I have a cable ISP that is giving me 500 down and 20 up for 30 euro/month, I got a call from a second ISP that is Fiber to the home and offered me Gig down but only 20up for 39/month, they offer to pay the penalty fees for my first ISP, the thing that I don’t really like about the fiber ISP is that they use PPPOE, what would you guys do? TOM what would you do? :))
I have not used a PPPOE connection in the last 10 or more years but plenty of people comment about it not working right all the time.
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I recall reading something about when you have a large delta between upload and download speeds which can lead to slower speeds. It’s related to the acknowledgements returning at a slower speed, which then transmit data at a slower rate.
Not sure if this is theoretical or not but at least in the UK there are not many services with symmetric speeds which is probably the best option.
Tell that ISP you also want 500 up !!
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Yes, your right about that the 20up is too little for all that download, talking to a friend here that has the gig down and 20 says when downloading with that speed he nearly chokes the upload.
Thanks a lot, Tom 
Upload does NOT need to be symmetrical in order to received a faster download, if that were true we would not be able to have separate upload and download measurements like we do. Yes, there are ack packets when using TCP that need to be sent but they are not size proportional to the upload.I am not sure the source of this misinformation.
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When I was fixing my bufferbloat awhile back I came across this, obviously on the internet , I suppose in a scenario when packets are being transmitted, they can be resent if the acknowledgement comes back too slowly, which has the effect of a slow download speed. Personally I can’t test this as I have crappy speeds.
One thing I don’t see any rationale for is why upload speeds seem to be so consistently slow for home users regardless of country.
Thanks for the info Tom. Doing a speedtest on my 500 down it uses 5mbps up while downloading at 500mbps.
A friend of mine that works at one of these ISPs says the slow upload is due to cost, they tell him upload costs much more for them.
Fiber will give you lower latency, which is important for (video)calls and gaming. In my opinion, this is a huge benefit. Low latency gives you better user experience than fast speeds.
Definitely fixing your latency / bufferbloat transforms the browsing experience more than faster speeds. Webpages are so much more snappy. However, I’d say most home users will have the mind that a faster download speed will “fix” their “slow internet”.
To be honest pinging places like example google both ISPs have around same 29 to 32ms, so I dont think there is much better latency on the FTTH, anyway, our cable provider uses fiber to the node, so that might be why they are similar
In your situation, I don’t think I would change. You aren’t getting that much unless you download big files a lot.
Now in my case, either of those would be great. I get 70mbps down and 6 mbps up for approximately $60usd per month. I keep waiting for Starlink to send me an invite because their users are on average getting 10-20mbps up. The 70 down is fine for what I need, but I want better upload and I’m angry that cable providers have not bothered to progress with the industry. Co-workers are able to get gig/gig fiber, but not all areas were built up to allow this, and I’m in one of those areas. This gig/gig fiber is around $90usd currently.
Just as a point of comparison, the 6mbps up that I have makes it difficult to have 2 zoom/teams meetings running at the same time. Since two of us have worked from home recently, this can be an issue.
And just for the record, shame on you Spectrum cable! Update your technology instead of sitting on plants that are more than 20 years old! Almost nothing has changed since I worked there in the late 90’s and this is truly shameful!
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Most FTTH are PPPoE that is managed by the ISP and is not seen by the end user as it is setup into the ISP equipment. If the OP really need to setup PPPoE manually, than yea, I would probably not go with that ISP.
Yes its ISP managed, but if I want to have the public IP on my router /bridgemode I would have to do PPPOE on the router…
Well you don’t want to have the IP on your router - even if it is cool in a non-commercial setup like yours - since your equipment is not part of your ISP’s local loop. If something goes wrong and they need to troubleshoot, they might refuse or will charge you. Also there is no real advantage in your scenario to have the IP on your router as it is plugged into a port that is switched on the ISP’s equipment, so that you can do some HA after if you want.
Do not want their device to do anything but pass everything to my Mikrotik as I already have with my current ISP, Do not want double NAT also I have VPN, reverse proxy, and other stuff going on, so Id rather have my RB4011 do everything. but thanks for your advice much appreciated.
Why do you consider PPPOE being difficult to manage? It is a set and forget operation. Here in Romania, Europe, our biggest telecom provider uses PPPOE connection for 10+ years now. We have 1 Gb/s down, 500 Mb/s up. It works flawlessly. Also it supports bridge mode on the ISP modem so dialing of the PPPoE connection via another router is possible. I use OPNSense at my business to dial the connection and never had any issues.
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Romania, love your country dude, I been there a few years ago and it’s amazing, hope will be able to revisit soon. As for the PPPOE I hate the overhead it uses, it is single-threaded so it uses a lot of power on 1 core for GIG, router must do MSS clamping and I also don’t like the virtual interface it creates for PPPOE, I did not try it on the rb4011 yet might not have that big impect as rb4011 has a lot of CPU power, might try it out sometime and see.
I’m happy to hear that.
I never thought about PPPoE being single threaded, but sure, I imagine it is. I do have a SFF i3 PC running OPNSense doing the PPPoE, but I never observed any throttling or any high CPU usage. It might be a problem for low powered routers, but then why use a low powered router for a 1 Gig link? Makes no sense. Current gen ARM based routers are very affordable these days. Am I missing something?