This article seems very US-centric, I'd like to know what the situation is in other countries.
I will start with mine, Spain. Here, every ISP offers symmetrical speeds since they became a selling point some years ago. It seems like the minimum speed nowadays is 100Mbps with 600Mbps as the average and 1Gbps in the most expensive packages.
Right now I am living in a little village in a very rural area where a local company offers 300Mbps (symmetrical, of course).
In Finland it is a citizen's right to receive 2 megabits down. So this is available nation-wide.
I have 10/1 Mbit free of charge at home, the operator event sent me a modem free of charge. This might be a deal the housing cooperative (equivalent) has with the operator though, I'm only renting.
In my experience connections are mostly asymmetrical, in the 10-100 Mbit range down and a tenth of it up. Costs are very low compared to the world, $5-20/mo or so. Usually ADSL, sometimes cable.
Downtown in a bigger city I once got lucky and had like 1 Gbit symmetrical for $12/mo. It was kinda crazy, anything you could think of downloaded in less than a minute. It was faster to download from the Internet than to transfer files over USB.
> This might be a deal the housing cooperative (equivalent) has with the operator though, I'm only renting.
Yes it is. I imagine most of the people upgrade the base speed amyway and you can get it pretty cheap e.g. 100/100 for 10 €/month which IMHO is very reasonable. I wish other countries like Spain would follow this model because it’s very affordable for everyone.
In Australia symmetrical is only for bigger businesses. Every home connection is asymmetrical, with the common ones being 25/5, 50/20, or 100/20. There’s outliers if you’re willing to pay more (I’m on 250/50 and there’s 1000/50 if you’ll pay upwards of $150/mth) but the first 3 are the default/common plans on our national broadband.
250/50 sounds amazing. How much per month does that cost? Is it unlimited or with a data cap?
Are you inner city or right next to a node, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m in a ‘regional centre’ and while ISPs are happy to charge us for 50/20 or 100/20 plans, we just can’t/won’t get those speeds here (even before the pandemic and the work from home shift).
It’s so frustrating trying to help out less tech savvy family and explaining that they’re basically getting the broadband speeds they had before and that’s all they’ll get on this NBN (if they’re lucky), and that paying more than the minimum $70/month for higher speeds is throwing money away.
Costs me AUD$40/mth for the first 12 months then $80/mth after that (no contracts, month to month). No data limits other than an abuse clause, Eg you can’t run commercial stuff from home or anything. I’m a very heavy user though, plenty of torrenting and downloading big ISOs nearly daily and stuff, and I’ve never had an issue. I’m regional, and pretty close to centre of town but not right in the middle (I guess it’d be inner-suburbs?).
It’s HFC by iiNet not NBN, and it’s so much better. We had NBN for years and had endless issues, this has been utterly flawless without a single dropout in over a year now, and if anything we usually get well over advertised speeds.
1000/50 is beyond my wildest dreams at this point! $140/mo is pretty great. Aussie Broadband are worth the extra money imo, they’re great. Thanks for replying!
1000/40 is $270/month here in USA. Fortunately Google Fiber just dug up the neighborhood so hopefully I’ll have 2000/1000 before the end of the year, for 1/2 that cost.
It depends on where you are. Especially if you're in an area with competition. In the rare places there are two good providers, it's going to be $100+ cheaper.
Telia is pretty darn good - tier 1 provider, symmetric up/down. Sweden/Norway/Denmark and the Baltics. Oddly enough Finland versions of the offers are rather asymmetric.
That is a nice connection, if you don't mind, what equipment are you using for that?, and any caveats?, just curious how expensive this would be overall for a home connection
Upload speeds for fiber in Germany are between 5% and 50% of download speeds, most of them 20%. It's strange because for DSL there was a technical reason to do this. Before DSL internet connections were always symmetric. Now it seems that people got used to it and providers probably think they make more money that way? Because the power users who would like fast upload have to buy even faster download speeds.
The FTTH GPON standard is inherently asymmetric as well. In densely populated areas it is much cheaper than point to point fiber, so you will see asymmetric speed in contracts for quite some time. And of course marketing people really love price differentiation, and speed asymmetry is one of the few parameters customers actually understand (unlike most QoS offerings).
Yeah, that sounds like the reason people seem to agree on. Why give the customers 100/100 if you can give them 100/10 and sell 100/100 for a premium?
Also for Germany, I still think you're really lucky if you get fiber at all. Sometimes small villages get it and in big cities only in certain neighborhoods.
In Montenegro, most ISPs are very asymmetrical. I have 120 mbit/sec download but only 6 mbit/sec upload, the tech is DOCSIS.
One way to get better upload speed is corporate contracts, but they are expensive, hard to setup and availability is limited.
Fortunately, the new wireless stuff is symmetrical. I’ve tried one of them for a few months as an experiment, measured 40 mbit/sec both upload and download, the tech is LTE.
It is intentionally very US-centric because they are discussing sort of Obamanet to be provided for every household on taxpayers' money.
Specifically, they are targeting an old CATV technology which is delivering the last mile service by coaxial cable (typically alredy existing) and asymmetrical by both design and low layer implementation. Still very popular in the US due the population density.
Norway. Most of the FTTH plans seems to be symmetrical, anything from 100Mbps to 1Gbps. Some GPON based networks will hold back upstream at 500Mbps max (but they are fairly rare. Most is active ethernet anyway, not GPON)
FTTH is quickly taking over with over 70% coverage in homes passed. Pretty sure I saw less dense areas (rural?) had hit 60% last year according to some goverment report.
