It's built on a limited number of RF channels in a certain segment that have many modems all going to a single "port" on a DOCSIS CMTS (cablemodem termination system).
There is a great deal of absurdity in their claims to be selling a gigabit service product using coax-based technology, when the oversubscription ratio is INSANE. If you had more than a few customers on a segment trying to actually make use of gigabit speeds at one time (just 2 or 3 people downloading a torrent of a popular linux ISO at 980 Mbps will eat a huge amount of the total aggregate capacity of that coax segment).
Cox and Comcast and RCN and similar operators are squeezing every last dollar possible for the ROI out of legacy copper coaxial last mile stuff. Only in places where the local phone company or another operator is building proper FTTH (GPON/XGSPON) are they starting to overbuild their own network with their own FTTH. Comcast is doing it in the Seattle area, for instance, in areas where the local telco (Ziply or Centurylink) offers a symmetric 1 Gbps product based on single strand FTTH/GPON.
Your average coaxial cable tv last mile operator like Cox is a telecom industry dinosaur.
The article here was published in early 2020 during peak covid19 lockdown but the general technology problem of copper/coaxial last mile stuff from 25+ years ago is exactly the same today.
For GPON that's 2.5 Gbps for downstream and 1.25 Gbps for upstream. So with a 32 split it's the same story of 2-3 people downloading a popular Linux ISO at 980 Mbps still eat up the entire fiber line for all 32 people.
The difference on the fiber, outside the better upload symmetry we already see, is it will be able to scale a lot more in the future. Some places already have 10G PON (which, unlike GPON, is usually actually said speed) such as where ATT offers 2G and 5G symmetric service. The next step will be 25G PON (again, about the actual nominal speed).
High last mile oversubscription is a net good for home consumers, it almost always works out in everyone's favor. The exception is that 1 guy in 10000 that will actually somehow use 20 gbps a day all day every day in some neighborhood and create some drama in the news because ISPs can't be bothered to try to explain why oversubscription is good to everyone who already doubts them.
Or before you can no longer claim that you are delivering 1 Gbps.
Your average residential user does not move that much traffic at all, if you have a traffic chart that's something like 60s SNMP interface bit counter poller interval for their CPE, fed into a time series db, and draw grafana charts for that customer over a 1 day or 1 week or 1 month period of time.
Even when a customer does something like buy several new 140GB xbox games in one day, the actual amount of time that they're really utilizing that link near full capacity in the same 24 hour period is very minimal.
The only caveat is that you need to be able to watch out for the 1 or 2% of outlier/heavy use customers who will really use their link for huge amounts of data. In many neighborhoods there won't be any of those.
I'm not saying this as anti-PON, just that the existing coax improvements are sometimes very sensible and extremely comparable in the current generation. I've architected and deployed several small city G-PON and 10G-PON networks with Nokia gear and it's fantastic for net new and probably the only real option to continue growing 5-10 years from now. That said, if you've already got decent coax for the last mile DOCSIS 3.1 can be extremely comparable and behave near identically at the moment.
If you look at a typical residential 16:1 or 32:1 split XGSPON system on an optical spectrum analyzer that's capable of all DWDM ranges, it looks gapingly empty. There's just a few channels used for the downstream and upstream with the timeslicing for the various CPEs' usage. And vast ranges of totally empty optical space.
What I find interesting is that your average residential user does NOT really use much more traffic in (in average Mbps per CPE or GB per month) if you give them a 2.5Gbps or 5 Gbps or 10 Gbps connection. I have plenty of 2.5Gbps and 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps customers. Maybe 1-2% of them are really heavy users. The rest of them use exactly the same amount of traffic as the 1 Gbps users, because the vast majority of non-technical residential end users these days have only wifi client devices. Finding someone who has a desktop PC with a 1000BaseT or 2.5GBaseT LAN port to do a proper speed test is maybe 1 in 50 customers.
Even if you've got people with 3x3 802.11ax stuff running in 80 MHz channels they're just barely going to approach 900 Mbp speed tests downstream one way.
