this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 172 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Maybe they should be expanding their physical network first. I waited seven years after they supposedly came to my hometown, and their coverage area barely moved. Most of that is absolutely the fault of AT&T and Comcast stonewalling pole installations but they have the money to put up their own damn poles made of gold after that 77 billion profit report.

Now I moved elsewhere after covid and of course the only two real options still suck uncontrollably with no hope of any other big mover creating actual competition.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i am also incredibly disappointed in their lack of achievement here. they have a metric shit-tonne of liquid cash, lawyers and tech out the butthole.. but no.. were back to ma' bell still coagulating ala T2.

so much for being different

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

I suspect lawyers are stonewalling expansion for fear of making their monopoly cases worse

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Google fiber has been supposed to be coming to the west side of Atlanta for like 10 plus years. Hasnt an expanded at all . Yet they still keep that message coming soon to your neighborhood up. And somehow where I am only one option available. Fucking shitty Comcast

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's vaults labeled "GFBR" 200 yards from my house on the east side, and it's still "coming soon." Meanwhile, AT&T is out here digging every 2 years.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

At&t offered my 5mbps lmao. Idk what they are digging for

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Probably putting in VDSL to cash in on federal "high speed Internet" grants.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

IKR? The last time digsafe came out and marked, there were 3 separate AT&T lines twisting around each other like spaghetti, all going the same way and within 3 feet of each other. Like, you've already got conduit buried, just blow another fiber through it. Maybe some exec's kid runs a horizontal drilling company.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Something something ISPs forcing municipalities to create service monopolies?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Yep, somethingsomethingsomething regulatory capture.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Dude I feel bad you’re relying on Google of all people to save you 😬

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

you should feel bad for everyone in the u.s. that have to suffer the government(s) that allow this bullshit to even be a problem.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I wouldn't want to calculate what it'd cost to replace all my switches with 25G capable ones.. then all the network cards.. You'd have to have a really specific application to justify it.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Just cost me 1K to replace 3 NICs, 1 router, and 2 switches to freaking 2.5Gb.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I got one of the 2.5 x 8 + 10 switches StH reviewed for like $80, and x520 nics are $20. I'm happy with it for homelab stuff!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

You won't but I will

Switch: mikrotik CRS504-4XQ-IN ($799.99) Cabling: QSFP28 to 4 x 25G SFP28 DAC ($63.00 per cable) NICs: Intel XXV710 25GB ($349.0)

I don't know how many machines you have so for two machine it's cost you $1562.97 and maxing out the switch would cost you $6651.83 but do you really have sixteen machines that need or can even physically saturate a 25GB line?

I think it's more reasonable to get something similar to ubiquiti's USW-Pro-Aggregation and have three machines capable of the full speed and 28 machines capable of half rate speeds (at a much lower cost per machine)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

That's the early adopter tax. Same as it ever was.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just want an internet provider that isn't Spectrum or single-digit download speeds. Not having any real choice fucking sucks, especially since Spectrum is horrible.

Had AT&T fiber at my old place and god damn that shit went down one time for an hour the whole 3 and a half years I was there

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Have you looked at mobile broadband from T-Mobile or Verizon? I haven't tried either personally but I know if I were in a broadband desert or an oligopoly market like most Americans I would definitely give it a try and see how performance is. Prices weren't great when released, maybe $50+/mo. for home internet, you can get $ 30-40/mo around here from fixed line providers CenturyLink, FiOS/ziply, or comcrap; feel like the mobile Carriers really missed an opportunity at not pricing it cheaper to add a ton of subs or at least get people to try.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I was involved in one of these Google fiber roll outs several years ago, Google simply doesn't know what the fuck they want or what they are doing as far as installing outside plant goes.

EDIT: To clarify, they simultaneously had no fucking clue what they were doing & also wanted to micromanage all of their contractors.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Google really doesn’t know what it wants in general besides more profit. Like the killed by google is impressive.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If you're struggling to think of a use-case, consider the internet-based services that are commonplace now that weren't created until infrastructure advanced to the point they were possible, if not "obvious" in retrospect.