DSL is practically dead and "Fiber to the Cabinet" never really happened here. Coax is shrinking. Those still using these technologies are of course getting asymmetrical down/up. Some "Fiber to the Building" exists but mostly with copper ethernet to the housing unit, so its practically full FTTH.
Things that could be better is:
- pricing, it's not exactly great most places, although smart HoAs can usually get decent pricing if they actually try.
- the networks are very rarely open access, local monopolies are rife.
I've been on 1Gbps/1Gbps open access FTTH since ~2014, coming from 300/20 cable.
Infrastructure is being migrated to FTTx. Which means you can have xDSL or direct fiber to endpoint. In case of xDSL, DSLAMs are distributed to the FTTx boxes, hence no more "distance to post office" woes.
Speeds are asymmetrical. ADSL's upload is a joke (50KB/sec in reality), but VDSL2 provides really good Download/4 upload speeds (this is the nature of the VDSL2). My home connection is 24/6Mbps, with true to promises speeds 7/24.
Fiber is available up to 10Gbps, but they're not cheap, and not available everywhere. Speeds are again asymmetrical.
I think asymmetrical speeds are not big limiters after a certain point, but a symmetrical line always would be better. My home is wired for xDSL, so no ethernet conduits or fiber termination anywhere, and I'm happy with my speeds (for now). However, having a symmetrical network connection at office which is limited by interface limits is a big factor in this happiness.
Tried to find them while writing the comment, but failed. I was able to find them this time:
Looks like 1gbps is ₺875/mo on average (first three months is cheaper, remaining nine is more expensive) if you promise to use it for 12 months. Has 20mbps upload.
10gpbs is ₺8000/mo, but you have to sign a 24 month contract for it. Has 50mbps upload.
They're extremely asymmetrical, needlessly expensive. It's like a data hoarder's dream, but I don't know what will they do if you manage to saturate the bandwidth for a considerable amount of time.
Canada (near Montreal), I get 400/40 for about ~50$/month through a building deal (I pay my landlord who pays the ISP). The connection is dedicated so my neighbours' usage does not affect my speed.
Before that I had 120/20 with a company called Fizz and paid about 60$.
At least over here everything is asymmetrical and has been for as far as I can remember.
In Slovakia, if you live in an apartment building you can usually get up to 1Gbps/100Mbps FTTx or DOCSIS for around 30€, with some providers limiting upload to only 5% of download (so e.g. 1000/50). Some local providers might offer symmetric, but that's an exception. Most people are probably on cheaper plans in the 200-300Mbit download range for ~15€.
If you live in a detached house though, your only option is usually xDSL where you're lucky to get 15/1Mbit for ~20€ if you live "further from the post office".
Fixed wireless (LTE) usually offers better speeds if it's not oversubscribed in your area (40/40Mbit) but is not available everywhere, is more expensive and includes data caps.
Fiber to individual houses is mostly possible only in new developments, as you can't run new wiring on poles in Slovakia, only in the ground, so no ISP bothers to upgrade older houses.
Singapore, 1 Gbps up & down, S$42.99/month (~US$32) via MyRepublic, fiber to my router.
Speedtest shows avg 350 Mbps up & down (wifi limited), plenty of headroom if I needed wired. Blows the water out of anything I used to get in Seattle (read this comcast!!).
Switzerland, I’m getting 1, 10 or 25gbit (ptp) from my local isp (https://www.init7.net) for ~70 usd per month.
I currently only use 1gbit because the 25/10gbit hardware is too big or too loud to fit into my electrical cabinet.
There’s also cheaper 1/10 gbit options, but they suffer from massive oversubscription and gpon.
Download-only being a serious disadvantage seemed like the point of this post. US internet service from the pseudo-monopolist cablecos and telcos generally being overpriced and subpar seems like the theme of the comments, and they're correct.
The counterarguments you typically hear about it being hard/expensive to provide such services in the US due to geography and population distribution are, in my strong opinion, nothing more than industry propaganda and a poor excuse.
I’ve got symmetric 2 gbps at home, and frankly I struggle to find a purpose for it. I think for the vast majority of people, download speeds are the important thing.
It’s also worth noting that, while cable has various limitations, it was an earlier-deployed technology. So while Spain has closed the gap recently, the US enjoyed a healthy lead over the last decade. (For example in Akamai’s 2015 study, Spain was #30 and the US was #20.)
As to the difficulty and expense of serving the US—what’s your opinion based on? It’s easy to blame the “industry.” But it’s not like the US public sector is great at building infrastructure. Here in Maryland we are building 16 miles of light rail in the middle of existing suburban streets for the same price as Copenhagen spent to build 16 miles of fully automated subway. Building any kind of infrastructure in the US is very difficult and expensive for various legal reasons.
Running some fiber is in no way comparable to building light rail. It is simply not done because Comcast and their ilk want to sit there and collect money without investing in upgrades, and even lobbied to prevent voters from getting it installed themselves on a city level.
Also, 1Gbps+ symmetric fiber connections can allow for lots of things, like hosting videos yourself, or running your own backup service for your devices. A family of four can easily use it by streaming high definition media and data up and down.
It opens the door to not having to rely on FAANG to host and serve personal content, maybe even allowing for federated services again.
The utility you personally get out of symmetric 2gbps is pretty much irrelevant here. I am seriously hobbled by not having symmetric internet available in my area, and so are many other people; the articles point stands.
As for where I got my opinion that the "they're doing the best they can, it's expensive to do in the US" line is a poor excuse for the high prices and poor quality of services...
