Subscribe[Update: July 14/12:27am -- Our sharp eyed readers contested the accuracy of the speed chart shown below almost immediately after publication. Eric, who pens for Photography Bay we linked to below, replied to my inquiry about the data. His reply: "The speed estimates come from Verizon. I was more concerned with the upload figures; however, now that you mention it, it looks like Verizon may have the 80% calculation on the wrong side of their equation for the download portion of the chart. The upload chart looks right with FiOS at 10x faster than cable; however, the download chart shows a 20% speed increase when it should show a 5x speed increase. Nice catch." I suppose we should let Verizon know. Thanks to our readers who caught the math error. Hopefully their billing is more accurate.]
With the announcement by Rogers that their particular implementation of DOCSIS 3 would bring speeds of 25-50Mbps for downloads, it was curious that the company elected to only make incremental increases in upload speed. Maxing out at just 2Mbps for uploading, Rogers continues the mindset that broadband subscribers don’t care about upload speed — just download speed.
That may have been true in the past, but today’s broadband consumer is woefully underserved with slow upload speeds, which hamper uploading pictures, home movies, and other content to share with friends, family members, or like we do here, the rest of the connected world as a whole.
In Rochester and many other Time Warner Cable cities, upload speed has remain unchanged for standard service customers for more than a decade — just 384kbps. Paying $10 more for Turbo service, if only to get 1Mbps (which isn’t exactly “blazing fast” these days either), is the only alternative.
Fiber to the home services like Verizon FiOS and some municipally run fiber systems are changing the paradigm for upload speeds, providing customers with substantially faster service — typically far more than telephone company DSL or broadband service from the local cable operator. A “speed test” from New York from a FiOS customer illustrates the capability:
For photographers, among many other net users, upload speed is critically important in managing their photograph collections.
The Photography Bay blog compiled a chart illustrating the dramatic differences upload speeds can have on your time and patience:
Other stories of interest:
- Mercury News Columnist Calls Out Broadband for Slow Upload Speed, Blames Cable/Telco Duopoly
- The Communications Workers of America Get It: Speed Matters
- Competition Equals Better, Faster Service: Fiber Is Good For You!
- Verizon Business Introduces Tiered Pricing… Based on Speed – On Demand Bandwidth
- Damage Control Technique #1: Increase Speeds in San Antonio
I know gamers usually want a fast upload speed because hosting a game server, you have to base it on the slower upload speed. If you don’t have a decent upload speed, you might only be able to host maybe 4 players at a time, which isn’t worth the effort, and have to almost pay for a monthly game server. With FIOS, paying for a game server will become a thing of the past pretty much for people lucky enough to be in their service area. AT&T Uverse is a step up from cable but they still need to run FTTH if they want to be competitive in the future.
Also, running a FTP server, my upload rate is 1.5Mb/sec but even that is still sort of slow for nowadays. I would like to see better upload speeds myself just for FTP. Sharing files between friends and family is better but still slow. Time Warner in my area, even on their elite package, only offered 512Kb/sec. One of the “major” reasons I switched to AT&T Uverse was because of the better upload speed. From now on, that will be the make or break feature of an ISP for me.
Lastly, one of the major reasons ISP’s limit the upload rate is not because most customers, even in the past, didn’t want it or use it, it was the fact that they wanted you to pay a premium for a business line. See if you had a upload speed the same as your download speed, then why do you need a business line in the first place. Trust me, if they offered upload speeds almost par with download speed in the past, people would of used it. They were just deterred from using it because of snail pace that was involved in sending files.
That kind of reminds me of what I want to do. I had planned that as soon as I were to get FiOS here, I’d set up a 24/7 32+ slot Team Fortress 2 server and a Garry’s Mod server. Unfortunately right now, hosting companies have terrible servers which crash half the time (GMod) and you don’t know what hardware you get put on, not to mention it can become very expensive after a while, plus I want to manage my server and upgrade it as I please. I can’t do this though because 1: Colocating a server would be very expensive for a game server (the bandwidth costs mainly), and 2: I don’t have upload capacity here (384kbps >.>).
But may I mention, I frequently upload files greater than 300MB. These files are HD gaming videos, backups of files, game server content, etc.
