[1st-mile-nm] Is Faster not always better ?

Wed Aug 28 12:43:19 PDT 2019

I don't have a WSJ subscription, so I can't RTFA, but I thought I would
chime in a couple of points:

- I've got ~30Mbps at home (WISP)
- My household streams almost *constantly* youtube, netflix and twitch
(inbound), and bandwidth seems fine
- Online gaming (non-streaming) is also fine
- Twitch streamers are upload-heavy, not necessarily download
- Cable Co. internet is heavily biased towards "download", rather than
upload. We have  60(d)/10(u) at the office from Comcast. Download is fine
for an office of 7. Upload is on the edge for the cloud-heavy work we do.
In order to get better upload, we would also have to double our download
(and pay for it). IIRC, the asymetric connection is a technical feature of
DOCIS, so maybe it's not something they cable co. can actually address...

-Michael

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 1:32 PM Doug Dawson <blackbean2 at ccgcomm.com> wrote:

> The big cable companies have unilaterally raised speeds with no changes in
> prices. In the most recent change I noticed one day that Charter had
> increased my speeds from 60/6 Mbps to 135/20 Mbps. The cable companies have
> done this regularly since back when the speeds were down in the 6 Mbps
> speed range. They may have done it before then since they started with 1-2
> Mbps – I just can’t recall.
>
>
>
> Your Michigan situation sucks, and just means that they haven’t upgraded
> the network there. In urban markets they have increased speeds in various
> markets from 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps for the same price you are paying there.
>
>
>
> With that said, the days of no rate increases from cable companies is in
> the past. Most Wall Street analysts now expect them to raised rates every
> year. For the last year most of them buried the increases in the cost of
> modems and other hidden places, but they need to raise rates to keep up
> with earnings expectations now that they aren’t growing by double digit new
> broadband customers any more.
>
>
>
> Forcing folks off slower, older packages is certainly a quiet way to
> implement a rate increase. I hear they are all quietly killing the old
> cheap packages. That’s only going to work for them one time. Once everybody
> is onto the base product they’ll have to raise everybody’s rates.
>
>
>
> I think you are massively underestimating the existing number of gamers.
> Estimates are that 25% of all households have at least one serious gamer.
> You wouldn’t get that by talking to us old farts on this web serve. Gamers
> can use intensive broadband. I have a friend with two teenage boys who each
> run 2 – 4 games simultaneously on different streams. He had to upgrade from
> his 250 Mbps Verizon FiOS product!
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Doug Orr <doug.orr at gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, August 28, 2019 2:58 PM
> *To:* Doug Dawson <blackbean2 at ccgcomm.com>
> *Cc:* John Brown <john at citylinkfiber.com>; 1st-Mile-NM <
> 1st-mile-nm at mailman.dcn.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [1st-mile-nm] Is Faster not always better ?
>
>
>
> Hey Doug,
>
>
>
> (a) Did broadband companies raise endpoint bandwidth and upgrade all their
> other junk with the expectation that there would be significant uptick in
> usage...or did they raise endpoint speeds, meaning they can charge higher
> prices, and implement minimal core improvements to back it up with.
>
>
>
> I have, for example (anecdote alert!), a house in a podunk Michigan town
> (3000 population). The only provider is Charter. They used to have several
> packages, all of which could stream Netflix. They switched to where the
> minimum package is 40mbps for $80/mo. Way more bandwidth than I need and
> way more than I'd prefer to pay. Does that sound more like forcing everyone
> into a higher grade of service because they are totally going to be better
> competitors and provide better service, or updating cheap endpoint gear in
> order to justify price increases which offset losses from cord cutting? (Here's
> an articl
> <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/charter-will-spend-less-on-cable-network-in-2019-but-charge-customers-more/>e
> reporting Charter is spending less on its cable network in 2019 and
> charging its customers more. Here's an article
> <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/sorry-ajit-comcast-lowered-cable-investment-despite-net-neutrality-repeal/>
> saying, roughly, the same thing about Comcast [Comcast says they're
> spending more on infrastructure, but, who'd know if that's right?])
>
>
>
> (b) I agree that school aged children and young people are bigger
