Fiber "internet" has arrived

Thanks, Dan. That explains why they slow down. Whenever I run the test, I am the only one running the test. So it is fine. But as I said, occasionally when our home WiFi is congested, then I get some connection problems.

One more question, if you don't mind. I am on coax cable from Spectrum. They offer three tiers of Internet speeds. I am on ULTRA. AFAIK, there is no hardware difference between those services. So, are they just software throttling on their server end? When I started working from home, I upgraded our service from the standard speed (up to 300 Mbps) to ULTRA (they say up to 500 Mbps). I am not really sure if the upgrade was necessary but I don't have hard data to compare before and after the upgrade. Are those upgrades worth the cost?

 

Yeah, the speed test result is one thing, but real-world usability is another. I use to pay $19.99/mo for internet service, but the current rate after the promotion is $99.99/mo. That's not much different from the Standard Internet service now at $79.99.

Here is the Speed Test I just run on my laptop. For my work, it is actually much preferable to have a faster upload speed but I think the upload speed is the same for the higher upgrade Internet services.

 

As you guessed, the speed is throttled through a software setting at the cable modem.

Unfortunately, Spectrum subscribes to the concept that the guarantee of "UP TO 500 Mbps" allows them to oversell their capacity and still sleep at night. Did I mention that Comcast "upgraded" my service down by 50% ???

Th reason that they get away with such loose terms is that your 500 Mbps is only guaranteed from your cable modem to their switch. From there to your office 10 miles away the data may travel through a dozen links at a handful of data centers. If any one of those links is overloaded you may find that your throughput may drop a lot. I've traced connections that went from San Jose to Los Angeles on it's way to San Francisco.

You mentioned working from home. If you have 100 co-workers sharing the same connection into the office network, the slowest point is often the line going into work building.

More in the next post.

 

You guys are killing me. $70/month...

 

A short followup. The connection problems when the house is full of guests may be due to many things.

First is the often overlooked interference from the Microwave oven in the 2.4 Ghz band. Most of the time it does not matter much, but when we have a lot of guests we end up cooking a lot more and spend a lot more time in a room near the kitchen. You can get away from it by using the 5Ghz band of an AC class wireless router.

 

I thought this duckduckgo blog post could help give some a better understanding of your comment, it helps me get a better perspective of this current anti trust initiative, anyway....
https://spreadprivacy.com/privacy-companies-call-for-vote/
as always there is going to be push back for security focused entities that are continually demanding backdoors into every part of the lives of ordinary people.

What can we expect as far as privacy is concerned even in the best of times looking ahead to our future.

my speeds really suck 36 Mbps down - 6 Mbps up but this box is on a subnet and the route is not clearview. I'll test a clear line on wifi later and check to logs to see if any of my neighbors are using my connection like in the past before I kick um off. Don't ya hate nosey neighbors as much as I do?

 

Would either of you wish to disclose exactly what part of which anti trust law or consent decree is not being enforced? There are several to choose from.

I have spent more than 25 years working for regulated monopolies, including AT&T. I also have also taken a series of 4 college courses on the subject of the regulation of telecommunication monopolies.

I don't see any company implied by that "privacy.com" petition (except Microsoft) that would be considered an out and out monopoly. According to it's own bragging, the majority of all consumers in the USA are using Microsoft products. Does AT&T have a monopoly for Fiber internet access? Top 10 Best Internet Providers in San Jose, CA in 2022 shows that there are at least 10 companies that provide gigabit or better internet service, so those people have a choice.

There is a special barrier to entry that faces any company that wants to install fiber in a city. Cities tend to charge for the rights to tear up the streets, sidewalks and other infrastructure. In the mid 1990s Pac Bell ran a pilot project in San Jose that was a hybrid of Coax and fiber. As I recall, it was fiber to a node in each neighborhood and then copper coaxial cable to the customer homes. It worked, but the city wanted to charge exorbitant amounts of money to bury new cables in the streets. The project was eventually canceled.

Now, back to the privacy issue. None of the consent decrees that I've read had anything to do with privacy. All of the companies that want to "protect your privacy" want to do it by selling you their own product. It's just a different target of greed.

 

Roadrunner hung fiber around the turn of the century. simple search of both At&t anti trust and IBM anti trust should give you enough data for a thesis on the subject. 40 years for data might be required to get a PhD though.