If we had offered 10G FTTH to the home in 2002 the sort of power user who would buy that might actually try to run a small server farm out of their spare bedroom. But now it's 2024 and people who are serious about hosting their own stuff are doing it with their own VM/VPS/cloud based stuff, or by colocating a few servers, etc. They know that a residential last mile gigabit+ connection is not the best place for it. There's outliers and exceptions of course, but they're getting even rarer every year as a percentage of the total customers (eg: someone who wants to run a torrent seedbox from their house or something).
No, they're really not, you can't compare single strand FTTH XGSPON on singlemode fiber (16:1 or 32:1 contention ratio), something that is built on 10G XGSPON tech, to something that is built on bonded RF channels on coax copper. The aggregate capacity per oversubscribed network segment is radically different.
Now, all of these cable operators also ARE building actual FTTH networks in certain areas because they see the writing on the wall for the longevity of how much more they can squeeze out of the copper. So in some very specific places the Comcast 1 Gbps last mile product is functionally equivalent to the local Verizon, or Ziply, or Lumen (Centurylink, now branded as Quantum Fiber) FTTH product.
The physical medium itself really has next to nothing to do with it. You can TDM and OFDM on both fiber and coax. The bandwidth is a factor of the total frequency and modulation methods.
FTTH is popular for new rollouts because it's cheaper to rollout and run. It uses less power, it goes longer distances, it's cheaper to repeat if you need to, it's cheaper to upgrade to the next generation of PON. It also has a better scaling future, but I already mentioned that above.
yes, it does, because actual fiber is significantly more future-proof. The same boring 9/125 fiber that's being built today is capable of 100/200/400 Gbps ethernet with only a change in electronics at the ends. Can't say the same for coax. Even the must rudimentary DWDM with 10G OOK optics on single strand or two strands of fiber has vastly more capacity than anything coax based.
No matter how you slice it the coax has a much more limited service lifespan and eventual capacity exhaustion problem compared to the more creative solutions that can be employed in the future to grow beyond the capabilities of 10G XGSPON.
Your typical 10G XGSPON setup like with 16:1 or 32:1 split and single strand to the home, is only using maybe 2% to 5% of the actual available THz channels that exist (in the 1470 to 1610 bandwidth range) in the fiber. There's a vast amount of empty channel space in that fiber for future bidi optic usage scenarios if you know how DWDM stuff works.
The RF on coax, on the other hand, is using pretty much every viable frequency in the bands that will work on the coax and is already at its limit.
The truth is that only some cable companies make these investments - you can look up “fiber node size” for respective performance across different companies. A fiber node being the place where optical is terminated and switched to coax. These have been getting smaller everywhere, but it only makes sense to invest there when the upstream infrastructure can support it. So from a consumer perspective, your “Linux isos” will be slow to download in any case until the upstream network is upgraded and your node is split to offer higher performance.
I know, and you know, that the people doing the more serious engineering for DOCSIS based cable last mile segments are well aware of the limitations of the tech. What I was saying is that they are milking every last dollar of ROI out of the existing physical plant because overbuilding your entire network with XGSPON (it would be dumb to do 2.5G PON in 2024/2025) is a very capital intensive endeavour.
The shareholder value and profits of the company are increased in the short term by continuing to do copper as long as possible, even at the cost of thousands of unhappy customers dragging your company's name into the mud.
It's the fundamental business model problem, and executives at big dinosaur coax operator telecoms that have made the decision to do it this way as long as possible, until the coax/oversubcription situation becomes completely untenable in an area, or until a real XGSPON operator (maybe Lumen, or Ziply, or similar) which overlaps with your historical cable tv network rolls out a better product and you have no choice but to spend the money to keep up with the local competition.
You and I also know that no matter how much they mess about with DOCSIS3.1 and channel sizes and different RF configurations, the aggregate capacity of a few strands of fiber (using even the lowest cost and most rudimentary WDM) is much greater than RF over coax. Squeezing 2048/4096QAM RF stuff into coax is polishing the brass doorknobs on the titanic. It's not a viable long term solution!
little popups (like viasat did) that say something like "your internet will continue to suck until your neighbor at $address stops torrenting the 100gb h0rse archive"
and then they can get extra fees for "anonymous" as well as "unlimited"...
