have their own laws? It's not an American only concept.
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.
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.
No it is not just about competition it needs to be treated as utility. Do you have 5-10 different companies bring their electricity wire or water pipes to your home of course not. It should be the same most cities should get fiber to the home themselves they can and let isp provide services over them for price let them compete on services. 10 different companies puting fiber all over a city won't be cost effective as they will do 10 times the work and 15-20 times the capital costs.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know what's going on with your account, but you've unfortunately been posting a ton of flamewar comments lately, and breaking the site guidelines badly in other ways as well.
If this keeps up, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and go back to using the site as intended?
I didn't even see that comment. We don't see everything that gets posted to HN (not even close) and often don't read the threads in linear order. If there's a comment that ought to be moderated but hasn't been, that's the likeliest explanation, and you can help by letting us know about it—by flagging it and/or (in egregious cases) emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
It isn't against the rules to be wrong. When someone else is wrong, and you know something, the thing to do is to respectfully show how they are wrong by sharing some of what you know. Then you can contribute to improving the threads instead of degrading them.
I wasn't responding to your point about how different countries treat the internet, though; I was responding to the fact that you've been breaking the site guidelines a lot lately. This, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34265230. That's obviously not cool, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.
> Maybe it'll spur you on to do something about the other low quality comments that are flooding HN.
He's doing just that. You could have engaged the counterparty, you could have ignored it or you could have just downvoted it and moved on, instead you chose to lower the level purposefully, that is the problem that you perceive as 'the quality of HN comments has gone down dramatically'. If you let yourself be provoked into reducing it even further then you are part of the problem.
A blatantly false flamebait comment that started this whole thing is still standing so no, he is not doing just that, and the community supports misinformation as long as it makes them feel good.
I don't know what "misinformation" means; people use that as a fraught pejorative these days. If you mean another comment was wrong, that's unsurprising; nearly everyone is wrong about nearly everything. As I said to drstewart, the thing to do in that case is to respectfully explain how another comment is wrong. Then we all learn something, and the person who is (by hypothesis) right doesn't make the mistake of discrediting the truth with extraneous attacks or insults (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
We can't have a rule against being wrong. That would combine several impossible things before breakfast, such as (1) making discussion impossible and (2) requiring us to have a truth meter (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), which we don't.
Your sentence "the community supports" doesn't work here because there is no singular community in this respect; there's just a statistical cloud of different users (including you!) who support a plethora of conflicting things.
Misinformation means false or inaccurate information.
>Your sentence "the community supports" doesn't work here because there is no singular community in this respect
If a comment is downvoted or flagged, it is not supported. If a comment is not downvoted or flagged, it is either supported or neutral (if it hasn’t been seen). If counterarguments to the comment are downvoted or flagged, that’s a solid signal that the original comment is supported (since it was seen) and the response was not supported.
There’s not enough time in the world to explain why every trivially posted comment is wrong. If I constantly posted comments to the effect of “there are no hospitals in Southeast Asia because it’s such a poor region”, how is that valuable? How does that help the community? Why should anyone bother to constantly correct me? And most importantly, if I’m a casual reader, I might take that as truth and that’s how misinformation spreads. I don’t mean “misinformation” in any political sense which is the trendy way to use it, but rather in a clickbait/flamebait sense that makes a populace dumber. Something that sounds plausible and since someone states it so authoritatively on a site that one might think has some credibility, so it must be true. It’s exhausting to constantly have to verify whether something is true because there’s no community punishment for intentionally saying something not true.
>We can't have a rule against being wrong.
You don’t need a rule against being wrong but you don’t need to shut down people that point it out. Nothing here except the original comment was flamebait. I know this because it was the only comment that triggered a cascade of negative comments.
Did you flag drstewart's comment explaining his point? I presume, because there's no vouch link. If so, why? If you didn't, why is that comment worthy of being flagged but not the original comment? Clearly the community has opinions on comments and misinformation is low on the totem pole of concerns. Hence "the community supports misinformation as long as it makes them feel good" -- it feels good to shit on countries you don't like and it feels good to shut down people that tried to go against the flow, all while the original comment that was wrong and incited this unsavory discussion is still standing.
I flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34315771 because it broke the site guidelines*. The GP comment may have been wrong, but it didn't break the site guidelines. As we've just agreed, there isn't a rule against being wrong, nor can there be.
> there’s no community punishment for intentionally saying something not true
I've learned that this isn't a good way to think about internet comments, because it's virtually impossible to accurately read someone's intent. Not only that, but people are much too quick to assume ill intent, intentional deceit, or (favorite internet word) disingenuousness.
* It was dipping a toe into nationalistic flamebait, though, so maybe it would be more accurate to say it was straddling the edge.
That one is flaggable under your own version of HN's rules because it's completely wrong about HN's guidelines. It's also flaggable under the actual guidelines because it's mostly non-responsive fulmination.
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".
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.
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
> Connection costs will be capped at £2,000 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.
In France with a Freebox Delta I have unlimited 10gbps speed down and 700mbps up for less than 50€ 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
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".