I have some personal experience in dealing with their business side, which shows none of the qualities of a business working hard to compete. That shouldn't convince anyone else, but the obvious anti-consumer behaviors like forcing bundles on people, absurdly low upload speeds (far under what docsis will allow for on well laid out networks), arbitrary data caps, and so on shouldn't give the impression they're working hard to support US technical innovation. There are massive price drops in the rare competitive area (clearly they're working with a lot of margin), and comcast (e.g.) makes $40B yearly profit while failing at basic customer service. Last, are the success stories of municipal ISPs and foreign ISPs, which, despite the objections, often are very comparable expense-wise and still make the US ISPs look as awful as they are.
> It’s also worth noting that, while cable has various limitations, it was an earlier-deployed technology. So while Spain has closed the gap recently, the US enjoyed a healthy lead over the last decade. (For example in Akamai’s 2015 study, Spain was #30 and the US was #20.)
Spain deployed ADSL back in the late 90s, and had it available in relatively rural areas before major cities (e.g. London) had availability.
Spain started deploying FTTP a few years ago, everywhere, to replace the ageing copper infrastructure.
Spain never really had a large scale cable rollout outside of fortunate areas of a few major cities. For the vast majority, it was copper line services only.
Now ~everyone can get FTTP, and anyone who has that has symmetric services.
There aren't many major applications that benefit from symmetric connectivity as a rule, because the vast majority of the world (including those in Silicon Valley) dont have that capability. The userbase for such applications is relatively tiny.
This is part of why we depend on 'the cloud'. The idea that anyone can host anything depends on decent upload rates. Why couldn't an on-prem equivalent of Dropbox be mainstream if everyone had symmetric connectivity 20 years ago already?
> I’ve got symmetric 2 gbps at home, and frankly I struggle to find a purpose for it. I think for the vast majority of people, download speeds are the important thing.
The majority of Internet traffic today is video, where there's no real reason for bandwidth usage to be asymmetric. You might be streaming webcam video up to a Zoom call or streaming a movie down from Netflix. Today, the former has far lower video quality than the latter. But why should it? Why can't we stream equally high-quality 4K (and better) video in both directions?
…Well, bandwidth is only one reason, with other reasons including the low quality of most webcams and processing power limitations. And video doesn't require that much bandwidth. The 20Mbit the EFF is complaining about is already good enough for one 4K video stream. Still, only one, and only if that 20Mbit is an actually achievable transfer rate rather than a theoretical cap. 100Mbit would be much more comfortable, especially for multi-user households.
On the other hand, 2Gbps is beyond what video streaming will have any use for in the foreseeable future. But I'd argue most people have no need for 2Gbps down either, with some exceptions.
> The 20Mbit the EFF is complaining about is already good enough for one 4K video stream. Still, only one, and only if that 20Mbit is an actually achievable transfer rate rather than a theoretical cap. 100Mbit would be much more comfortable, especially for multi-user households.
Focusing explicitly on "20Mbit ... is already good enough for oen 4K video stream", this is only true if the peak rate is 20Mbit, or if it's not a real time application, where buffering can be applied to smooth out that stream.
Try streaming a 4K RDP session on 20Mbit, and watch that experience degrade rapidly during any periods of high motion on the remote machine.
Averages only work for workloads that can be smoothed. For any real time applications, what matters most is the peak rate. For example, a single 4K RDP session can peak at over 80Mbit. Even at 50Mbit, the session will become unusable during peak motion periods, in the worst possible way: you lose the content, and there's a delay before you're able to interact with the session in real time again.
So yes, 20Mbit is good enough for lowest common denominator stuff, but there's a lot of value being ignored outside of watching TV.
Switzerland here. We have both, traditional ones with bad uploads and trendy small providers with ex. 1Gbps symmetrical. In some cities this is even one of the cheapest options.
Right now I only have 4G, and given that I don't have many neighbors but a antenna nearby it works great too
In Greece no ISP offers symmetrical. Fiber connections are 50/5, 100/10, and 200/20. There was a pilot program for 1Gbit symmetrical but it never made it to consumer market.
Greece is truly embarrassing when it comes to data services, both for wired connections and data on mobile contracts. Why is that? Is the market cornered by some monopoly/oligopoly?
Practically what we have is a cartel. Three major players with similar pricing. Government has no real intention to intervene because one company is half owned by the public sector. It's a fucking disgrace when you compare prices with rest of Europe. Even less developed countries are way cheaper.
As someone else mentioned there are some smaller players who give kind of symmetrical but their coverage is way too small, like 10% of major metropolitan areas and nowhere else.
Some of my business customers pay for 50/50mbps fiber to the building (dedicated) line for 500€/month. 100/100mbps costs about 800/month.
Residential broadband excluding Athens is mostly down to 50/5mbps and in many suburbs in cities (e.g. Khania, Crete) don't even get more than 1mbps upload.
Yet we have politicians and commercials all day showing how '5G' will change our lives. It's a joke.
Here in the Netherlands symmetrical speeds are not common at all. I pay €30 per month for 100/30. I could get faster download but not significantly faster upload
Take current 100/20 Mbps speeds. An average Zoom call uses 0.6 Mbps upstream, while a super-HD 1080p one uses 3.8 Mbps up. (And virtually nobody videoconferences from home in 1080p anyways, who wants coworkers to see your skin blemishes in maximum detail?!)
So a connection or 20 Mbps upload supports 33 users in theory, or 5 at super-HD. Even allowing half that in practice... seems fine to me.
The 100 Mbps download is necessary when you've got someone watching an 8K VR video on their headset, and a few 1080p movie streams going as well, which is more reasonable in a family setting.
But most people just don't have any use for upload speeds anywhere near as fast as download. Or at least certainly not until we start doing 8K 3D video calls in front of massive 3D displays, which isn't anytime soon...