> bandwidth users (as, I wouldn't be surprised, are children of Internet
> professionals :) And the question absolutely is, as you say, who are the
> isps making the network for? But, again, the question, fully, is, who are
> they building the whole thing out for -- caching, peering, aggregate
> bandwidth... Because it's the end-to-end performance that matters to the
> intensive consumers, not the "speed test" number, and raising end to end
> performance is way more expensive than giving people a faster endpoint.
> (Cable companies seem to be reporting getting done with their upgrade to
> docsys 3.1, which all fits. And, maybe not coincidentally, one of the big
> features in 3.1 is "active queue management.") Throttling and traffic
> shaping can give you a whole lot cheaper implementation than upgrading line
> cards.
>
>
>
> Better numbers sound sexier. It's a marketing benefit to have higher
> numbers, and it makes the bar higher for potential competitors.
>
>
>
> I'll stick with my baseless assertion that our isps are advertising and
> pricing for gamers and building and provisioning for 50 year-olds watching
> Netflix :)
>
>
>
>   Doug
>
> On Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 9:32 AM Doug Dawson <blackbean2 at ccgcomm.com> wrote:
>
> This is a topic I've been giving a lot of thought to lately, because this
> seem to be one of the new arguments that opponents of funding rural
> broadband are now using.
>
> It takes pages to write a full response to the question (and luckily for
> me I have a blog where I can do that), but here are a few ideas that are
> part of the response to refute this concept:
> - 2/3 of the broadband customers in the country are now served by the big
> cable companies, and those companies all now have set the minimum speeds of
> broadband for new customers between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps. They didn't do
> this in a vacuum and the big companies unilaterally increase speeds every
> 3-5 years as a way to cut down on customer complaints about speed. I think
> there is a strong argument that these companies have established the
> 'market' speeds that customers want. Nobody made the cable companies
> increase speeds and this is one of those examples of the marketplace at
> work.
> - Like with everything in this world, the users of broadband run the gamut
> on the spectrum from homes that barely use it to homes that will use
> everything they can get. It's really easy to talk to folks along the bottom
> half of that spectrum and assume that homes don't need faster speeds. This
> raises the really interesting policy question: do you set speeds based upon
> the average customer, upon the 10% biggest users, or something else? There
> is no automatic answer to that question, although I point to the answer
> above where the cable companies seem to have decided to cater to the top
> half of the spectrum.
> - There is a huge difference in homes with school-age students and those
> without. In my opinion any discussion of the right amount of bandwidth
> needs to consider homes with students - other homes just come along for the
> ride.
> - We know that the need for bandwidth and speed increases every year. If
> the policy is to build broadband that takes care of today's needs, such a
> network will be inadequate in five years and obsolete in ten years.
>
> Doug Dawson
> President
> CCG Consulting
> 202 255-7689
>
> Check out my blog at http://potsandpansbyccg.com
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: 1st-mile-nm <1st-mile-nm-bounces at mailman.dcn.org> On Behalf Of John
> Brown
> Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2019 10:18 PM
> To: 1st-mile-nm at mailman.dcn.org
> Subject: [1st-mile-nm] Is Faster not always better ?
>
> https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/
>
> --
> Respectfully,
>
> John Brown, CISSP
> Managing Member, CityLink Telecommunications NM, LLC
> _______________________________________________
> 1st-mile-nm mailing list
> 1st-mile-nm at mailman.dcn.org
> http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/1st-mile-nm
> _______________________________________________
> 1st-mile-nm mailing list
> 1st-mile-nm at mailman.dcn.org
> http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/1st-mile-nm
>
> _______________________________________________
> 1st-mile-nm mailing list
> 1st-mile-nm at mailman.dcn.org
> http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/1st-mile-nm
>

-- 
Michael Harris
--
President, Visgence Inc.
www.visgence.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www2.dcn.org/pipermail/1st-mile-nm/attachments/20190828/c3a4beda/attachment.html>