Can’t tell if this is serious or not. People here are doing basement and house work without any permits, without any gas line indicators, while being filmed. Neighbors are leaving because they fear a gas line puncture will lead to an explosion. The city won’t bother addressing it. Nobody, absolutely nobody gives a single infinitesimal fuck about a pipsqueak neighbor “naming and shaming” them over download limits. Laughable.
While I have not yet run into any caps with my gigabit plan I am painfully aware of how limited the so called "unlimited" gigabit plan is. During COVID it was particularly egregious. I was paying about what Mike was paying except from the hours of 11am to around 9pm my download would be capped at 10Mbps or so and my upload halved from whatever it is to around 2Mbps. Cox didn't have the common courtesy to tell anyone that they were QoSing entire city blocks because their "infrastructure couldn't handle it". I only learned this by isolating the network and running my own tests. After what felt like 30 escalations with their tech support and a large portion of my night they all but confirmed they were doing this to handle the "streaming services". I work from home - this was a major problem. Despite this I was simply upsold yet another super-duper plan rather than given anything I could work with.
I get regular outages with them and run my own tests on the coax. Despite having noise levels that are pretty good for the most part their service still doesn't work right all the time. Despite my insistence calling a tech out their labyrinthine tech support tree all but prevents you from talking to anyone but a moron with a flowchart where all roads lead to "reset the modem" or "upsell hardware" and a hands free phone.
I used to run my own modem as I prefer to control my hardware. When I upgraded to gigabit years ago I was forced to lease a modem from them as prior to this they refused to service my house with third party hardware installed. All problems were always blamed on my modem, or my router, or anything they could point to that wasn't them. Dealing with their technical support or on-call techs was worse than pulling teeth. It was like performing dental surgery with a sledgehammer.
I won't get into what it was like cancelling my cable TV. Yet another mess made more complicated by the same situation. At least it was easy to drop off the set-top boxes at the local store.
I hate the amount of control ISPs have over us with the last-mile laws. Companies like Cox can more-or-less do whatever they want in my town because they're the biggest players with the most pipes. The result is as expected - terrible service, fine print bear traps, and high cost.
Support is challenging when you need it. You usually have to talk to multiple people before your problem is resolved. For example, last time I got a new modem I had to be handed off twice before I got to a level where they could 'reset my registration,' and I definitely got the figurative stink eye over the phone for not renting their modem (which, is probably why it didn't "just work"). They usually try to sell you something like wiring insurance as well, and really like to emphasize the potential cost to you if they feel like they have to roll a truck. Fortunately, I've only had perhaps 3 support engagements (1 truck) in that 15+ years. Otherwise I'd be a lot less satisfied.
I'm hopeful that the various fiber providers 'coming soon to my area' will help with this. AT&T is here but not cheaper - they force you to rent their equipment - and I don't want to be an AT&T customer. At the very least it might stop Cox from raising rates $3-$6 a year.
https://www.lightreading.com/cable-technology/cox-called-out...
FTTC would avoid this scenario at least where a heavy user brings down the whole neighborhood.
But perhaps the bandwidth through the last 10 feet of DSL/cable/5G isn't enough to upsell customers to convince them the switch or modem equipment is too big to fit at the curb.
To be honest, we approached the ISP, who was offering fiber in a town 45 minutes away. They said if we could get sign ups at least every half mile, on average, they would make it happen. We had the signatures when they got the grant, so it was sort of a wasted effort on our part.
I'll message here tomorrow if I figure it out though.
What state are you in? There are quite a number of state grants, depending on where you are.
For real though. Talk to one of their planners and see if they have a number of necessary sign-ups. We did a signature campaign and had what we needed before the grant existed. They had committed to our stretch of fiber before they had the grant, we just had to all sign contacts for services. It took a year or so of knocking on doors. And that was to run the line about 40 miles.
I don’t know what Cox is going on about, they need to get with the program.
I have the best ISP in the country. You can’t convince me otherwise.
It's a no-brainer for people who live in their coverage area, yet as you say, their coverage isn't complete.
But it's still $50 for 10Gb where offered.
They want to advertise their sevrice as meeting the federal broadband speed without having to actually build a network that can support it. That's fraud.
And a residential ISP would still be able to massively overcommit despite such a guarantee.
https://www.atr.org/senators-demand-bead-program-accountabil...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/kamala-harris-announces-plan-...