>But most people just don't have any use for upload speeds anywhere near as fast as download. Or at least certainly not until we start doing 8K 3D video calls in front of massive 3D displays, which isn't anytime soon...
Most people don't have any use for upload speeds because very few have upload speeds that can be used in an interesting way.
If lots of people had lots of upload, you might start to see widespread commercial products for home-hosting what currently goes in cloud providers and social media sites.
I have symmetric 1gbps. It's not about what generates that much data. It's about things that become feasible.
I remember when a decade ago I occasionally needed to share large VM images with a customer. I'd set up my notebook to upload it over the weekend and hope the upload wouldn't abort. Occasionally remoting in from home to check it was still uploading.
Now a 50Gb VM image is absolutely nothing to me. I can let people pull that from me during a coffee break, instead of scheduling it around a weekend.
It's not that sharing a 50Gb image was impossible before. It's that I can do it so quickly now, that I can do things like these much more liberally and don't have to plan around them as much.
My father routinely had to transfer multiple gigabytes of CAD model data to colleagues and clients back when he was was working in aerospace as a private contractor. He lived in a rural area and had to get by with satellite internet at the time. The real killer for him was the data caps and throttling that the satellite provider would impose after transmitting some ridiculously small amount like 25GB.
Not every worker in the world goes to work in a shared office space with enterprise class Comcast or fiber accounts. Modern businesses of many types can benefit or even must have fast uploads.
A self hosted website with high traffic? Maybe you’re hosting high quality video, or a high tick multiplayer game server? Perhaps those specific examples are niche use cases, but the idea is that they‘ll stop being so niche if symmetrical upload/download becomes more commonplace.
I have a gigabit home connection. No I don’t need it, but having to wait less to move data around is nice.
A week ago I downloaded a 4.5 gigabyte photo from the ESA to print and put on my wall, yes all of those pixels mattered. It took closer to 30 seconds than the ten minutes it would have otherwise on a more reasonable “fast” home internet connection. So there’s several minutes of my life I probably would have just sat around waiting for otherwise.
It’s not about big constant needs but making the delay shorter on many smaller things. (i.e. latency over throughput, but latency not in ms for computer networking but seconds and minutes for tasks on a human level)
> while a super-HD 1080p one uses 3.8 Mbps up. (And virtually nobody videoconferences from home in 1080p anyways, who wants coworkers to see your skin blemishes in maximum detail?!)
I posit the real reason is because no-one makes a decent webcam for desktops and laptops, not even Apple.
That's not my experience at all. Crystal-clear and virtually zero sensor noise in regular light conditions. Maybe you got a bad one...?
Also it's just compressing to MJPEG, which is far higher quality than any subsequent h.264 compression your CPU would ever do. The Logitech Brio transmits raw data over USB3 like you're asking, but the resulting image quality is identical -- I've tested them side-by-side.
(Ancient 920's performed on-camera h.264 compression which was later removed -- if you have one of those, be sure to select the MJPEG stream instead.)
I used to work on a commercial live streaming software app and we routinely had C920s fail from the actual USB wire shorting out. The Brio is overall a much better camera, particularly with the detachable USB-C cable.
That is a great article, but literally everything he complains about the C920 is with regards to the "auto" settings.
You absolutely do need to manually set and lock exposure, focus, white balance, and ensure you have proper lighting. Once you do that, it works like a charm. And this advice is what pretty much every streaming tutorial on YouTube advises.
The softness issue is particular to the Logitech Brio, which he notes, and which matches my own testing. The C920 doesn't suffer from that.
Yes I wish the software for the camera settings was more intelligent. But ultimately that's a software issue that's fixable with manual settings. The hardware is solid, provided normal lighting conditions.
Nah. Mostly that comes down to thinks like optics, large sensors etc.
The bandwidth needed for a high quality 1080p stream isn’t gonna be much more than one from a shitty 1080p camera. The better image would benefit from less compression / more bits, but it’s not an orders of magnitude difference.
3.8Mbps 1080p is hardly 1080p. Decent quality starts at several 10s of Mbps, and high quality 1080p is in the 200-400Mbps range.
Ideally in the future you would A) be broadcasting directly to other participants, not going through zoom’s servers, which might multiply upload bandwidth needs B) be broadcasting at several 10s of Mbps per stream.
I definitely prefer higher bandwidth vconf. I’m not worried about blemishes, but I want to see people’s minute facial expressions better.
> Decent quality starts at several 10s of Mbps, and high quality 1080p is in the 200-400Mbps range.
That's so incorrect I don't even know where to begin.
I regularly record my own "talking head" in 1080p from OBS in h.264 at CRF 14 in "ultrafast", which is extreme crazy quality/space overkill (literally indistinguishable image from original, extremely low CPU usage), and that's an average of 34 Mbps.
I then immediately recompress the resulting enormous file to a still extremely high-quality CRF 21 in "veryslow" to be suitable for editing and subsequent recompression later, and that results in an average of 2.4 Mbps.
For comparison, high-quality 1080p h.264 movie and television releases on torrent sites are usually around 5 Mbps. The difference is that half my frame is a plain/stationary background while movies and TV have complex backgrounds, hence double the bitrate.
I have to ask -- where did you get the idea that "high quality 1080p is in the 200-400Mbps range"? That's off by two entire orders of magnitude. It's almost all the way to raw uncompressed 1080p, which is 1,500 Mbps.
> high-quality 1080p h.264 movie and television releases on torrent sites are usually around 5 Mbps.
BRRips are frequently 30+GB for a 1-2 hour movie. Do the math. You’re off by like 5-8x.
