Altice Is Reducing Cable-Internet Upload Speeds To Bring Them 'In Line With Other ISPs' (arstechnica.com) 80
Altice is slashing its cable-Internet upload speeds by up to 86 percent starting on July 12 to bring them "in line with other ISPs." Ars Technica reports: Altice Optimum Online plans that currently have advertised upload speeds of 35Mbps will be reduced to uploads of either 5Mbps, 10Mbps, or 20Mbps, depending on the plan. Altice did not announce any immediate price changes on the plans that are getting upload-speed cuts. The only good news for users is that the change will not affect existing customers as long as they stay on their current service plans, an Altice spokesperson told Ars. But new customers will have to accept the lower upload speeds, and existing customers would have to take the lower upload speeds whenever they upgrade, downgrade, or change service, Altice said.
Altice claimed that its cable network isn't having any trouble offering its current advertised speeds. "Our network continues to perform very well despite the significant data usage increases during the pandemic and the speed tiers we offer," the company said. The upload-speed change is apparently being implemented not to solve any network problem but to match the slower upload speeds offered by other cable ISPs. Altice told Ars that it is changing its cable upload speeds to bring them "in line with other ISPs and aligned with the industry." Altice listed the upcoming changes in a chart on its website.
Altice claimed that its cable network isn't having any trouble offering its current advertised speeds. "Our network continues to perform very well despite the significant data usage increases during the pandemic and the speed tiers we offer," the company said. The upload-speed change is apparently being implemented not to solve any network problem but to match the slower upload speeds offered by other cable ISPs. Altice told Ars that it is changing its cable upload speeds to bring them "in line with other ISPs and aligned with the industry." Altice listed the upcoming changes in a chart on its website.
That's some BS right there (Score:1)
Re:That's some BS right there (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to run a high bandwidth server....
Nowhere in the industrialized world is 35 Mbps considered "high bandwidth". My old, dying cat shits out bits faster than that. This is, indeed, a money grab by a monopoly ISP.
My city recently started providing municipal fiber Internet, and I went from 200/50 Mbps with a 2TB cap for $100/month via Cable provider to 1000/1000 Mbps with no cap for $65/month with the municipal fiber provider. That's a 5-fold increase in downloads, and a 20-fold increase in uploads for $35/month LESS than the Cable provider.
You need to rethink your concept of "high bandwidth".
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It hasn't been high bandwidth since the back of fucking beyond in Sweden got 1 gigabit symmetrical connections a decade ago, asshole.
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Nowhere in the industrialized world is 35 Mbps considered "high bandwidth"
You need to rethink your concept of "high bandwidth".
Meanwhile, Down Under...
The prime minister of the incoming LNP government in 2013, taking over a national broadband FTTP project from the previous government that initiated it:
“[We] are absolutely confident that 25 megs is going to be enough, more than enough, for the average household.”
They switched the plan to buying and re-using existing xDSL and HFC, went nearly 100% over budget, and after 7+ wasted years they're finally being forced to overbuild with FTTP.
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Uh, where are you getting 1000 up? Comcast's top speed here is 1000 down / 40 up.
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Not sure if that's sarcasm or not, but in case it's not:
Almost anyone with enough last mile bandwidth does (ie switched ethernet with reasonable aggregates over the last mile). Usually WISPs, municipal metros etc. Obviously not the case with oligopoly telcos such as yours who are happy to rent you infrastructure built in the 80s (xfinity is just docsis 3.1, nowhere near legit switched ftth). Only in rare pockets of competition they'd sometimes begrudgingly give up and invest into infra for your sake (say AT
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Well, half of this argument is based on "the old days" of cable modems where outrageous speeds were offered to home, leading to home-based web servers. Now, it's clear that web content must be legal, and must be kept outside the home in order to go big. Some people assume they still have unlimited upload... but Slashdot over the years has noticed the eroding of this.
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If you want to run a high bandwidth server out of your residence, pay more than residential rates for it, tx.
I'd just like to just keep my torrent sharing close to 1:1, the system works better for everyone that way. I can download a movie in minutes, but it takes quite a bit longer to reciprocate, which means leaving my VPN connected much longer than I need to. Often I will leave it on overnight, and end up sharing much more than 1:1, so I actually end up sending more data upstream than I normally would, just slower.
