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.
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.