> I have to ask -- where did you get the idea that "high quality 1080p is in the 200-400Mbps range"?
From actually filming and editing video.
Keep in mind that real-time encoders (such as the one in a video recorder or that zoom has to use for reasonable latency) are pretty constrained and will generally achieve worse ratios. If you need to get 3Mbps in real-time on a laptop your only option is basically to quantize the shit out of the video. Releases that can encode slower-than-real-time can use longer GOP, B-frames, etc.
> It's almost all the way to raw uncompressed 1080p, which is 1,500 Mbps.
That's something entirely different, not what I was talking about. Also, if a Blu-Ray gives you the space, there's no reason not to use it. That doesn't mean you need it. Which is precisely why the rips that people commonly share don't.
> From actually filming and editing video.
That's for recording frames independently for editing on a professional camera. Not for anything you'd ever transmit live to a consumer in a million years.
> will generally achieve worse ratios
Worse than 200-400Mbps? What are you even talking about? Even an iPhone encodes to just 16 Mbps. Which is definitely not greater than 400.
> basically to quantize the shit out of the video.
Looks fine to me. It doesn't need to be lossless. It just needs to be good. I've never heard anyone complain about an iPhone "quantizing the shit" out of their video. To the contrary, people love iPhone-quality video.
Where you go wrong here is that a webcam image is pretty stable. Same background, person moving a little.
Sure it can't be as optimal as a non real-time compressor can, and should therefore need more bandwidth, but high compression ratios on such an image aren't difficult. It's not valid to compare professional film work or even output BluRay encodes to what's required for your typical home video call.
>BRRips are frequently 30+GB for a 1-2 hour movie. Do the math. You’re off by like 5-8x.
No. First, 1-2 hour is a 100% increase. 15GB for a 2hour movie is realistic, with a very high quality (CRF 18 or 19). Which would then be ~15Mbps, considering that there is also audio. Going further does not increase quality, but does increase file size.
It seems to me that you want to transfer an intermediate-codec (or even raw) via the Internet.
What kind of camera is recording 1080p at 200-400Mbps?
For example here https://www.red.com/recording-time if I put in 8K, 60fps and choose the lowest compression ratio, it's still saying it will only use 270Mbps. At 2K the highest bitrate seems to be 41Mbps.
> Decent quality starts at several 10s of Mbps, and high quality 1080p is in the 200-400Mbps range.
What? No. 10 Mbps is already plenty for high quality 1080p with the latest codecs. Even 1080p Blurays only run 20-40 Mbps and they're typically very conservatively compressed.
I think a lot of people might take issue with the statement “plenty high”. This type of statement comes across as similar to when we constantly heard ISPs decrying “25 down is plenty! it’s only pirates who need more than this!” and this was only a few years ago when ISPs were spouting this insanity.
Using your numbers — and we’ll pretend we haven’t already sailed past 1080p as a standard — if we expect better than garbage zoom tier quality, at 20-40 for one stream, most of our isp connections are currently woefully slow for uploads.
Many many many people have others who live in their households, whether they’re roommates, partners, or kids. So if you have 3 people on video chat, suddenly if we want high quality streams, that need goes from 20 and shoots up to 60+. If you have 3 kids on a video chat or streaming for school or play and a parent or two working from home, suddenly you’re up to 100+ upload.
And that’s ignoring that 1080p is becoming old world. I haven’t looked recently, but when buying my last monitor set a year ago, 4k seemed to be by far the most commonly available.
this whole x amount of bandwidth “is plenty” almost always seems to ignore a) real life situations of most families/roommates and b) forward moving technologies.
Where are you coming up with these numbers 20-40 Mbps for a single video stream?
That's insane. Like I mentioned in another comment, high-quality rips of 1080p movies tend to be 5 Mbps, and that's generally with a lot more detail and motion than what your camera is filming at home.
There's really no point in 1080p streaming video above Zoom's 3.8 Mbps. Even that's already overkill which is why almost nobody uses it. While the "20 mbps" you're talking about is beyond the threshold of lossless for human perception, and 40 is beyond that.
And beyond it? There's virtually no use for 4K video in personal communications, nobody wants to see the pores in your nose. It's not about technological limitation, it's about use cases. And a 20 mbps uplink handles the real life situations of most families and roommates just fine, when you use actual real numbers and not the ones you're just making up.
If you’re can’t tell the difference between 20Mbps and 200Mbps you need glasses. This isn’t even some audiophile-tier argument about an extra 60kbps in MP3 or whatever; there are obvious compression artifacts in 20Mbps real-time-encoded CBR video, especially on any kind of remotely high-entropy scene.
> high-quality rips of 1080p movies tend to be 5 Mbps
This is nonsense. A decent 20-30GB BRRip will be at least 25-30Mbps. Also, it’s not a fair comparison because it’s not real time encoding. If you can afford to encode in 5% real-time speed you can get much better compression ratios.
> If you’re can’t tell the difference between 20Mbps and 200Mbps you need glasses.
I think you're the one imagining things here.
Like I said in an earlier comment, I record h.264 in "ultrafast" CRF 14. Every guide that exists says this is below the threshold for indistiguishable from raw footage, and my own eyes agree after extensive side-by-side comparisons. I go as low as 14 because it's overkill. But there's simply no visible difference. And it's an average of 34 Mbps for the kind of stuff I shoot, which as I said is overkill already.
200 Mbps is insanely unnecessarily high, even for real-time encoding on a crappy CPU.
What are you filming? It sounds like you’re streaming a video of your face; how are you capturing it? If your video is blasted with shot noise from a 10mm^2 sensor through an 4mm wide lens, where “1080p” is more of a recording convention than a faithful description of the resolving power of the system, I can see how 34Mbps might look as good as whatever you see uncompressed.
