I don't buy the 'no demand for it' line. It has never been offered by the big players. They don't want consumers uploading large amounts of data. I suspect this was originally done due to piracy concerns. But with so many homes having Nest products (and the like) that constantly upload, we need higher uplink speeds.
There was a company I like claim something like "only 5% of our users <do a thing that we dont support>" as argument for not supporting the thing.
To me, I heard "A full 5% of our users want this badly enough to hack around and get this for themselves"
This would be like Comcast saying "Less than 1% of our customers are using 10 gigabit connections, so clearly this isnt a thing people want"... You dont even offer that speed so of course the user base is low (assuming even top businesses can get those speeds). It's your job to increase the user base.
Yes, I want symmetrical broadband. But I would rather have 200/20, than 10/10. Don't mistaken that for "lack of demand" but rather "settling for what the area monopoly provides"
Well, that's only true for ISPs who are not also content producers/owners.
Many ISPs who are also cable companies sell the content that people pirate, so they definitely do care.
In Canada, Rogers and Bell (two major quad-play telcos) are at the forefront of pushing for legislation to crack down harder on piracy by eroding privacy rules that protect consumers' Internet usage.
Fair point, but I think that was more true maybe 5-8 years ago. Since streaming services have taken off, piracy has gone way down, and providers see subscription-based streaming services as their existential threat. If any ISPs haven’t realized this, they’re just behind the curve. Bell clearly has, hence Crave TV.
Just think, who do you know outside of some geeks that bother with torrents anymore? Even most geeks who know how to pirate video and music don’t bother. They just give their $5 to $15 to netflix/hulu/amazon/spotify and don’t bother with the hassle.
When you pay your cable company $X/month to add a premium channel, they get to keep some of that money. When you pay the premium provider directly, your cable company gets nothing. (You were going to have an Internet connection either way, so they're not getting any additional money from you.)
Pretty much all fiber services around Seattle offer a symmetric gig (CenturyLink, WaveG, Google Fiber/WebPass).
The only caveat I’ve heard of is that in some older buildings, WaveG offers only non-symmetric 1Gb down/100Mb up, but i am yet to encounter that myself. I didn’t look into this myself, but i have a feeling that one might actually be just a DOCSIS instead of the real fiber.
There is measurably no demand even if you look at fiber. Most fiber deployments are GPON which is asymmetrical as well. They even make symmetrical deployments which however means you can’t (in theory) use much of your upload. However since almost nobody uses their upload nobody notices.
In Austria even fiber uses a very low upload (500/70, 1000/100 are common) because cable also doesn’t have more and there is little customer demand to increase upload.
There is no demand because of the limited upload bandwidth and ISPs only providing limited IPv4 addresses. When customers are forced use NAT with very little upstream bandwidth, they are de facto a lower-class network host that cannot use many types of network software.
I personally stopped working on a few P2P communication and personal server projects in the late 90s. Letting people communicate and share files with their friends directly with their own local private server could have been a way to fight back against the FAANGs centralizing the internet. Unfortunately, the limitations from the ISPs made this impossible for most people.
Seems more likely they want price discrimination for their business offerings. I don’t know how well that would explain things in competitive market areas though, but in monopoly areas it would make sense.
The business offerings for my office are basically the same as the consumer offerings but 4x as expensive. Getting 75/15 at work cost as much as 1000/35 did at home.
I always assumed this was part of it. ISPs want you to have to pay more if you're going to be hosting a server (and possibly making money). also explains why port 80 is usually blocked.
It's extremely common for ISPs to block inbound packets with a destination port of 80, 443, 25, etc. Of course they don't block them outgoing (with the exception of port 25 commonly). He didn't "imagine" anything and it's quite out of form on HN to claim something like that.
I always thought that this was the reason... so they could charge more to businesses because they tend to upload more then download (not sure if it is still true today).
Possibly, they shot themselves in the foot by creating demand for pushing everything "into the cloud"? If the telco demands monopoly prices for hooking up your servers on premise, chances are you move your servers to a datacenter where there is actual competition, or use services of someone who does.