Then the cherry on top was they wouldn't even put me back on my old plan because it "wasn't offered any more". So they tried to charge me an extra $15/month for half the speed I was getting before. I switched to a local wireless ISP that ended up being even more expensive for even slower service -- but at least they weren't liars and when I had a problem I could talk directly with the owner if it wasn't sorted (and no data caps).
The GP already lost 6 days of work… how much would the likely payoff be to make it work their while to continue dealing with that company?
"To do what they advertised to you."
I had an issue with my wireless carrier repeatedly refusing to issue credit for a months-long ongoing problem on their end.
Within 2 days in filing a BBB complaint, I had a rep from the company asking how much I thought seemed fair and if I wanted a bill credit or a check.
BBB is just a review website. Like Yelp.
Filing a complaint with BBB is like saying 'I left a bad Yelp review' ... useful, maybe.. if the company cares..
An FCC complaint got that fixed in two weeks.
The filling fees are in the hundreds of dollars and the judge are used to working with the general public as opposed to well represented plaintiffs with expensive lawyers.
I won the fiber lottery where I live, and I will never go back to cable (I had a choice). Let's just call the rejected cable choice a "30 Rock episode".
And that same cable provider eventually was called out for advertising a "10G Plan!". Yeah.
Meanwhile my fiber provider advertises options based on symmetric upload/download speeds. And I think this is the key in these days when we send a lot of outbound data with video call and offline backups.
Put in place a rule that only the lowest speed can be advertised by providers.
"Unlimited data" should mean you can saturate the connection 24/7. Anything less is deceptive advertising. For a gigabit connection, that would mean around 300TB per month.
The internet is a series of tubes! You can get a dedicated gigabit sized tube but it’ll cost 1-2 orders of magnitude more.
E: Even elsewhere on this thread people are like
> I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down.
Yes! You are the noisy neighbor getting lucky that your neighbors aren’t also noisy!
Just traffic shape that protocol/connection to only use a connection free share of upstream if upstream is currently close to dropping packets, and work a bit with others to get swarms to prioritize downloading from nodes close in IPv6 address space.
If it's shared then say "Shared gigabit internet for only X dollars!" I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest. Cable companies are soul sucking monopolies/duopolies and deserve no quarter.
Competitor services? Starlink aside, I have no options but what I have. I think many people at least in USA are in similar situation.
I live one block away from one of the main fiber trunks in the city, but I was quoted (both by Comcast and AT&T) that it would be $20k-$30k to run that fiber to my building.
Unfortunately I think my experience is pretty common in the US, though sure, there are plenty of people who can choose between e.g. cable and fiber.
I don't think any competitor will give you a dedicated gigabit to you for a reasonable price, especially if everyone suddently starts asking for one.
I pay for a Symmetrical gigabit connection, it’s 60 dollars a month. I record speed tests multiple times a day every day and have ever since I got the service last year. They’re growing gang busters too, my entire neighborhood is on Ziply (90% of household converted from what I understand)
Aside from them adjusting some things due to the rapid unexpected uptake, I have gotten full connection speeds for upload and download every day for over a year. Its been uptime of 99.999% (the adjustment period happened over 2 days and they only slowed service to 300/300 temporarily)
It can be done. It won’t be done by Comcast et. al.
Note that this doesn't means that there are exactly 0 users downloading in those moments. Usually there are multiple gigabits dedicated to a group of users, so that multiple users can navigate at 1Gbps without slowing down others, but not all the group at once. How much bandwidth is allocated to how many users can vary though, and some providers might allocate less total bandwidth to more users.
In practice this works out fine most of the time and most users won't notice slowdowns like you do, but if everyone started a speedtest at the same time you will notice it.
As long as the DMARC isn't saturated then you're only limited by the other lines also going to the DMARC and the collective activity of subscribers upstream of you between you and the central office. That's to say, you are right that it can be done but only insofar as other posters have indicated: last mile providers need to provision higher capacity lines between the DMARC and the central office.
In the end, people go for what they perceive to be the cheapest prices, not necessarily the prices that actually are the cheapest.
BTW the FCC recently introduced "nutrition labels" for ISPs. https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels
"Unlimited data" refers to volume.
