My house gets internet via a magical coax cable that is, I assume, connected to the rest of the world via my Internet Service Provider. This cable connects directly into my router, which links to all the devices in my home.
My question is: Where does this magic cable go?
Some followup questions: How long is the cable?
How does so much data go through a single-pin coax cable? Wouldn’t it be better if there were more pins, like in a twinax configuration?
There are also other houses in my neighborhood. Are their cables connected to mine? Can their routers see the packets sent by my router, similar to ethernet?
How has your day been?
It is true. What’s your upload speed? 😁
Fiber connections are synchronous. Meaning that the download speed is the same as the upload speed.
A gigabit fiber connection gives you 1 gigabit down and 1 gigabit up. A “gigabit” cable connection gives you 1.something gigabit down (it allows for spikes… Usually) and like 20-50 megabits upload.
Fiber ISPs may still limit your upload speeds but that’s not a limitation of the technology. It’s them oversubscribing their (back end) bandwidth.
Cable Internet really can’t give you gigabit uploads without dedicating half the available channels for that purpose and that would actually interfere with their ability to oversubscribe lines. It’s complicated… But just know that the DOCSIS standards are basically hacks (that will soon run into physical limitations that prevent them from providing more than 10gbs down) in comparison to fiber.
The DOCSIS 4.0 standard claims to be able to handle 10gbs down and 6gbs up realistically that’s never going to happen. Instead, cable companies will use it to give people 5gbs connections with 100 megabit uploads because they’re bastards.
Comcast has done some wizardry to finally allow decent upload speeds as of late. For years I’ve had 900Mbps down and 15Mbps up but with whatever upgrade they’ve done, I’m now at 900/200 which is decent enough. I honestly don’t even need all this download bandwidth and would be happy with 500/500 but most people aren’t running media servers and hundreds of torrents so they don’t dedicate much to upload bandwidth.
That’s a whole lot of words to try and justify not maintaining a 1:1 ratio on my server bro.
I currently get 2.3Gb/s down and 360Mb/s up on my DOCSIS connection. It’s advertised as 2000/300, but I’m consistently able to get above those speeds regardless of the day or time. It’s about $120/mo for those speeds.
Cable companies are absolutely still bastards though.
Non symmetrical, and my pc can only handle gig anyways -.- upload is always around 1/10 the download for the plans, but I tested 330 up the other day.