But I suppose I get what I pay for in any case, and the system is actually better for it.
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Re: That's some BS right there (Score:2, Troll)
Re: That's some BS right there (Score:2)
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Most heavy bittorrent users are not supporting artists at all. They're hoarding, collecting hundreds or even thousands of audio or video recordings imply to have complete collections, and collecting far more than they could possibly use in their own lifetime.
The ISP's do pay for data transferred, and to maintain the bulky connections to support these. It's unsurprising that that they'd engage in an economy which does not hurt normal clients, but much more interferes with Bittorrest.
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Effectively they are encouraging leeching, which is bad for Bittorent as a protocol (and would be even if everything downloaded was legal). That is their right, but I still nonetheless work to minimize that as much as possible within the confines of my contract.
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Do notice the "hoarding" part of what I commented. Hoarders will generally use up every available resource, no matter what that maximum is set to. Most of them simply do not care about the protocol performing well for others. And yes, leeching is an issue for Bittorrent. But I suspect this will actually help, by slowing transfer speeds from the first seed and the first stage of recipients, it will slow the downloader completion times and keep _them_ active in the community longer, encouraging distribution o
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Do notice the "hoarding" part of what I commented. Hoarders will generally use up every available resource, no matter what that maximum is set to. Most of them simply do not care about the protocol performing well for others. And yes, leeching is an issue for Bittorrent. But I suspect this will actually help, by slowing transfer speeds from the first seed and the first stage of recipients, it will slow the downloader completion times and keep _them_ active in the community longer, encouraging distribution of the load.
I might be mistaken: I'll be curious about the results of the change.
If hoarders upload as much as they download then it is all good from my perspective so long as they don't degrade other users experience, and the latter is controlled by ISP over/under subscription, not absolute speed. I don't really care if they cannot consume a fraction of what they hoard. Hoard away.
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2 years ago, your upload speed for most residents wasn't a big deal. As most of our stuff was downloading information. However now that a lot of us are working from home, having Video Chats, (we are uploading a lot more data than before)
There's got to be something they aren't saying (Score:3)
Re:There's got to be something they aren't saying (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs in the US typically don't have any real competition, so they don't need to.
Re:There's got to be something they aren't saying (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. And the current anit-trust frenzy is carefully worded to only go after goog facebook and amzn. I'd argue ISP monopolies are more onerous.
Re: There's got to be something they aren't saying (Score:2)
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Mercedes has to compete with other car makers, which is why they need a point of difference.
I'm not sure how this equates, since this move would be akin to Mercedes removing all aerodynamic advantages they've gained from racing F1 over the years in order to 'bring them in line' with other car makers who don't race F1. Who retards their product, in order to compete?
ISPs in the US typically don't have any real competition, so they don't need to.
But this is a story specifically about an ISP making a change in order to "align" with other ISPs.
Just because we call it an "information superhighway" doesn't mean ISPs should collude together and put speed limits on it. Stupid, is st
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The thing they're not saying is that there's not a single one of their customers who has any other options, and there's absolutely no laws preventing this.
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I hate to defend an ISP ever, but no current customers are being effected by this change. If they change to a different plan, this will have to be taken into consideration.
New customers haven't lost anything because they were not customers in the first place. They literally were not signed up for service, so nothing has been lost for them.
I do agree that ISPs are typically monopolies and have no competition. By the way, the laws that should prevent this from happening are written the exact opposite way beca
Re: There's got to be something they aren't saying (Score:2)
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No customers are being effected by this change yet. When their contract renews it will auto update to new rules, like all other monopolies do.
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Correct. The only thing that can happen is their customers can complain to their local franchising authority that oversees the cable company's monopoly in their area. Although it would take some serious number of people complaining, most likely, for anything to change.
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(I'm sure they've actually taken money under the table to do this on behalf of their competition. There is actually laws against that but it is almost impossible to get caught doing it unless one of your own executives spills the beans in public.)
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I could speculate but it wouldn't help my credibility. Just know that some people see any stifling of free communication or business to be a end goal in and of itself, even if it ultimately means paying someone else more than the market value of something you don't have, not to show you up by selling theirs.