Gigabit refers to speed.
This customer presumably isn't too worried about the speed, but is rightly under the impression that he isn't being charged on volume and can thus use as much as the speed allows.
That contrast is now gone, so it's become deceptive IMO.
I don't think I even had 18GB of disk space back then.
Technically what we offered was shared dialup access to a T1 or a T3 upstream. They just looked for the word "unlimited". Customers didn't know what it meant either, except it was "better".
If you were doing anything we thought of as "abusive" we would hang up on you. You could immediately call back in, and we were fine with that.
Normally after the 2nd or 3rd time we caught you being "abusive", we would call you and have a chat: try to figure out what the heck you were doing and why. Most of the time we would just run their data on one of our machines and save the dialup space. They could telnet in and do what they needed doing on occasion. Dialup lines were expensive compared to process space.
Of course we were also one of the few weirdos that had a "community" linux box with the root password in the login banner, so everyone could create their own account and help maintain the community box. It worked really well for several years, until some meanies found it and ruined it. After that we put the root password in /etc/motd, so every logged in user could do root things if needed. That also worked really well for many years.
Different times for sure!
> I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate.
I'm not saying this to justify their actions. I actually think this is worse because it demonstrates clear intention to mislead. But it's something to be aware of because they will argue (and frequently some smug person that I guess has a boot fetish) and then blame you for not reading. But I strongly disagree. Words mean things, and they mean what a reasonable person would interrupt. You can't just hide stuff in legal language. No person has enough time to read all those TOS agreements and even if they did, it's not in normal language that's understandable by the average person. If a contact is fair only if participants are informed and consenting, then I don't think most of these contacts should hold up (they do).
But hey, we live in a world where courts have decided that "boneless wings" doing clearly mean "without bones". But I for one don't want to live in a country where that's okay.
There's a lot of smoke and mirrors with the legal system and I for one don't think enough people are upset. Apathy isn't working.
Interpret. Words mean things, you know.
If I am not to use it like that then it should say clearly on the paperwork that I have data limits, and I don't have any such notifications.
HE only has to run relatively short cables within a datacenter, which is designed for running those things, while residential fiber has to be run much further through much more hostile terrain.
Residential fiber takes more total land and maintenance and has different customer density per unit laid.
Unless HE also offers residential fiber at that rate, don't think it's comparable.
But that's something different than what Cox is doing.
"Unlimited" and over-subscription aren't incompatible. You have a gigabit connection, the 40Gbps uplink is shared between 1000 other people who each have a gigabit connection, the over-subscription rate is 25:1. That's fine as long as the average usage during peak hours is 4% -- which it might very well be. A 4k Netflix stream is 25Mbps, which is 2.5% of a gigabit connection, so you're not above that even if everybody is streaming in 4k at once.
You're even fine if everybody is streaming in 4k at once and then on top of that 15 people want to fully max out their connections. And everybody using their connections at once doesn't really happen. At any given time a lot of people will be using zero.
Now, there will be times that are outliers. Maybe a popular video game drops without staggering the release and suddenly 30% of the customers are maxing out their connections at once to download an update and the average speed drops from 1000Mbps to 100Mbps for a couple hours. That's why it says "up to", right? That isn't artificially limiting anyone, that's just everyone getting their pro rata share in a time of atypical demand.
But on a typical day with an adequately provisioned network you should be able to get the speed on the label, and there is still no reason to be limiting anyone's speeds during times the network isn't over capacity.
The issue is they don't want to over-subscribe their network at only the ratio that would allow them to provide the rated speed on a typical day, they want to promise more than they can deliver and deflect blame onto people who are only using what they were promised.
You have a finite downlink capacity and a finite uplink capacity, users are not just competing for the same time on the wire, they're competing for spectrum. If everyone was on Ethernet to the home then you'd be right, but FTTH and Cable are in physically contended spectrum in the cabinet/cable itself. Proper fibre ethernet costs more per user than FTTH/Cable because each user needs a port on a switch, instead of using TDMA and everyone being on the same wire at the other end.
One is a stupid way to run a society and the other isn't.
That turns out to be a ~1.6TB/month limit.
