https://www.aussiebroadband.com.au/blog/aussie-broadband-ann...
Edit: The real test though will be the bandwidth of our gov-sponsored, substandard, widely FTTN (instead of full FTTP).
EDIT: props for getting rid of limits and disconnects though. NZ providers are just saying we'll be able to cope with everyone working from home because we have a fancy network.
Last week they started laying cable down my street, so it seems pretty soon I'll be able to join the modern world.
Hell, my company has several branch locations which are relegated to point-to-point wireless links in the sub-Mb range.
Their only broadband option is LTE (and data prices in Canada are through the roof) or satellite (also expensive).
From what they're telling me, people from the area formed a co-op and got government funding to lay fiber. Except now that it's happening, incumbent telecomms also want a piece of the pie, doing everything in their power to lobby, slow things down through the CRTC and give them time to put their own systems in place before the co-op.
We have organizations like Internet Society Canada (https://internetsociety.ca/) that are aiming to help change that, but it's an uphill battle.
Kudos for the multi-gigabit fibre, when we can only imagine of a gigabit lottery.
a fast local internet is useful mostly for local streaming services. (does youtube count as local in NZ now?)
You could cover more than 80% of our population just cabling up (literally) about half a dozen reasonably dense cities.
The actual reason is political. One side of politics privatised the state owned monopoly telco, creating a single huge, anti-competitive behemoth. That made progress with the internet stagnate for a decade. Then the other side got in, tried to work with the telco but they wouldn’t budge, and then surprised everybody by deciding to just build a provider-neutral network that was FTTP to 90-93% of the population. This was going fine - a few months behind schedule but on budget (projected at AU$44.1bn) after a few years.
But the opposition managed to convince a bunch of people in the media that it was hugely over-budget (despite the fact it wasn’t, and that all their financials were on the public record) and that a sensible solution was to stop that, and instead buy the old copper networks off the incumbent provider and spend a few billion to do a bit of an upgrade. They were “absolutely confident 25 megs is enough for anyone” and said this would cost max $29bn. They won Government, turned the network on its head and it’s just been one problem after another with huge widespread service quality issues, massive cost overruns, delays etc.
So now the cost of their “more sensible, cheaper, and quicker to build” network is nearing $60bn and finishing two years later than the original FTTP schedule (before they won Government, the party that wrecked the project promised to have it done by the end of 2016!)
So it’s just a big mess. Nobody really knows why they chose to do what they did when pretty much all the experts said to just continue with FTTP (they paid some consultants with links to their party to say their idea was great to get around that). Some say it was business links between party members and the incumbent telco, or the cable TV network they own half of. Others say it was because they had a deal with Murdoch (the leader of the opposition actually happened to have lunch with him the day before they announced their policy) because he owns the other half of the cable TV network. Perhaps it was just because they couldn’t accept that it was a good idea the way it was...
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/03/16/rogers-waiving-long-d...
Now if we could take a second to talk about all the "From CEO..." emails that are being sent around...
https://news.expats.cz/prague-technology/t-mobile-joins-o2-i...
WFH (RDP/Webex/VPN) uses much less bandwidth than streaming Netflix.
But the kids being at home might make a big difference.
I'd have thought Netflix in particular would use less bandwidth than video conf because of the amount of peering / caching tricks they can do to bring their service "closer".
Note: I'm not talking purely bits transferred - I'm referring to network boundaries. In-network congestion should be easier to manage for an ISP and I'd expect plenty of them make it so Netflix and others' traffic is effectively "in-network".
Not to mention that most of the people now moving to home office will be spending their time working in relatively low bandwidth applications not sitting video conferences.
The storms we had 6+ weeks ago knocked out the landline (and adsl), so we've been tethering for any internet, which is 1 bar strength of 4g.
It's increasingly unlikely that Telstra (the fixed line telco) will ever repair the copper: we've had several promises and nothing yet (nor expected until April).
An entire political party decided that the internet was just for "movies and entertainment", "You don't need fast internet" and similar comments. This guided them towards penny pinching as a strategy which meant they succeeded in seizing defeat from the jaws of victory.
"Penny wise, pound stupid" is the old term for it.
If you don't like AT&T's offerings, you can't go with another ISP.
In a lot of buildings - there's exclusivity arrangements so that no other provider can install fiber.
This is why Australia's NBN was a good idea - the fiber is rolled out by a single body, all the ISPs have equal access.
My apartment has NBN Fiber, I have an ONT provided by NBN, and off that ONT there's four 1Gbit ethernet ports - I can call up my choice of ISP(s) and ask for service from any of them.