  • multimedia websites
  • real-time gaming
  • buffered audio -- and later video -- streaming
  • real-time video calling (now even wirelessly, like Star Trek!)
  • nearly every office worker suddenly working remotely at the same time

My personal hope is that abundant, bidirectional bandwidth and IPv6 adoption, along with cheap SBC appliances and free software like Nextcloud, will usher in an era where the average Joe can feel comfortable self-hosting their family's digital content, knowing they can access it from anywhere in the world and that it's safely backed up at each member's home server.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Video calls were all over 1950s futurism articles. These things do get anticipated far ahead of time.

4K Blu-ray discs have a maximum bitrate of 128 Mbps. Most streaming services compress more heavily than that; they're closer to 30 to 50 Mbps. A 1Gbps feed can easily handle several people streaming 4K video on the same connection provided there's some quality of service guarantees.

If other tech were there, we could likely stream a fully immersive live VR environment to nearly holodeck-level realism on 1Gbps.

IPv6 is the real blocker. As you say, self-hosting is what could really bring bandwidth usage up. I think some kind of distributed system (something like BitTorrent) is more likely than files hosted on one specific server, at least for publicly available files.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I couldn't care less tbh. Gigabit is more than enough.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And we're still stuck on IPv4. Going to IPv6 would do a lot more than 1Gbps connections would.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (11 children)

And what do you think it would do for you?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I have 10 gig at home, and powerful enough networking hardware that can take advantage of it (Ubiquiti stuff)

Nothing can ever saturate the line. So it's great for aggregate, but that's it

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

It's not often that I can saturate a 1Gbps line, unless you have a large household I don't see much point in going over 1Gbps right now. Though I'm sure there are some exceptions.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

That’s what I was gonna say: it’s not that i use sufficient bandwidth to really need 1gbps but the line is never even temporarily saturated. Just rock solid

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Having a connection that's not even close to saturated (or backbone for that matter) means lower latency in general. But it also means future proofing and timely issues resolution as you catch problems early on.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Man, I'd love to sit on that. Growing up with 56k and living with 100Mb/s now is already a big difference, but it shows when I push and pull docker images or when family accesses the homeserver. 1Gb/s would be better, but probably I'll somehow use up the bandwidth with a new toy. 10Gb would keep me busy for a long time. 20Gb would allow me try out ridiculous stuff I haven't thought of yet.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is still a thing? I thought they crushed it like 10 years ago

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, they severely underestimated how hard it would be to overcome the telcos and their lobbying.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

They may mean crushed it like Google killed Fiber. :D

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

how long until google kill it?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I thought they already did, so this is unexpected.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fiber infrastructure? More likely they’d sell it if they wanted out.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I have their 1gbps plan, but I don't see how I could utilize anything faster.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

My provider recently started offering a 2gbps plan for $30 more a month. I was tempted until I thought about the money I'd need to spend on new equipment to take advantage of it. 1gbps fiber is plenty for now.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Things that take seconds now take even fewer seconds!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Would be more exciting and worth paying attention to if Google Fiber wasn't basically living in an iron lung over at Alphabet these days since they halted major expansion.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'll never understand how you guys in the US are fine with having bandwidth limits on your broadband connections. I'd be pissed. I even have unlimited on my phone. Like wth?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

What makes you think people are fine with it? ISPs have monopolies over service areas and can do whatever the fuck they want. They have monopolies because of corporate lobbying. No amount of voting gets these corrupt fucks out of office bc votes literally do not matter and there's only two parties, they're both to the right of center, and they're both bought and sold. Just to really make sure, we're all taught from birth that the US is peak civilization and all other countries are backwater shitholes.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You could start your own VPC data center with this lmao

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Why are people doubting this? This opens up massive possibilities for people, especially those who want to start businesses outside of city centers.