Re: There's got to be something they aren't saying (Score:2)
You think that's it? Who does the bulk (in bytes) of uploading on consumer internet? From a degradation in *upload* speeds ... cui bono?
Media companies who hate file sharing?
Other ISPs who donâ(TM)t want people to question their low offerings, even if they serve other markets?
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So the answer is clear. Buy a Porsche.
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For most, the answer is the superiority of the autobahn for handling high speeds which allegedly led MB to overbuild the cooling systems in their vehicles for sustained hard-condition driving.
Unfortunately, there are always tradeoffs and any performance car owner will tell you there's a lot of situations where high spec vehicles are less reliable or require more stringent maintenance; this is particularly true if the vehicle isn't regularly pushed, many performance engines suffer higher blow-by for example.
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If a company has a skill or point of performance that makes them stand out in a positive way from the competition, why on God's green earth would they want to get rid of it?
Their business is Not in competition... A natural monopoly exists for cable generally more than one provider will not serve an area, and typically other options such as DSL are slow -- Most consumers have 0
realistic alternatives to their main cable provider, And this move kind of Re-Inforces and proves it.
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Because in many places they have no wired competition. I live in such a place. The moment Verizon decides to pull their heads out of their asses and extend Fios over to my street, I'll drop optimum so fast it'll dig a crater in the asphalt.
Really glad (Score:2)
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They are getting in line with you anyway.
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It's okay, if you were, nothing would be changing from your perspective anyway. You are grandfathered in, oldgraybeard.
I hear it all the time... (Score:5, Insightful)
"We're reducing the size of the standard cubicle to be in line with our competitors"
"We're raising health insurance premiums to be in line with our competitors"
"We're getting rid of the coffee maker in the break room to be in line with our competitors"
"We're setting the thermostat to 60 degrees in the winter to be in line with our competitors."
I might as well go to the competitors then, since everything will be the same.
Re:I hear it all the time... (Score:4, Funny)
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The only time it is good to be "in line with our competitors" is when you were worse than they are before. Sheesh.
Re: I hear it all the time... (Score:1)
The free market works (Score:2)
Look at that, free market competition working in favor of the consumer yet again.
Reminds me of the good old days of roughly 15 years ago when all the cell providers managed to increase their price from $0.10 per SMS to $0.25 in lock step.
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My internet (Score:2)
is 1Gbps so obviously they are moving in the wrong direction.
So what's the motivation? (Score:2)
I'm not familiar with cable tech, but I would naively assume that the less bandwidth you dedicate to upload, the more will be available to download on the same coax So it would let them increase download speeds down the line?
I'm not familiar with how bandwidth gets priced for a cable ISP by its upstream.. But in my small corner of the world, a miniscule fibre ISP basically has stupid amounts of free upload bandwidth, where 'free' means both capacity and cost..
Re:So what's the motivation? (Score:4, Informative)
From a technical perspective: only in theory are they interchangeable. In the typical urban cable system, there are thousands and thousands of physical devices that amplify signals. In the US in most of them (because of standards from the early 1970s... and honestly the late 1940s) below ~42 MHz signals get amplified toward the company office (or a remote fiber-fed node), above ~50 MHz they get amplified toward the users. So, yeah, if they wanted to replace every one of those diplexers to increase upstream bandwidth, they would inevitably eat a little of the possible downstream (which could be some traditional cable TV channels) to do it. In reality, it's not the lack of frequency space that is stopping cable companies from moving that split higher, it's the cost/benefit of actually rolling trucks to do it.
Which ISPs? I've had 100 up for years now. (Score:2)
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I'd have thought that symmetrical service would be relatively common in the US at this point.
Nowhere I've ever lived has had symmetrical service of any kind outside of dialup (slow, but equally slow in both directions) until a couple months ago. My local Cable ISP is shitting its bits now that they have real competition via municipal fiber. They're going to have to change to fiber for Internet, drop the caps, and offer symmetrical Gig, or they're going to be driven out of the Internet business.
I, for one, will shed no tears if the phone company and the Cable company fold up shop. When I canceled my
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FTTH (UVerse, FIOS, etc) is symmetric. Cable is asymmetric.
seems like de-facto collusion (Score:1)
I remember the good old days when you offered a better service for the same price and people would then buy your product.
