How are (say) the 100-200 Mbps connections provided through regular cable not sufficient for this? And is all this fight really over being able to stream 3+ different 4k video streams? It seems like such a niche and low priority first world problem that if these are really the concerns I'm almost glad they're not being addressed. Is there really no other better use case people are fighting for here?
DOCSIS has a very difficult time providing 100+ Mib/s connections. It's really only possible when the distance to the cabinet is less than 1 km and the number of clients served by that cabinet is less than 50. This is why cable companies are able to offer 300 Mib/s connections in urban areas that have a cabinet for every block, but struggle to deliver 50 Mib/s connections in suburbs where a whole neighborhood must share a single cabinet. The cost of installing enough cabinets to give everyone 100+ Mib/s rapidly approaches the cost of fiber-to-the-premises as population density drops.
There is also the issue of the asynchronous nature of DOCSIS. Cable companies must make a trade-off between upstream and downstream bandwith, and tend to assume that people value downstream much more. This is why you see hilarious allocations like 300 Mib/s down and only 5 Mib/s up.
Agreed. My 100MBit down DOCSIS connection has only 7MBit up provisioned and the ACKs for 100MBit takes 2MBits of that 7 (and whatever traffic shaping box the cable co uses has horrible queuing behavior if you transit more than 6.6 for more than a few minutes, so I have it rate-limited at 6.5MBits on my router). So if I have a 100MBit download running, I actually only have 4.5MBit upload capacity free.
The cable companies might be changing this. I'm in suburbia, consistently get 125/25, and noticed the other day on Comcast's site that I can get 300Mb down if I want to upgrade.
Because cable QOS sucks. Both technical QOS and service from the vendor. I have a 16Mb connection right now through TWC/Spectrum. In the last year, it's gone out at least 15 times, usually during primetime. My upload speed is horrible, roughly 1.5mbps. In my town, a new fiber vendor is bringing FTTH, charging $65 for 100mb/sec, and $100 for gigE. This is symmetrical too, and upload speeds are important for good offsite backups etc. My vendor allows self-hosting, basically with the statement that as long as you're not doing anything illegal, you can use the pipe as you see fit. Try running an smtp host on TWC or the other bigCo vendors.
>And is all this fight really over being able to stream 3+ different 4k video streams?
Shit, three 4k streams should work with 110 mbit cable service that is pretty standard across the country. Gbit is more like 30.
I have 80mbit. I'd only pay maybe 10 bucks extra a month for Gbit. And I download copious amounts of video from usenet. TV shows already take under 5 minutes.
