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

Wed Aug 28 15:33:57 PDT 2019

I think this article is basically on the mark. Personally, my wife and I
are bandwidth-starved -- We both do a LOT of photo and video uploading. We
have a personal cloud, as we live both in Boston and NYC and never know
when we'll need to access stuff where we are not.

The real issue is the "special cases" that are becoming less and less
special. In NJ as Verizon deployed Fios, the number of work-at-homes with
heavy bandwidth needs -- professional photographers uploading to their web
sites for clients to access, medical image users, etc -- exploded.

We're a special case. Our  NYC apartment has clean Verizon DSL (Fios is
coming up our Harlem street "soon" .... and has been for years. We're at 15
Mbps down, 8 up. Best Verizon service we can get at the moment. The Boston
place gets me 60 Mbps down, fairly consistently, from Comcast. But only 1
to 10 Mbps up -- more toward the lower end. The old coax plant is maxed out.

Both Verizon and Comcast have fiber to our MDU service room but none of it
gets to the units.

There are days when I go to campuses where I have teaching and research
connections -- Columbia, MIT, Harvard -- to feed on gigabit. We often
travel back and forth with a 4 TB hard drive in a plastic case.

I'm surprised more WSJ journalists are not handling large data files -- I
deal with random forest runs of all 6 million inhabited census blocks
combined with USGS data.

Steve Ross
Editor-at-Large, Broadband Communities Magazine (www.bbcmag.com)
201-456-5933 mobile
707-WOW-SSR3 (707-969-7773) Google Voice
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steve at bbcmag.com
editorsteve at gmail.com

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 4:53 PM Jane M. Hill <jhill at cybermesa.com> wrote:

> Happily, one of our staff members subscribes to the WSJ. He copied the
> article, though the graphics were a bit trickier. Attached is the article
> in its entirety (with a little fudging on a couple graphics).
>
> The article really focuses on streaming. It does address some of the
> points made on the list - as well as the concept that the cable companies
> hype bandwidth somewhat unnecessarily.
>
> I see the desire for speed. In particular, more upload speed would
> simplify file transfers and working in the cloud - plus help with
> gaming(?). Then again, the article makes the point that we may be getting
> more than we can actually use. In two to four years, we'll all need more
> speed. Luckily, from the ISP perspective, bandwidth and the attendant
> equipment will come down in price to meet the demand.
>
>
> *** Jane ***
>
> Cyber Mesa Telecom
> Santa Fe Headquarters
> Tel 505-988-9200
>
> *Local Contact Numbers* <http://www.cybermesa.com/ContactUs.htm>
>
>
>
> On 8/28/2019 1:43 PM, Michael Harris wrote:
>
> 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
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>
>
> --
> Michael Harris
> --
> President, Visgence Inc.
> www.visgence.com
>
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