But one thing I would honestly like more of if I were to get FiOS would be local peering. Right now with my Verizon DSL, my data has to travel 600 Miles (to New York City and Back) just to reach my neighbor who has Verizon DSL as well. And to reach any local Datacenter in my area, I’m reaching at least 600 miles my data has to go. Sometimes it has to go over 2000 miles worth of cable. All this does is equate to latency. Being a gamer, I need to have low latency for many of the things I do. Not to mention, if local peering was more common, wouldn’t you think Provider Backbones would run better? At least Frontier can route me to a DSL connection in my area within 2 hops, as all it does is go to the CO and then hit the connection. Seriously though, to hit a Verizon connection from my Verizon connection that’s only 100 feet away from me coming out of the same equipment (different edge routers), isn’t 60ms of latency ridiculous?
EDIT: Folding@Home SMP Multicore CPU just finished uploading 80MB worth of data to their server after crunching a work unit for a day and a quarter on my gaming computer. IT brought my connection to a crawl for a half hour, uploading at 384kbps.
Yes I agree with the local peering thing. Gamers need very low latencies for the game to be accurate. Source games suffer a lot from high latency gamers so much that it affects everyone on the server. They tried to fix it with interpolation but that has its quirks. A person entering the game with a high latency of like 150ms latency causes an almost .5 second delay in what everyone sees. Doesn’t sound like much but it is a lot when there are split second happenings in the game. I don’t know how many times I got shot in HL2:DM by someone after I ducked behind a wall.
Seriously, local peering and better routing is a huge issue with all ISPs. When it comes down to it, I have noticed TF2 servers stutter when someone with 600 ping joins (as in lock up for a few seconds). But seriously though. I’m on my Frontier connection at the moment and I traced a TF2 game server I play on all the time. It’s located in Chicago Illinois. When tracing it and pinging it, I’m taking Frontier to Rochester NY, then to New Jersey, then to Virginia (up to 32ms now), and then from there I take Servernap to Chicago (at 48ms latency now) and hit the game server in Chicago at 49ms latency. Now, this is the same latency my Verizon connection gets. Now, may I Also mention, Frontier has a backbone and peering point in Chicago that connects straight to Rochester, NY (where my data must go anyways, since that’s where my CO’s fiber line goes to. Short 100 mile maximum fiber cable). For some reason, I haven’t been routed down there in over a year (I used to be, for for whatever reason Frontier sends EVERYTHING I send/receive through New Jersey now after leaving Rochester). Now, remember what my latency was I stated above? It was 48ms latency when I hit Chicago. Now, when I trace the backbone and peering point that Frontier has in Chicago, I’m pinging a whopping 32ms latency, to Chicago via Frontier’s own network! Now, if I were to take that route to the server, I’d be shaving off 20ms of latency, holding the server at 34ms latency. That is a huge performance boost for TF2!
Now, for something even more local, there is a web host only 5 miles from me who has an OC-3 line going into their location. Turns out, they use Qwest, who peers with Level3 in my area. Now, Level 3 has an exchange in my area, which I am NEVER routed to unless I go to New York City (Verizon) or New Jersey (Frontier) first. Already, that’s killing 20-30ms of latency. Now, for me to ping this hosting company, I have to take my ISP’s network to NYC or NJ, then I have to take Level 3 to Washington DC, where it eventually goes to my local area. By the time it’s there, I’m on a route that has packet loss (seriously), and I’m pining 60ms to something that I should be pinging no more than 15ms to.
It makes me sick seeing this. Absolutely pathetic routing, even on business connections (unless you’re paying over $300 for something like a 1.5Mbps/1.5Mbps T1 line). Now, Time Warner users in my area typically have it better when it comes down to routing than people like me with DSL, but I’ve still seen many, many pathetic routes on Roadrunner such as the ones I described above.
The Photography Bay is woefully out of date when it comes to downloading video game demos. Downloading the demo to any modern day game (indeed, even full purchased games from Valve on their Steam service) is in the vicinity of 1.5 – 5 GBs.
I kicked off the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) this morning and that was a 2 or 3 GB download by itself.
Most significant OS updates are over 100 MB as well.
Google just bumped up their maximum email attachment size to 25 MB which is very handy except that it takes a long time to send your emails. In some cases (with a slow upload speed) I’ve gotten a timeout trying to send my email with a large amount of attached data.
