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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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;
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
In fact, anyone approved can use BTs own ducts and poles via their PIA product[1], which has created a resurgent and incredibly active market of "alternative" network providers ("alt nets"). London for example is now well served for broadband by Community Fibre, g.network, Hyperoptic and others alongside the incumbents.
[1] https://www.openreach.co.uk/cpportal/products/passive-produc...
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.
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.
Country-level generalizations about internet speeds are basically useless in 2023.
A lot of us have easy access to 1G up and down and multiple providers to choose from.
I have friends who live less than 15 minutes away who only have DSL or Starlink as options.
Extrapolating city-level anecdotes to entire countries doesn't make any sense. We don't upgrade the whole country's infrastructure in lock step.
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.
I'd imagine multiple countries are like this.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/want-faster-comc...
So, no. Do not rent their modem/router crap.
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
$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.
Recently I moved to a terraced house about 300m from my previous flat. The only internet option is expensive and slow fibre-to-the-cabinet-down-the-street.
Yes, coverage in London is uneven!
I've got AT&T GigE here in San Jose, but he's had it for longer than I have.
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 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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
I wonder how many are like her, just leaving it on all day for ambience and what the carbon footprint is.
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!
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).
Comparing address listings against the various provider websites is a ridiculous chore
It's frustrating - depending on the street you may have 2/1 gigabit fiber... or DSL.
I am assuming that is the same in most part of the world?
So it is a feature, not a bug.
https://dongknows.com/10gbps-internet-unlocking-super-broadb...
https://www.speedtest.net/result/14185051949
Cheaper than fibre and 30-day rolling contract. Unlimited data.
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.
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.
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.
You want to leave your windows open at night when it's cooler. Close the windows and curtains in the morning before it starts heating up.
Managed to get through the heatwave last year by doing this.
How big is the house and is there zero insulation, eg single pane windows?
0 - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-performance-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
What you mean waste?
The same infra that lets you download, lets you upload.
Also, if only you knew the cost of wholesale bandwidth ...
Dead Comment
There are plenty of smaller ISPs that run their own fibre and do offer symmetric connections, but the bigger players all off asymmetric connections.
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 [...]
not with those prices. I thought that is so high because it has to account for remote areas but if that isn't the case it looks huge.
... or it is a yearly cost and article didn't mention that
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.
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.
Caveat: fibre is telco infrastructure and is not limited, cable can still be limited ie only virgin media on virgin cable infra
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
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
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.
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.
Then again, this example is far from universal.
Keep in mind however, we're really talking about 50 different 'countries', when we're talking about laws like this so far.
The EU for instance has no such Europe wide mandate. The populations are roughly equivalent.
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.
https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
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.
Deleted Comment
Capitalism doesn't work if the market is captured by rent-seekers. Unfortunately this describes most American industries these days.
Dead Comment