Most of England has last mile connectivity from BT, the historical monopoly telco. BT is required by the regulator to sell access over their "last mile" of copper, fibre, or whatever, at a fixed tariff, plus to sell routing over their long distance networks for a fair price, so that ISPs, even relatively small ones, can serve anybody with those last mile lines, from anywhere in the country. So maybe you pay Jim's Tiny ISP £29 pcm, Jim's pays BT say £8.26 pcm to reach your home, and they've got £20.74 to buy upstream bandwidth, pay staff, taxes etc. The box in your house either belongs to you or was sent out by Jim's, the fibre or copper between your house and some big building belongs to BT, fibre between the building and Jim's Tiny ISP is either owned by BT or a rival huge corporation.
Anyway for a good many years now, BT offered to basically do fibre rather than copper for the same install price on new homes so long as the builders actually had their people come in early and put the trenches where they need to be etc. on a multi-home site during construction. If you wait until the house is finished, BT wants $$$ to dig everything up and lay fibre.
This meant if the house builders understand why owners would want Internet, or if they at least understand market forces, they would pull their finger out and arrange this, because it's basically free money. Some fraction of buyers will actually remember to ask if the new house has decent broadband, and at some point vague non-committal answers either become specific (and actionable if you were lying) or the buyer walks away.
But if the house market is booming, and you don't get into the habit of having BT do their work early in development, you're going to keep building houses which don't have fibre, they'll sell anyway. This government rule tells builders nope, either show why that it'd be crazy expensive to run fibre up a mountain or whatever - or else pay up and get it done, whereupon of course that's pressure on builders to do it properly.
I expect the net price will be almost zero, because of scale.
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^) £28pcm 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.
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.
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
Used to live in NZ where I believe we had one of the world's most organised, fairest fiber rollouts. I moved from 1Gbps to 5Mbps connection (in central London!!) when I first got here.
This is just gonna be one more thing to tack onto the artificial price of new houses (and old ones). The property market here is so incredibly boned, houses often aren't properly modernised, construction methods used are from the 60's a lot of the time bc rather than knock down & rebuilt to modern standards, they just keep repairing the old - plus a lot of "new builds" are built super cheaply/crappily as well.
And all of these problems for the low, low price of half a million £ for a three bedroom terraced house, not even detached.
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.
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).
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.
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.
In sweden you get a discount for drawing fiber to your house wherever this house might be on in the country side for a cost between 1500-2000 EUR. This has lead to all that all houses all over sweden now has high gigabit fiber or more to their houses because this increases the value of the property and no one can afford not to take the deal
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.
> wouldn't better mobile coverage at faster speeds be the thing to go for?
Maybe, but you'd still need to have fibre run to any new builds to put a transceiver there to get the high speeds and to not saturate the bands that the transceivers are operating in. You might as well run the fibre into the house and let the home owner choose what to do with it.
Perhaps, but new construction homes tend to be more expensive, and (anecdotally) in nicer areas. Regardless, the benefits are limited to the household (of two to five?). On the otherhand, better mobile is for all.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think we've had coin meters for at least a decade now. A previous place I rented had a card meter that I topped up at the local shop and they'll still exist, but thats just for power.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
It can make a maximum difference in cost of about 1% of the final sale price, probably less given the cap and average prices of new build properties. I don't think it'll have a big impact on whether the houses sell, we have a huge undersupply of new housing.
Developers will often do the cheapest thing they can, that doesn't necessarily lead to big differences in the end cost to buy but putting in copper to save a little on construction would be pointless overall given the changes that are happening.
More importantly I think this law forces right of access for installing fibre in various situations, which has been a stumbling block for doing the work in other cases. Just from a quick scan of the coverage though.
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.
But there is a cap on how much houses can be and that is the credit available to make the purchase. So house prices are largely a function of available credit.
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.
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).
Unintentional side-effect of faster internet speeds: even more bloated app-sites. One wonders if average page sizes are going to start reaching hundreds of MB or even exceed 1GB more quickly.
I had 10Gbps (real-world numbers were about 6Gbps down and 2Gbps up) internet, on so-called unsaturated "dark fibre" for several years in Tokyo and while it was incredibly fast for downloading games from steam, streaming movies and synching to/from cloud services, it really wasn't noticeably faster than 100Mbps services for general web browsing. There was also no noticeable difference for general web browsing when I connected to my 10Gbps modem with 10Gbps wired, 1Gbps wired or wifi.
The bottleneck is definitely on having a million connections open to serve a typical commercial app-site including ads, and the latency of each, than just datarate.
So although it's for a bad reason, I don't expect that higher average datarates will automatically lead to more bloat, at least not right away. Hopefully it highlights where internet browsing bloat actually comes from (although I doubt it).
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.
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.
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...
Maybe, but around me, house demand hugely outstrips supply, so everyone buys at the limit of what they can afford. For sure, proper dumps that need significant renovation go for less, but they are super rare. Everything else goes for a price set by the size of the home and increasingly, the size of garden. New builds command a slight premium, but that's mostly a marketing premium, which doesn't hold for resale. It's hugely complicated by the location aspect of course - older houses tend to be in better locations. Basically, my point is that trying to attribute regulatory costs to house prices is essentially impossible, and is very much in the noise.