You could:

  • host your own home-servers and never be worried about bandwidth

  • get 8k streams and not stutter (a low-end 8k stream requirs 50Mb/s, a family of 4 would need minimum 200 Mb/s just for videos)

  • send 8k streams and not stutter

  • offload most of your data to a datacenter on the other side of the planet and not worry about access speeds

    • boot into a browser or a minimal frontend with a low powered device and mount your home directory
  • offload computing to the cloud (no need for a gaming PC if you can just play them online)

The biggest thing would be 8k streams. 360 8k streams would be even crazier. 360 videos are filmed using 3-6 cameras depending on how much fish-eye you want. True 360 requires at least 6. If each is filmed at 1080p that's ~6k total resolution, but since you're only watching one section of the video at a time, you're really seeing 1080p.

Those "8k 360 videos" up on youtube are a lie! They aren't 6x8k, but most likely 8k / number of cameras. True 360 8k video would be 6x8k cameras.

A single 8k stream at minimum requires ~50Mb/s. Multiply that by 6 and you're at 300Mb/s just for a single 360 8k stream. Family of 4 --> 1.2Gb/s just for everybody to watch that content - and that's the minimum. If you have a higher bit rate and aren't streaming a 30 fps, you can quite easily double or quadruple that. Family of 4 again means 5Gb/s if everybody's watching that kind of content in parallel.

But this is just the beginning. Why stop at "video". These kinds of transfer speeds upon you up to interactive technologies.

It would still not be enough to stream 8k without any compression whatsover to reach lowest latency.

8k = 7680 × 4320 = 33,177,600 pixels. Each pixel can have 3 values: Red Green Blue. Each take 256 (0-255) values, which is 1 byte, which means 3 bytes just for color.
3 * 33,177,600 = 99,532,800 bytes per frame
99,532,800 bytes / 1,024 = 97,200 kilobytes
97,200 kilobytes / 1024 = ~95 megabytes

So 95MB/frame. Let's say you're streaming your screen with no compression at 60Hz or about 60 fps (minimum). That's 60*95MB/s = 5,695GB/s . Multiply that by 8 to get the bits and you're at 45,562Gb/s which is way above 25Gb/s. Hell, you wouldn't even be able to stream uncompressed 4k on that line. 2k would be possible though. I for one would like to see what an uncompressed 2k stream would look like. In the future, you could have your gaming PC at home hooked up to the internet, go anywhere with a 25Gb/s line, plop down a screen, connect it to the internet and control your computer at a distance with minimal lag as if you're right at home.

In conclusion, 25Gb wouldn't allow you to do whatever you like. You could do a lot, but there's still room. We're not at the end of the road yet.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, man. Thank God someone is finally thinking about the family of 4 simultaneously watching 8K 120Hz 360 degree streams.

Also,

  • bandwidth isn't the same as latency. This would not let you remote control "with minimal latency," it would be exactly the same as it is with say 20Mbps download.

  • lossless and visually lossless compression dramatically reduces the amount of bandwidth required to stream video. Nobody will ever stream uncompressed video, it makes no sense.

  • If you want to know what an uncompressed 2K stream looks like, look at a 2K monitor.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

20 gig networking — even just a switch — is so expensive. 10 gig is already out of reach for 99% of the population, even network nerds. We’re just now in the past couple years seeing a standard of motherboards with 2.5gbps rj45. A lot of brand new nvme ssds can’t saturate 25gbps. There are just so many bottlenecks. I’m not saying I wish dearly those didn’t exist, but I know from my experience upgrading to 10 gig just how many there are.

https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/all-switching/products/usw-pro-aggregation

Personally I am more excited for high speed networking for homelabs to come down in price. At this point in my life I don’t feel the need to access my network outside of my house at super high speeds. My 100mbps up is fine for when I’m out of the house, and 10gbps is more than I need when I’m home.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

offload computing to the cloud (no need for a gaming PC if you can just play them online)

Unless you can live very close to one of the data centers doing the computing to minimize the number of hops, that just isn't even remotely doable with modern networking equipment

Google tried it with stadia and gifs like this show why it doesn't work for most people

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