 

I've read about both of those antitrust suits. Discussed them at length in class. Wrote a paper about it too. One of the flaws in our system is that existing natural authorized monopolies like cable and telephone will tend to have a head start (embedded plant in the form of buried or aerial copper) when it comes to pushing new technologies like DSL, fiber or piggybacked on the existing wiring. They also have a tendency to cannibalizing each other. Roadrunner, mentioned above was actually part of Time Warner Cable which was gobbled up by Charter before it became Spectrum. AT&T was forced to sell off some of it's dark fiber to competitors as anti trust prevention before it could buy SBC. It's hard to tell who had what monopoly and at what point in history.

But I don't see where the anti trust laws are not being enforced, not in a way that impacts high speed internet deployment.

 

Anti-trust went off the board in 1984.
Heck, you don't even need terrestrial internet as of about 2019, and Starlink wants to do mobile voice in the near future....

NOW....let's talk about Section 230....

 

Huxley `1984 the door of perception
coincident?

 

@dbstoo I can't speak for PriusCamper but I took his meaning as Privacy Issues that extend way beyond the issues of one technology ie; fiber or telee . But those techs are and have been merging for years and years and years. It get intensely complex, especially when a corp. proprietary ownership(s) contain classified materials. Check out - The Open Group - and their current posix compliance certification. It's actually nothing special for the first time casual reader, but if you'd been following it for twenty or more years, you would have surely noticed many suits back and forth, some of them anti trust in substance, between almost every certification holder throughout it's existence, however long you might have been following along. It's history pre dates me.

 

Yes.
One of very few allowed by nature.

AT&T got out over their skis with 'foreign attachments' and tangled with the wrong Texan,...and the rest???
History.
Kinda interesting history in eight parts.....
A Significant Date In Tech History: The Carterfone Decision - EDN
IMS: A radio History of the Telephone, HELL'S BELLS

(*) As it turns out, Hell's Bells goes back even further than the 'Classic Rock' song of the late 70's or a late-80's docudrama by government funded radio.
Some of my antecedents used a thusly named FM sonar set back in the 1940's in Hirohito's Bathtub and did some good work for the Almighty.
See also: Operation Barney, or Wahoo's revenge.
Operation Barney: Revenge for a Lost Submarine - Pearl Harbor

BUT.....Wahoo is another story...

 

@ETC(SS) speaking of rock tunes the reference of Years and Years and Years came from, dont ask me how??. Roger Waters "It's a Miracle" kinda NSFW if a boss hears the one or two swears. linked to a safe time for the exact reference.

I had to listen to a few others on the 90s CD to find it, "Amused itself to death" references 1984 at the very end and "Perfect Sense" just in general.
Loved the antique audio formats available for the radio recordings It looks like the audio format description page is blank, but that's just due to the color of the text,
I think you and I are on similar pages when it comes to history and it's story telling perceptions.
One of the audio files references MCI, which I used for long distance back in the days of AOL HELL. while that set of issues was common place.

I could have gotten fiber to the house 10 years ago when it was first offered in this area, since the fiber is hung real close to eveyones houses in the local service area. I just didn't need the extra speed than and I still don't need it for our use case.

Is anyone recommending fiber providers google verison fronteir other ....

 

Most people really don't need that extra speed.
My CFO and I were on 6-12 meg DSL for years until 2 seperate providers utterly laid waste to our neighborhood's buried utilities by putting in fiber with missdirectional boring machines. Since I'm still employed by one of them I qualified to switch to my beloved company's 'gigawhammy' service, for a quarter of the price, and I haven't looked back.

So....
What's the difference, you ask?
Not that much in my house, quite frankly.
It's a little perkier, but we were able to dual-stream video on 6-12mbps, and run about 100 IOT devices, cameras, security systems et al.

If you have gamers in the house, or a coupla teens then yeah.
It matters.

I DO get to patiently explain to a lot of people that....NO....you can't use Google Speed Test on your home WiFi and expect 1,000 megawhammies of deflection on their cartoon speed meter with gigabit service.....

If the fiber stuff were not so cheap for me, and if it weren't for the fact that I have to get executive approval for large capital expenses, I would have Starlink, but that's me being me again.

 

I feel sorry for you that you've had a career based on enabling monopolies and turning public resources into private resources for the sole purpose of maximizing profits. There must not be many positive memories you can look back on whey it comes to being a benfit to the public rather than just greedy shareholders who'd rather screw the public.