Apparently that doesn't work anymore.
The other distinct possibility is that there never was such a thing as the good old days.
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It doesn't work when there are vertical monopolies or duopolies backed by local/state governments.
Previously Cablevision (Score:3)
I lived in NY for most of the 00's and had never heard of this "Altice". Googling it, turns out they actually bought Cablevision a few years ago. I actually had Cablevision Optimum Online service back in 2003 - it covered most of Long Island. It was a 10Mbps/1Mbps service that was several times faster than other cable or DSL companies in the State. In fact, when I moved to NYC 2-3 years later, the best I could get was Time Warner's "RoadRunner" Cable, which gave me about 4/0.5, or a Verizon ADSL at a bit slower down, so I missed Optimum Online.
Sad to see the new owner of the Optimum Online service changing strategy from offering far faster speeds, comparable to European etc standards, to "matching competitors" with dismal upstream. And their tiers don't make much sense to me, they start at 100/5, which is ridiculously asymmetric, I would say 100Mbps down for residential already covers most possible uses, yet 5Mbps up is quite lousy if you do any kind of media uploads... Unless that's exactly what they figured out, i.e. most people would stay at the low tier when it was 100/35, as you rarely need more downstream, while now the low tier has a serious deficit. However that cannot be the whole story, as their previous max tier was 940/50, which now becomes 940/35. So you can no longer get 50 upstream even if you are willing to pay for it.
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Not surprising coming from Altice. Altice is controlled by Patrick Drahi who is notoriously famous for nasty business practices. He doesn't give crap about his reputation, his only goal being to maximize profit. His innovation is about business practices, tax evasion, and screwing up customers. Funny part being that Altice started by buying Numericable which is the equivalent of Comcast in France, and ended up with the same kind of bad reputation as Comcast in the US.
Now in France (and even Europe at this
Ha Ha! Fooled you! (Score:2)
You bought our service because we offered great upload speeds and our competitors didn't. Your account is very important to us. Well guess what! Now that you are connected to us and have paid all of the equipment deposits, we have decided to bring our service into line with our competitors and make it as crappy as everyone else's. Have a nice day. We look forward to keeping you as our customer.
Which ISPs, Exactly? (Score:2)
So, I live in Altice country, but we're lucky in that there are a handful of competitors. Verizon has FiOS in the area, and we're moving a lot of clients at work to FiOS explicitly because even 50Mbits/sec is problematically slow for upload throughput (Veeam backups to Wasabi for servers with 1TB of storage can take in excess of a weekend when doing active fulls), whereas the lowest tier FiOS has available is 300D/300U...so FiOS isn't it.
If you go to the NYC area, you've got Spectrum, formerly Time Warner.
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It's better than it used to be at 50 down / 5 up though.
Marketing (Score:2)
Seems fishy (Score:3)
Here in tiny town population 17K, way out west, the local ISP is serving up 1000/250 for $90 a month. Maybe I'm paying too much but it seemed OK to me.
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This is fiber - they are running fiber all over the place. The local cable outfit (Spectrum) keeps sending offers but I'm pretty happy.
Maybe it's the fact that we have some competition that's driving the level of service. I'm not sure.
Cartel, what cartel? (Score:3)
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Sarcasm noted, but telecommunications and Internet service are so heavily subsidized by government in the United States that you can hardly consider most broadband markets to be free or unencumbered.
Ask Altice (Score:2)
Meanwhile, in the developed world (Score:1)
We're starting to get XGS-PON in NZ.. 8Gbps symmetric...
https://hyperfibre.co.nz/hyperfibre-options/home [hyperfibre.co.nz]
This isn't just some far fetched stuff, you can order it today.
Your telco system is broken, USA.
Concurrence at work (Score:2)
The race to the bottom has commenced.
Musk will be glad to hear it.
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Bullshit detector is off the scale (Score:2)
"bring in line with other ISPs"
Wow. This is one of the stupidest things I've ever read in my life.
How about telling the real reason, that their upstream provider monstered them with threats if they didn't throttle upload speeds?
At least they would've gotten some sympathy instead of revulsion tward themselves.
On the face of it, that's infuriating. (Score:1)