Hence why I think both speed and volume limits should be advertised prominently. "Up to 5Mbps (1.6TB/month)" or "Up to 500Mbps (or 1TB/month, whichever comes first)" gives users a clear idea of what their service is.
The point I am making is that if fixed carriers seemingly no longer want to be selling connections by last-mile bandwidth (with implied statistical oversubscription and a fall-back to best effort), and instead want to move to selling specific amounts of data delivered, then their big-print marketing should have to reflect that!
Or alternatively, if they want to stick with selling the instantaneous last mile connection speed, then data quotas should have to raise along with that according to a standard benchmark consumer usage - say 2 hours of nameplate usage per day, meaning a 300Mb/s connection would be ~6TB/month. And then additional data usage should cost the same (or lower) as the monthly plan - for example $120/month for that 6TB/month plan is $20/TB, so 1TB of additional data should cost no more than $20 rather than the current punitive or even unobtainable pricing.
Also I'd guess your 90%/1TB figure is quite out of date, which gets to the heart of the problem here - these limits have remained arbitrary and opaque rather than being expressed in the market. It gets even more rotten when talking about national policy where these ISPs have been able to claim they're providing modern "broadband" while their backhaul networks have been seemingly frozen in time for a decade+.
Although, a disclaimer: I only read these threads to gawk at the train wreck and check if the Internet access market is really still this bad. I've got municipal gpon at 1Gb/s symmetric, no caps (I've asked multiple times), with a fixed price every month. Which really just underscores the absurdity of talking about this topic in a negative-sum parceling out of bits and bytes, which mostly stems from Ma Coax wanting to continue milking their captive markets on aging infrastructure.
I gave Cox over $2000 explicitly for unlimited data and still got nastygrams from them for uploading 4TB of my original digital photos to S3 for backup.
It’s effectively illegal to start new ISPs in America, that’s why this shit happens.
My ISP lets me use the service all of the days of the month, not just one. His ludicrously low limit is unfathomable.
They started charging me overage fees. I called them up and asked them to explain why they were charging me overage fees on an unlimited bandwidth account.
Their explanation was that the bandwidth was unlimited in when I could use it, not in how much I could use.
Fortunately for me, there were other providers in the market that I could switch to. So I did.
It has nothing to do with speed/bandwidth.
Just like "unlimited text" plans don't charge per text message. But there is still a physical limit for how many texts you can send.
Just like prop 65 warnings don't help when everything has them.
We truly fucked ourselves by giving these national ISPs so much power. In return, they abuse us, they collude to make sure other ISPs do not compete against each other to justify high prices and low bandwidth, and hire lobbyists to implement/push stupid laws in various states to prevent municipal ISPs (eg, Texas).
Why did you give them so much power? Maybe you should have asked questions, drawn up better agreements.
They way HFC (cable internet) works you would have to cap upload speed for everyone on the network, as it uses time multiplexing for uploads.
No different than when they change their speed plans and roll out new tiers.
And it's not like they put you on slow speeds once you expire it, no, they charge you $10 per 50GB (!). Automatically. You cannot opt out.
Oh, and their counter isn't real-time...
for example, it’s crazy to me that we allowed companies to redefine “unlimited” to mean “limited”.
when people pontificate on how we seem to be heading towards dangerous levels of low trust society—this is a great place to start. few things reach as many people as marketing. we can’t trust so much of what we’re being sold. that’s not good, at all.
I am kidding, Cox is probably their only choice. They better write a letter to apologize as a neighborhood for their bad behavior.
FCC Map - https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/location-summary/fixed?version=...
Vice article - https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-north-dakota-has-the-bes...
New America article - https://www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/united-states-broadba...
Further, having a ton of eyeballs pulling downstream gives Cox a ton of leverage in negotiating settlement-free peering that for instance a pure wholesale carrier would not have. Cox is also a carrier, so the eyeballs are valuable beyond just their subscription fees.
I have a 2.5 Gbps link which I would never saturate continuously no matter what because I have generic equipment at home (despite self-hosting a lot).
I tried a few times to saturate it and whatever I managed to pull was never slow. This is probably because the ISPs allocate some realistic amount of people to the group of people who use the 10 Gbps provided to that group.
"If your ISP isnt in the business of servicing internet, they should rethink their business model"