The idea for having four data ports was that you could have multiple different network conections.
Perhaps your employer wants you to have a 1Gbit connection direct into their network - no worries, they can provision directly onto one of those ports, and then it doesn't matter what malware might be on my home network, it won't impact the work device.
Perhaps you need some kind of remote-monitored medical gear - well having that on the public internet is a bad idea, so your healthcare provider could provision a port for that, too.
It also means that if I want to switch ISPs, I call up the new ISP and ask for a connection, and when they get around to setting it up - I switch over to their port. Not working? No worries, switch back to the old ISP and continue using that until the new ISP figures it out.
Now, let's compare this to my state and local governments. They're slow, hate change, they're very careful about who to give money to because their main problem is avoiding corruption. A prominent local politician campaigned and won by promising to vote no on or veto everything. Every slow-down comes from a totally legitimate anti-corruption rule and you aren't going to speed the process up without creating Tammany Hall. My local politicians have only one way to make the news, and that's by messing something up. There is no carrot, only a stick.
Those two pictures align perfectly! As a result, my water service has never been interrupted, and I have never gone to the polls with a negative idea about anyone on the MUD board. It's a great system for everyone involved.
Now, my question is, how in the world does this work with internet service, an area in which there are changes at a rate greater than once per century?
You might also be mistaking the fad driven high margin web for the rather stable internet sitting underneath it, especially if you go all the way down to the cable duct where a lot of rural houses are still using copper put down in the 30ies.
The problem here is that laying down cable ducts requires both "right of way"(often exclusively held by whoever laid down telephone cables in the 30ies) expensive survey work and real physical labor(someone have to an actual trench), all of which requires capital and if you already own the copper cable for no significant increase in revenue.
Things can be done with radio signals and i suspect whenever 6G mobile arrives it might be municipal, but radio will likely never match the bandwidth potential of even the first optical cables ever laid down.
Was this just a really unfortunate typo for underserved?
It is limited and many people will rather choose commercial providers (faster, more flexible plans) but it is working and is free.
PS. Germany has toll-free highways, Polish are quite expensive..
Do you mean like the RDP marketplaces should slow down so people cant find a computer near the skimmed credit card they bought so that visa transactions go through?
Or something more like corporate hacking?
Or back to the RDP to install monero mining botnets?
I’m just trying to figure out which one you are referring to as “overtaxing”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...
there is a basis for mutual coexistence, it is a maladaptation for anyone to destroy the basis of your existence.
in particular the idea of ransoming or disrupting connectivity and integrity of critical data, info ,services or creating compounding issues. If someone makes thier living doing that, now is not the time for thier own sake as well.
the vast majority of "hacks", the kinds with efficient markets, don't have those kinds of consequences, almost negligible consequences really.
nobody is trying to overload internet-connected generators or some infrastructure where there are consequences.
I just can't imagine what kinds of hacks you think are actually happening to fit your dynamic.
If you use more water, even if there is plenty of delivery capacity, they could literally run out of it. There is only so much in the reservoir.
If you use more electricity, even if there is plenty of transmission capacity, they have to burn more fuel to generate it.
Transferring more bits doesn't risk depleting the supply of bits and doesn't require burning more fuel. The worst it can do is consume all of the available transmission capacity. But the amortized cost of a bit is very low -- if you charged true cost then it wouldn't meaningfully deter usage, so you'd still need about the same total amount of transmission capacity. At which point charging for usage serves no legitimate purpose.
Legitimacy or lack thereof is irrelevant when setting prices.
Most areas also have some kind of rate assistance or subsidy program for low income utility customers. But they still have to pay.
Very much doubt faceless corporations with automated billing cycles will take such an altruistic view on this but perhaps I'll be surprised.
Most will do the exact opposite I believe. The last financial crash caused massive cashflow issues for the big corps.
You have food distribution centers?
I'm jealous.
We have a full lockdown, yet everyone is outside and it's really crowded. There aren't people that give a (...) About the situation, especially in this city, because most of the people are higher educated.
This said, I also wouldn't say it's really crowded, I took the tram in to the office this morning to pick some stuff up (last day that'll be possible for a few weeks) and it was very quiet.
Anywhere people might gather is closed and the public are encouraged to practice 'social distancing'. But the army/police are not in the streets making sure people stay at home.
This is for now, i wouldn't be surprised if they extend it later on.
The thing is, Fastweb is big in residential internet connection but pretty minor as mobile provider.