>That's insane. Like I mentioned in another comment, high-quality rips of 1080p movies tend to be 5 Mbps, and that's generally with a lot more detail and motion than what your camera is filming at home.
I would double that, for at least movies. Not sure if you are going to see an increase in quality in smartphone style cameras.
The family that can equip their kids with production-grade 4k video kit can probably afford 100Gbit business internet service to their house tbh.
4k UHD Netflix stream is ~20Mbps. 1080p is usually about 5-6Mbps, and 99% of people say that it looks great and is all they want.
4k UHD is not needed for effective video chats for most business and personal use. And they wouldn't even need the same as a stream as it's a relatively static image and thus easy to compress.
Your image is typically a little square on the screen too (not the full display size). It is highly unlikely consumers will ever shell out for the camera equipment to create high quality images that need such bandwidth, even if such bandwidth becomes common.
Moore's law will maybe push this all forward in time, but what you describe is a total exaggeration of the current situation.
None of the video streaming software is set up for that, because nobody's internet can upload in that. The best I can do is a 1080p SLR ($350, once) + clicking the HD button in zoom, and most of that is being carried by the better optical system. All the low frame rates, micro stutters and so on still exist, adding to zoom fatigue.
I don’t understand why everyone is supposing that an entire household should be fine with the ability to send at most a single video stream out. What if both my wife and I have separate calls we need to be on? Or my kids want to play Fortnite while I’m uploading data for work? 10mbps up is 1990s-era tech.
I don't think anyone suggests that. But if we compare a "modern" asymmetrical connection such as a 250/50 or a 500/100 or a 600/300 or a 1000/100 then the "one HD stream is sub 5mbps" still means an asymmetric connection fits lots of these streams!
Obviously a 100/10 or 25/5 connection isn't going to cut it. I think really the gist of the article is "You need enough bandwidth in both directions". That's it. If you have a 100mbit, 200mbit or 500mbit or 1000mbit down with a 100+ mbit up, that's less important. "Symmetry" doesn't matter, it's enough bandwidth in both directions that matters.
The fact that "enough in both directions" and "symmetric" have been conflated is that because for a part of history, only symmetric connections did have enough upload bandwidth. With the gigabit and multi-gigabit down bandwidths, there is less need for symmetry so long as you have a fast upload.
On a technical level most of the asymmetric techniques just carve up the spectrum/bandwidth (in Mhz) to give more of it to downstream. Or timeslots or whatever.
I fully agree with the EFF that you need a decent upload, to support the applications of today and next few years. But to go fully symmetric actually means to lower the download in favour of upload, allocating exactly half of the spectrum to each.
So absolutely, once you reach a certain threshold I think most users are going to opt to carve up the spectrum in a way that favours download, just based on typical needs.
A dynamically allocating bandwidth allotment from a fixed budget would probably be a great improvement. 5 seperate zoom call time? More upload! Netflix time? More download, less upload! 3am backup upload time, mostly upload!
BR is different because the encoder doesn’t have to be real-time. It’s also just medium quality. 1080p60 264 or 265 encoded at 200+Mbps is what you get out of decent video cameras.
You can be conservative and assume that a live-encoding will require double the bitrate for the same quality. So for very high quality 15 Mbps you need 30.
It's a chicken and egg issue. Webcams are crap partly because nobody has a good upload bandwidth to make it matter. Video software uploads at low bandwidth because everyone's connection is crap, etc, etc.
Also more than one person lives at a household typically. Imagine 3 or 5 zoom calls going at 4mbps simultaneously. That's 20mbps right off the bat, which over saturates most people's upload, so zoom goes conservative by default.
Or imagine in a remote learning, you could see the pupils laptop screen , their desk and their face simultaneously so you can help them with their issue quickly, in 60-30fps HD+ per stream. And then do that for 3 kids + 2 adults and now you have 60mbps. For the adults, simultaneous face, desk & slides would be a form of seamless white boarding at a presentation.
In practice it's not that great. I hosted meetings on Zoom with 4-5mbps up (based on my tests and my recollection since it's been a year-ish). It was fine until my wife connected separately. So 0.6mbps is optimistic... or for people with very high pain thresholds.
I always mentally equate low upload limits with "the ISP wants to make sure you don't run a server". Or "this internet connection is just a way to watch TV". Which I find very sad. You can do a lot more than just consume other people's creative work on the internet. Some creative things don't need much upstream bandwidth (coughcough github) but there are also a lot of things (e.g. sharing videos of your craft projects) that are much more pleasant with more upload speed.
It is worth looking at the obstacles typical end users face.
In my experience, the #1 issue is poor WiFi deployment. Then, users of cable broadband use Ookla for speed tests instead of Fast - Ookla is scammed by Comcast and Frontier.
What if you want fiber on your block? In California, Comcast and AT&T will not touch the poles to protect their incumbency, and PG&E who owns the poles lies and says it’s the ISP’s problem that the poles aren’t ready for fiber. Based on my canvassing of fiber users in the Bay Area, pole improvements came from the cities’ commissions forcing PG&E to do the maintenance work, because it is supposed to anyway.
The EFF does not identify the real antagonist here: public utility companies.
Anyone who reads science fiction that includes networked computing knows this. IoT is horrible in its current incarnation, leaking private info everywhere, but the ability to send about as much as I receive to whomever I want is integral to a connected future.
The infrastructure must be present for the culture (or, optimistically, the Culture) to grow.
Symmetrical gigabit or more would fundamentally change the web forever. Self hosting becomes feasible for most things, it prys power away from the centralized structure we live with now.
