I think it has been true for many years that: a) a vast majority of residential gigabit/symmetric customers, or gigabit asymmetric (docsis3 500-1000 down, 16-50 up) no longer have a device in their home with a 1000BaseT port on it, or don't know if they do. in some cases literally the only cat5e cable they have may be a 3' piece from their cable modem to 'router', and everything else is wifi. b) don't understand the difference between the service speed delivered via the wireline connection and demarc/handoff device, whatever that may be, and their perception of service over the wifi. c) are unwilling to go through troubleshooting steps requiring them to directly connect a device to the modem/demarc by 1000BaseT and run speed tests, possibly necessitating a service call (this can be partially avoided by the install technician doing a *wired* speed test in front of the customer at the time of install, from their laptop, and taking a couple of minutes to explain the difference) d) may be using badly configured wifi things that stomp on each other, sometimes provided by the ISP (I have seen set-top boxes from major MSOs that broadcast a 2x2 MIMO 802.11ac 80 MHz wide channel, now imagine ten of these all in wood framed houses/condos/townhouses all very close to each other, in addition to the wifi from the demarc modem/router device). There are lots of other things in the common consumer environment that render some environments a CSMA mishmash, like smart TVs, printers and things that all create their own AP for some reason. e) may be using their own randomly purchased-from-best-buy wifi "range extender" devices to create weird forms of mesh networks in their home, further halving their bandwidth with each half duplex hop. On Mon, May 31, 2021 at 4:54 PM Tim Burke <tim@mid.net> wrote:
This is a good point as well… you can have the largest pipe in the world, but in many cases, in-home service issues are caused by crappy CPE.
Example… my neighborhood has 1000/50 GPON (rather silly to offer such poor upload speed, but that’s irrelevant in this case) provided by a local outfit, Entouch (now Grande/RCN) as part of HOA dues… Many people in the neighborhood do not use it and blame the ISP for offering “mediocre service”, simply because there is no fancy CPE included as part of the service offering. Yet as soon as you swap that $25 Netgear router pre-installed by the home builder’s structured wiring contractor for something that’s worth a damn, the pipe is actually usable…
With that said, if there needs to be regulation on minimum broadband speeds, should there be regulation to require home ISPs to provide high-end 802.11ax-capable network gear, so the average clueless home user with a 1gbps FTTP connection can actually use the service they’re paying for?
V/r
Tim
*From:* NANOG <nanog-bounces+tim=mid.net@nanog.org> * On Behalf Of *Josh Luthman *Sent:* Monday, May 31, 2021 12:55 PM *To:* NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org> *Subject:* Re: New minimum speed for US broadband connections
Was that the fault of the broadband provider or was that the fault of the indoor WiFi? Is it possible the router has so much interference from all of the neighbors and everyones using 2.4 GHz? What if that example had a cable connection with 960/40 mbps and they're limited to 5 mbps up because of the in house WiFi solution?
Would upping the broadband plan to 1000/1000 fix that problem?
Josh Luthman 24/7 Help Desk: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373
On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 2:56 PM Chris Adams <cma@cmadams.net> wrote:
Once upon a time, Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net> said:
"Bad connection" measures way more than throughput.
What about WFH or telehealth doesn't work on 25/3?
More than one person in a residence, home security systems (camera, doorbell, etc.) uploading continuously, and more.
I know multiple people that had issues with slow Internet during the last year as two adults were working from home and 1-3 children were also schooling from home. Parents had to arrange work calls around their kids classroom time and around each other's work calls, because of limited bandwidth.
The time of the Internet being a service largely for consumption of data is past. While school-from-home may be a passing thing as the pandemic wanes, it looks like work-from-home (at least part time) is not going to go away for a whole lot of people/companies.
-- Chris Adams <cma@cmadams.net>