No word from major providers (Vodafone, Tim, Iliad)
It also doesn't seem worthwhile to switch at the moment, since other solutions require a 1-2 year contract which I do not need (not to mention, it would also take 2-3 weeks to get a connection with those anyway).
There are not enough resources hosted within the region to make the distinction pointed out by donavanm worthwhile, unlike e.g. China or Russia. The local data from my plan gets used up predictably while I access resources in any part of the Internet.
However, I don't at all like the argument that if your neighbor can't pay her bill, it might not just impact her, but two of her neighbors, one of which is some kind of network engineer who fixes BGP thingies. And neither of the leaching neighbors who have some kind of critical need of her internet can help pay for it???
If you can fix BGP thingies, you ought to have your own WiFi, or be able to do better than leaching it.
But it is bad that you have two people leaching off some hypothetical other person's WiFi, neither of which is willing to pay for their own or help her. And you aren't "fixing BGP thingies" for free or if you are out of work.
Why isn't the mooching neighbor helping pay?
I'm ALL for the ISP's relieving bandwidth caps and not cutting service due to emergency related financial difficulties - for their subscribers.
On the other hang people who actually spend resources (for example those isp who continue to provide the internet to those who lost jobs) actually make change, and we are thankful to them.
In fact, I'd go as far aa saying thar internet today is an absolute necessity, on par with water and electricity.
We do not really know how long it will take. Emergency state and lockdowns may be the new normal. Everything that could work as usual should work as usual to not cause additional disruption.
You could be in hospital or you always pay cache not online, many people pay everything with money in hand in shops(that have such payment points) here in Romania, also if you have a smartphone I imagine attempting to setup accounts and try to pay online from the phone is a pain.
Asking university students to leave campus is hard. Switching from on-prem to online teaching overnight is harder yet. But teaching across the connectivity divide, where students don’t have access at home and the state just shuttered all the businesses providing “free” Wifi, is impossible.
I have been wronged many times by Comcast over the last 24 years; at least from my POV, this offer—provided they abide by it—erases most if not all my ill-will towards them.
Well done
Charter is waiving late fees, not terminating service, offering free service to households with students which don't already have service and opening their WiFi hotspots to everyone.
Verizon is waiving late fees and will not terminate service.
Cox is waiving late fees, not terminating service, opening WiFi hotspots to all and upgrading speeds on connections in their programs for low income customers to 50Mbs.
Comcast is eliminating data caps, waiving late fees, not terminating service, opening WiFi hotspots to all and offering 2 months of free service to those eligible for but not enrolled in their $9.95 per month program for low-income families. They are also increasing data rates for their low-income program connections.
Many other providers have also pledged to not terminate service.
[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363033A1.pdf
"Bandwidth" is already rationed but is usually high enough you don't notice most of the time or its still good enough most of the time. If you do continuous transfers you immediately see the data rate limits already in place.
But these data rate limits are usually already throttled and therefore different to some monthly download data cap. Those data caps are often marketing/sales driven rather than the actual data rate. And often the real technical data volume limits are for data entering/leaving the ISP. That's the real cost that is being covered by bandwidth caps. They estimate the costs at their borders and cover that first.
Which brings us to the caching involved. The more caching the easier it is to lower costs or limits. Peering means that some ISPs are closer to each other than they otherwise would be. And Netflix and others using CDNs etc place servers at strategic locations to bring themselves closer. That 2GB movie stream is likely traversing a lot less equipment than you'd expect. In some cases, less than a video conference or game.
If caching fails and something got broken along the way, or... they don't have a close enough CDN site, or caching simply isn’t possible, that is when you have congestion[1] since your traffic now joins whatever else is at the ISP entry/exit points. They can still lower your data rate without touching some monthly data cap.
[1] I'm not discounting congestion within an ISPs network but as they have all the dials and can do whatever they like to sort that out its a separate issue. Redundant paths are a thing. Also, if they isolate congestion to a particular user or usage, eg bittorrent, they already have throttling for that.
Even with preparation, It would be a very difficult and impossibly contentious process.
As far as establishing effective policy: ISPs have a lot of practice rationing bandwidth, I'm sure there's a way that's fair enough. Putting a price on it is a good start.
True, and if they can provide reliable service without the data caps, then it makes the public (and in a perfect world, government regulators) question why they need the data caps at all -- if their network runs fine for months without any data caps, then why do they need those caps at all?
Technically Comcast could implement it overnight by reducing everyone's data speed (or maybe throttling particular services), or instituting stricter data caps.
From a business perspective it's harder but if it was the only way they could keep their network afloat, I'm sure the could get the FCC to let them implement emergency throttling.