Bc the range of commercial offerings is so diverse and cost effective. Once upon a time, probably longer ago then 10, if you had a specific need that couldn’t be solved by cheap shared hosting, then self hosting at home might make sense if you planned to do all the patching, backups, hardware cycling, monitoring, etc yourself and didn’t care about network redundancy. Today it is nice for a certain variety of hobbyist for whom home data center is their thing. Otherwise host it somewhere competent.
This sounds like a wired-centric approach, where people assume that everyone has a fiber connection. And I agree that it is ridiculous that cable companies have such bad upstream.
Can starlink support synchronous up/down? I doubt it. The satellite swarm companies are going to bring the internet to rural/third world/oceania/etc in a way that hasn't been possible before.
Even cellular won't solve deserts, ocean, tundra, and IIRC the tower density to support decent 4G/5G for true broadband just isn't economically feasible outside of suburbs, towns, highways, etc.
But I'm shocked at the support range of LTE in wisconsin and upper peninsula michigan, although the bandwidth is pretty average, so what do I know.
I think we need to approach internet connectivity from a wired-is-most-ideal standpoint and spend whatever capital needs to be spent to build it out. In the mean time, underserved communities can be serviced with cellular and satellite options.
I don’t think wireless is the future due to limited spectrum and high latency. The future is still wired, it’s just that private companies can’t be the entities trusted to do the build-out — it has to be a public utilities project.
The future is still wired, it’s just that private companies can’t be the entities trusted to do the build-out — it has to be a public utilities project.
China did a great job at building out a fiber network. Unfortunately it's compromised by the GFW and other issues. Australia recently attempted to fund a national plan for fiber deployment, but managed to privatise the implementation to the point where it was never delivered and has become a joke. A couple of years ago, you still literally couldn't get a connection right in the middle of Sydney. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network
Their take: There is no significant demand for wired connections above 25 Mbit/s and consideration of upgrading the network will not be undertaken until demand for high-bandwidth services is proven.
Depends on the community of course. Sub-Saharan Africa leap-frogged copper and went to 4g/5G. Probably same for broader band.
Not too long ago 10 mbits was ‘broadband’, so, maybe various forms of wireless will be just fine. Certainly more flexible in terms of long term options
Not too long ago, _4 mbits_ was considered broadband in the USA. And it's one of the reasons we have such terrible infrastructure; we poured a ton of money to improve internet access, and now we're left with coaxial in 2021 being sufficient in even downtown areas, since there was no motive to install fiber instead.
Starlink only makes sense in a world of unlimited capital for certain entrepreneurs IMO. I do not believe that service can be profitable without permanent government subsidies. Terrestrial fiber is just a better solution.
Do you have some breakdown of the costs? Because SpaceX can loft them easily enough, and they already have a functional network, and a client base from the former victims/users of viasat at a minimum.
How would terrestrial fiber work in rural america, far north alaska and canada, the sahara, antarctica, siberia, etc?
Once the satellites are aloft, and the customer base established, assuming they get special SpaceX launch rates, what makes the upkeep expensive that would require subsidy?
I feel this is really a moral issue and so one tailored for the EFF because high speed upload is key for home servers or widely distributed nodes in decentralized systems.
Especially if it comes with widescale IPV6 rollouts which will mean no more NAT traversal.
The best internet service I ever had was symmetric gigabit fiber, terminated in my home in San Jose. Not only was it fast, the latency was 2ms. It wasn't cheap, about $120 / month. So it's definitely possible.
The worst, not counting dial-up, was my ADSL service in Oakland. They said the wires were never upgraded. I finally switched to Comcast.
The argument is bollocks and I would like to see better from a technical evangelist organisation: "We want fibre" so we'll insist on 100Mb/100Mb symmetric throughput as a design requirement. That's the tail wagging the dog.
Start with your requirements and then pontificate, eg "I want this":
* Nominal download speed with no latency guarantees at up to 100Mbs-1
* Sustainable throughput for three concurrent 4HD streams
* Latency suitable for speech without lag
* 1500 byte frame transfer without me having to worry about MTU issues
The second requirement is basically three lots of 25Mbs-1 with a reasonable ACK response time. I picked three: Parents and kids doing their own thing as two groups plus another one.
The third requirement is a bit tricky but generally doable. If you do VoIP then >30ms latency is the start of the point where people need to manage their comms. Humans are actually really good at dealing with crap latency, provided the quality is good. I would suggest that say 10ms to your ISP PoP is a good start for latency.
The EFF article waffles on at length. It is both crap technical and stolidly political in nature. I think it fails on all levels but I still applaud the basic premise: We all need reasonably decent, low latency connectivity.
Oh, soz, I'm a Brit, but my last point still stands 8)
I hoped that with the fiber, which is naturally full-duplex medium, symmetrical speed would be obvious choice. But with advent of GPON, which is essentially half-dupex shared fiber medium, asymmetrical speeds make sense again.
Here, a provider i use offers variable tarrifs, that allow adjusting download/upload ratio dynamically in web interface (e.g. tarif '250' could be switched between 250/80 Mbps, 150/150 Mbps, or 80/250 Mbps).
Although GPON is shared, it is not half duplex! I'm not exactly sure why the asymmetrical version won out, perhaps due to cheaper optics back in the day?
Latest iterations (NG-PON2 and XGS-PON) are 10G symmetrical, and XGS-PON is now cheap enough that GPON doesn't make much sense. AT&T Fiber in the US has been deploying it for the last few years.