Not to argue, but rather to add my experience as it is fairly unique, I did a renovation to a property that cost a low six-figure amount of money (£).
Few have done this so whenever this conversation happens everybody talks about house prices as if there is nothing driving them other than "planning permission is an expensive, time-costly and risky endeavour" -- that's not all as the cost of doing building work is very high! While there were a range of build costs given to us by building contractors, they were all eye-wateringly expensive and at the lower end you have to carefully consider the risk of fraud.
Overall we had a very painful experience and the project was beset with poorly executed work and fraud until we realised what was happening half-way through the project and diverted a large amount of our resources into sorting everything out [0]. As a professional software engineer, I'm used to being able to trust that people will do what they say, but this market is a whole different game and much more cutthroat. We specified exactly the work that should be done and the materials that should be used with an architect's help but this isn't enough: you have to carefully evaluate every single piece of work to ensure compliance and be ready for gamesmanship/fraud or even financial/legal conflict from contractors.
My point is that house prices must reflect the the costs/risks of building and these are numerous:
- Designing, quantifying and specifying work
- Navigating bureaucracy and failure to get sign-off
causing costly re-designs
- On-site supervision of workers completion of jobs and
assessment of materials used
- Evaluations of work completed by independent surveyors
- Organisational and project management skill
- Understanding of construction and contract law with its
many peculiarities (e.g. were you aware that you must pay
*any* amount that a building contractor specifies in a
validly constructed payment notice unless you have sent
a pay less notice with calculations showing otherwise?
This is often used in "Smash and Grab" abjudications to
force clients to pay money as "if the paying party does
not serve the right notice against your application then
they must pay first and argue later." [1])
There aren't as many skilled tradespeople as there used to be and quality building work is labour/skill intensive, complex and risky. My experiences leads me to believe that the lack of competition between contractors is just as likely to be driving high house prices as overall planning risks/costs. (It's just that the former is opaque and invisible to most people even if they work in research/policy.)
[0] Our contractor went as far as attempting to extort money from us by getting a subcontractor to send threats to us and finally slinked away unscathed once we involved a quantity surveyor and lawyer.
[1] https://helix-law.co.uk/smash-and-grab-adjudication-overview/
We went through a similarly priced renovation. We had a different objective to many doing similar to us, which was to improve the energy efficiency of the house. It was interesting to see how incompetent the tradespeople were when the requirements deviated slightly from the norm. We had the usual shenanigans of course: the electricians gave us a bill that included a huge amount for materials, so we asked for a breakdown and found that they'd charged for hundreds of meters of cable that I could prove were not installed (impedance measurements gave me a good upper bound on the total installed length). I simply refused to pay more than a nominal amount until I was given an accurate bill with evidence, which never came (I suspect it wasn't malicious, it was just each electrician buying a reel of cable and chucking the remainder in their van for future use).
I also got into quite a heated argument with a plumber about static vs dynamic pressure and flow rates (it turns out fluid dynamics is not really part of a plumber's training).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
"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.
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.
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.
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?
It's a hidden "buy-in" to future authoritarian control. Flying under the radar, hearts and minds approach. Spoil you with mandates you believe to be in your interest inthe now, only to be duped into acknowledging those that control what you later become dependent upon.
Create a problem, wait for a reaction, then provide a solution that favors the tyrants ability to control. Have a quick search for "problem, reaction, solution" and you'll be able to extrapolate from there.
The world is controlled by competition and greed, and the majority participate blindly while those that see the utility of it create the games where their opposition cannot win.
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.
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.
My house was built in England last year and already came with two separate fibre gigabit internet lines, one grainconnect and another BT. I think there are two separate ducts running throughout the entire development.
I'd imagine this is just to make the cheapskates and small developers get on with it too.
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.
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.
How does the builder know where I am going to put my one or multiple TVs? Or if I even have a TV - plenty of people went mobile-only for video. Old coax cable came out in the middle of the wall in the room I decided to use for home office, what was I going to do with it there? Finally I just cut it out and drilled a whole through a floor in another room to run Sonic fiber cable and connect a modem and WiFi router inside a cabinet shelf. If I was renting, I would rather just have good WiFi signal int the apartment like I do at work or in the hotel and organize my limited space for my convenience rather than based on where cables run.
A lot of rooms have an obvious layout... You put the TV in the living room on the wall without windows. Or above the fireplace (ugh, but that's where people put them) If you put a tv in a bedroom, it's opposite the bed, and there's often a clear place for a bed --- if the windows are bed width apart, the bed goes there, if they're closer together, the bed goes on a different wall that probably doesn't have the closet and maybe doesn't have the door.
You can run multiple cables to a room too, of course. Pick two spots and you'll probably get close enough so one is useful. And put a drop in the ceiling too, in case you want to mount an access point there, like at work or in some hotels. If nobody ever uses those cables, and you didn't terminate them, you're only out $100 on materials and an hour or two of someone's time.
Hotel wifi has always been pretty bad for me, not a standard I'd want to aspire to.
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.
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 £2,000 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.
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.