I use FIleFront to get my game demos if it isn’t on Steam (my last Steam download was 7GB big). Many demos these days are 2+GB. I’ve also downloaded Windows 7 and have it running in a Virtual machine. It was a 3GB download for the 64-bit version. Operating system patches can rack up here very fast as well. Then from torrenting a Linux distro on release day and seeding it to help others out, to watching HD video online and uploading it, things add up fast.
Hey Phil, just wanted to point out that the image of the FiOS speeds is in fact messed up. Unless they were counting in some TCP Overheard of Receive window increase delays, the 10Mbps cable connection shouldn’t be that close to a 50Mbps connection. They probably are trying to keep it at real world speeds though, but that’s going to change as many sites such as gaming sites uncap their servers (like FileFront has had for years).
But seriously, simple math will in fact show that the FiOS should download a 6GB movie loads faster than a 10Mbps connection. The FiOS on an uncapped server would finish it in a fifth of the time of the cable connection.
I was suspicious of the download speeds appearing so close together myself. I am assuming they were trying for a “real world” guestimate. I will drop by the blog and make an inquiry and see what I can find out.
I think the data for the Cable 10Mb/sec download is wrong.
50Mb FIOS line = 6.25MB/sec
6GB file
6000MB/6.25MB/sec= 900 sec/60 sec/min = 16 Minutes
Ok that figure is right but…
10Mb Cable line = 1.25MB/sec
6000MB/1.25MB/sec = 4800 sec/60 sec/min = 80 Minutes
Don’t ask me where they got 20 Minutes from a 10Mb line. I can download 4.4GB in 45 minutes on my 12Mb line so there figure is obviously incorrect.
Here are the correct figures for the Cable 10Mb line. Makes a world of difference…
5MB File = 4 seconds not 1
50MB Worth of songs = 40 seconds not 10
75MB Software download = 60 seconds not 15
125MB Video game demo = 1 minute and 40 seconds not 24 seconds
6GB 2Hr Movie download = 1 Hour and 20 minutes not 20 minutes
The FIOS and upload figures are correct. I checked them all.
There are 1024 Bytes in a Kilobyte, and 1024 Kilobytes to a Megabyte. But I suppose a notation of 1000 works best though. Still shows the errors.
Yes, you correct are when you are talking about memory and addressing it, but in this case it doesn’t apply.
yeah those numbers seem horribly off. you can’t download 6gb in 20 min with twc
also game demos are far bigger than 125mb. the difference between fios speed and cable speeds as far as downloads go in that graph are negligible. fios is a hell of a lot faster than anything twc offers.
I am surprised Time Warner hasn’t upped their speed to match AT&T Uverse in my area. AT&T offers almost double that of Time Warners top tier in my area, 18Mb/sec. AT&T offers 3 times the upload the speed compared to Time Warners top tier.
http://www.timewarnercable.com/Carolinas/learn/hso/roadrunner/speedpricing.html
Their “Power Boost” is a joke, “Ewww, I get my connection “boosted” for like 2 seconds. I feel so special now.”
[Update: July 14/12:27am -- Our sharp eyed readers contested the accuracy of the speed chart shown below almost immediately after publication.
Eric, who pens for Photography Bay we linked to in the article, replied to my inquiry about the data.
His reply: "The speed estimates come from Verizon. I was more concerned with the upload figures; however, now that you mention it, it looks like Verizon may have the 80% calculation on the wrong side of their equation for the download portion of the chart. The upload chart looks right with FiOS at 10x faster than cable; however, the download chart shows a 20% speed increase when it should show a 5x speed increase. Nice catch."
I suppose we should let Verizon know. Thanks to our readers who caught the math error. Hopefully their billing is more accurate.]
I wouldn’t hold your breath about Verizon’s billing (and quite frankly I’m not surprised that Verizon can’t do math): http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html
Brion: Im hoping Verizon knows how to do math and it is only theoutsourced
people that make all the mistakes. If Verizon turned into another Fairpoint
it would take away out our own best last chance with the net. Even TW gets
it’s billing right most of the time.
Note to Phil: Tate the guy works at tops has seen his TWC bill go up some
$10+ a month in a very short time. I told him to sent a message to STC
to share this and maybe figure out why.
It’s a long listen (27 mins) but if you listen to the audio linked in that post I referred to you’ll hear (sadly) 2 or 3 levels of Verizon management (not outsourced) completely screw up on comprehending that $0.02 is different than $0.0002 (0.02 dollars vs. 0.02 *cents*). It’s funny and sad at the same time.