Seems like you are right! Although most are asymmetric (2488 / 1244 Mbps). I guess that even for ones with symmetric bitrates, effective upstream transfer rate would be lower than downstream transfer rate due to synchronization / higher inter-frame period needs.
I just signed up for fiber internet service at my new house and it's 940/940 symmetric. I'm 99% sure the service is some form of GPON so I don't think there's any inherent limitation that you can't have symmetric GPON.
I am pessimistic about this coming upload utopia. Here in Houston suburb of Sienna, entouch (now grande) cut fiber upload speeds from gigabit to 30mb for reasons. Makes me suspect the cable modem asymmetry is also bs, (more about price discrimination and less about technology).
I wonder how much of it revolves around the fact that fat upload pipes probably mainly matter when you are serving out content, and at that point probably the ISP would prefer you had a business account?
I have 50/50 symmetrical, so I guess I can't complain. Nowhere close to gigabit, but always more than enough for my needs.
Cable plants are generally weak on upstream bandwidth. Around here, there's only 4x 6mhz channels allocated for upstream, meaning about 100 megabits is shared across an entire node, which is 100's of homes. Downstream, on the other hand, is 32+ channels, plus a DOCSIS 3.1 OFDM channel, providing over a gigabit of bandwidth (shared.)
DOCSIS 3.1 was supposed to also improve the upstream situation, but OFDM upstream is no where to be found yet, as supposedly they have to upgrade all the amplifiers to support more bandwidth in that direction. Most people don't care. They're not uploading tons of files.
They can do it but it requires physical upgrades, swapping out every amplifier in a node, for example. It’s a slow process. Some cable systems have gone to 8 upstream channels. I don’t know of anyone who has a 3.1 OFDM upstream. Does anyone here have that?
As high speeds become reliably available we will finally get nearly unlimited low-latency computing power, on demand.
There will be a huge simplification and cost reduction, of the computing hardware experience as both consumers and businesses. You will only pay for the computing time you actually use, no idle hardware. And the only devices you will need will be (mostly wireless) I/O devices.
And unlike heavy home desktop or gaming devices, our I/O devices (from touch screens, to keyboards to VR goggles) are very portable. The exception, large screens in hotels etc, will be configured as full computing conduits, not just Netflix streaming.
We will all wonder at the clunky way we each currently manage our inflexible local/individual computing power now.
In Australia, with our "National Broadband Network" rollout, the highest speed plan a retail customer could get was 100mbit down and 40mbit up (100/40). In the last few years, this has now changes to 100/20 (and you need to buy a 250mbit down plan to get the old 40mbit up), because the national infrastructure co. charges for capacity each way, and uploads were just not being used enough for ISPs to justify paying for the upload capacity that was going unused.
I'm not convinced symmetrical is the future. I would like it, but even in these days of remote work, nobody cares about their upload speed.
> and uploads were just not being used enough for ISPs to justify paying for the upload capacity that was going unused
I think it was pretty clear at the time that the "nobody uses it rhetoric" was to get around the lack of upload capacity on the HFC network (High Frequency Cable, otherwise known as cable TV coax for the international readers).
The smoking gun is that you can get 250/50, but can't get 100/100 for any amount of money.
Coming back to the article, Australia is a perfect warning of why broadband requirements should mandate 100/100, and therefore force new builds to build fibre. If congress allows 100/20, then the USA can join Australia in re-spending billions redoing infrastructure over and over again, instead of just getting it right the first time.
While I don’t really quibble with the overall argument, spectrum is a limited resource.
If I had xMhz of bandwidth on a communications channel, and the applications I use mean my requirements are skewed in favour of either upload or download, why not allocate more of the available resources to that direction?
It’s an interesting consideration actually, I wonder in future if some, say DOCSIS standard or something, would allow the end user to decide how many channels to allocate for up vs down.
In France I had gigabit fiber for, what, 6-7 years ? First for 49€ then 30€/month.
I did a speed test recently and the fastest available speed in a small village near my parents was 8gb/s ! I was amazed, especially considering how hard it is to get 10G networking
Fibre direct to the home, and not "shared segments" with other buildings (i.e. PON technology,) but direct full-duplex (two strand or WDM) fibre links from you to the ISP equipment.
If and when that is widely available then we'll get equal up and download.
If the up/down split is on copper with FDM then there will always be a question of how to allocate the spectrum to upload vs. download. And mostly, for consumer driven reasons, the standards will skew to give more of it to download.
Yes, in some countries symmetrical connections are available to home connections, see the comments elsewhere on this page e.g. about Spain and Denmark. Often this is based on a fibre connection.
I feel this is really a moral issue and so one tailored for the EFF because high speed upload is key for home servers or widely distributed nodes in decentralized systems.
I'm not sure what would lead you to that conclusion. Starlink is another asymmetric service. This page[1] shows an average of 100 Mbit down and 16 up on Starlink. If they can get the upload slightly faster they would qualify for subsidies under the 100/20 definition but not under the 100/100 definition, which actually reinforces the article's point that we should not be investing public money in technologies that will not scale for future needs as I doubt Starlink will ever be able to achieve the 100+ megabit upload speeds that future businesses (and some consumers) will need. Don't get me wrong, I think Starlink is going to be an important technology for getting the most rural and hard to serve 1% of people acceptable internet service, and it will provide important competitive pressures on other ISPs, but it will never be a true substitute for fiber for the other 99% of the population.
I will start with mine, Spain. Here, every ISP offers symmetrical speeds since they became a selling point some years ago. It seems like the minimum speed nowadays is 100Mbps with 600Mbps as the average and 1Gbps in the most expensive packages.
Right now I am living in a little village in a very rural area where a local company offers 300Mbps (symmetrical, of course).