As for which part of anti-trust deregulation bothers me, I could go on for hours... Perhaps most glaring is the person in the federal government who manages acquisitions and mergers. It's always run by people who's previous work experience is based on successful finagling the approval of corporate acquisitions and mergers, even when there was valid public opposition. It's a classic fox guarding the henhouse situation with bogus mitigations like requiring corporations to divest from certain products and services in order to allow the monopoly to grow with just enough window dressing of fake fairness to not raise the ire of the public that backs the watchdogs.

On a far more difficult level it's SCOTUS affirming Citizen's United case which said not only is there precedent to consider campaign contribution/bribes as protected free speech, but to remove most of limits on how much our elected leaders can be bribed with kicks the legs out from under representative democracy and corporate wealth has been soaring straight up ever since.

As long as that money flows to lawmakers and regulators monopolies like Amazon, who have access to 30% of all global domestic commerce data, can use their unlimited access to that private data punitively against those who do business with them in order to further their monopolisitic corruption. They have established themselves as a defacto international government that engages in criminal taxation without representation. But without new legislation and new laws against this type of corruption, we have very little ability to stop these egregious anti-trust violations.

As for your example of allowing IPs and cable companies affordable and fair access to public infrastructure, that's been rigged in many ways to favor monopolies, which is why Google Fiber was mostly a failure. That's because the telephone poles were not turned into robust open markets, but were privatized in many different ways. Same problem with toll roads, home ownership and RX industry and many other aspects of public resources where corporations can come in with billions of dollars and take over just enough of the public's resources that they can control the price and raise it to outrageous levels and not run afoul with anti-trust laws because they've rigged all three branches of government to work for them and against the public trust by nullifying representative democracy. History will remember this as treason, not as tens of millions of dollars spent on TV ads convincing everyone that these corporations make you feel good.

 

Telephone poles mostly.....aren't, and haven't been since they were telegraph poles, with the exception of some places where REA was a thing but even in THOSE places rural electrification generally preceded private telephony.
Power companies lease space on THEIR poles to RBOCs and COLOs alike.

Amazon?
A monopoly with less than a third of whatever "all global domestic commerce data" is supposed to be?

I don't think that's what a 'monopoly' is.-

 

You should do a bit more research into how these things work out in the real world, Prius Camper. A regulated monopoly is often a good thing, especially when you are asking a company to invest billions of dollars in assets that are buried in the ground. In exchange for a guaranteed market the public utility is held to certain quality of service measurements. In the case of the California public utilities, the prices of service were set to provide a consistent return on investment. If memory serves correctly, the local Phone company was allowed a 3% profit rate in the early 1970s. This profit was returned to investors via dividends.

Unfortunately, a bean counter at AT&T noticed that their manufacturing subsidiary (Western Electric) was not regulated as such. They figured out that they could, in essence, launder profits by selling equipment at inflated prices from Western Electric to the regional Bells. It was easy to do since no-one else at the time was making the same equipment to the same standards.

Before the breakup of AT&T in 1984, the individual regional Bell companies had the best, most reliable phone service in the world, and at the lowest cost for basic service. It was not uncommon for people in other countries to wait months or year to get a phone line installed.

The biggest fault that I've seen recently within the FCC not doing it's job is this: They have accepted circular logic to allow monopolies that are largely unregulated. Example: The cable companies are allowed to be unregulated because the consumer can always get the news and other information from broadcast TV and radio. A single owner (including the cable operator) is allowed now to own virtually all of the TV and Radio in a given market because the newspapers are available as an alternate source of information. The dominant cell service provider is largely unregulated because the local phone companies 's provide a competing service. Oh, the broadcast TV? It's been pushed out of the way by the cellular providers who insisted that the TV bandwidth would be better served if they were allowed to sell more wireless broadband services so that we can watch more ads on their network, where UNLIMITED means you can have as much data as you want to pay for.

TL-DR: A well regulated public utility is often a good way to provide services of quality at reasonable costs to the public. The hitch is that it's for the good of society, not for the benefit of wall street but most people don't understand that. The other hitch is that the regulators are susceptible to corruption.

 

Good points, all. I was also somewhat flummoxed by the possible interpretations of "global domestic commerce data" . As I recall, most rulings are that control of over 50% of the market is needed to declare a monopoly.