I wonder just how many fibers they ran to the pole in the first place. With the tech they're using, you only need one fiber or fiber pair to the node, then the node uplinks to the fiber. With modern fiber networks, each customer gets their own separate strand of fiber. They may need to re-run the fiber or use a sub-optimal fiber design of having a fiber node. Modern fiber networks have no nodes. Fiber strait back to the trunk.

A lot of people say "if the remote server supports it". Huge numbers of remote servers support it, assuming they're something other than a small company or don't purposefully traffic shape. I've done quite a few trace routes on different ISPs during file transfers, and in my experience over half of the time that I got below line rate transfers was because a trace route showed latency and jitter on a peering link with the ISP, not an issue with the remote server.

My biggest issue tends to be server related and not network related. For example, when trying to stream some YouTube videos, certain videos for certain resolutions are sometimes slow. Start watching a video in 480p, has buffering issues, switch to 1080p, buffering issues gone. Maybe the 480p is in less demand and hasn't been cached recently?

The internet backbone has no issues other than peering disputes. 100Gb ports on the cheap, 400Gb ports getting popular and 1Tb ports around the corner and multiplexing tech that accepts any combination of 10gb/100Gb/400Gb ports and shoves 30Tb/s down a single fiber. A single fiber can handle 3,000 10Gb ports, 300 100Gb ports, 75 400Gb ports or any combination of the above with 1,300Km ranges. New multiplexing tech is in the works.

YouTube can burst at least 1Gb/s at me, it may be faster but I only have a 1Gb Ethernet port. How is your single 1Gb link able to handle people streaming YouTube without causing jitter issues?

Plenty of companies are building out fiber networks in rural areas for a profit. They already have fiber to many farms in the area, which means they can also purchase a 250Mb/250Mb dedicated fiber connection for $200/m. According to the brochure, 250Mb is great for Web Hosting, Ecommerce, cloud computing, large remote back-ups, video streaming, and uninterrupted gaming. 10Gb is around the corner; Simple upgrade since the network is already fiber.

That's right, start hosting the new NewEgg at a local farm with 250Mb of dedicated bandwidth to Level 3, the highest quality dedicated bandwidth in the world, for $200/month.

Before you say government subsidies, the ISP has already stated that they have refused all government loans and grants and have built their fiber network entirely on their own dime. Not bad for a locally owned ISP in a small town with high unemployment.

Too big of government is about as bad as too small. There are different levels of government. My local government is still very small, they're the ones that would be running muni-fiber.

The dual port network card in my PC router is worth more than $100. No matter how many packets I throw at my router, the interrupts per second never go above 300. Interrupt coalescing is awesome. It even coalesces across my LAN and WAN ports. It does this while keeping latency low. I get a 0.04ms ping. from my PC to my router through my switch. I can't measure lower than that because of thread scheduling.

How's your latency and jitter with 300Mbs? If all I did was game, I would rather have a stable 10Mb connection than a 300Mb unstable connection. Just wondering, because they tend to have a track record of bad quality, but they're using new tech that I am not familiar with.

It doesn't happen often because most programmers are in the same boat of not understanding. I'm the goto guy for performance related issues and I find myself redesigning and re-writing huge amounts of other people's code on my own to gain magnitudes of performance, but good luck explaining garbage collectors, query optimizer, false sharing, data locality, and a slew of other issues to someone. They may grasp the concept, but they cannot predict how their code decisions will affect many of these issues.

If you're writing C/C++, you may have a decent idea of what is going on, but we need to use stuff like SQL or .Net, and I've done a lot of reading in general theory and some implementation of how these managed languages interact with system resources and what they're actually doing. They're not just a blackbox to me. To me the end result isn't good enough, it's knowing how the end result was gotten. Endless curiously drives me.

The way I describe it to others is when I program, I first think of what the basic steps to accomplish a problem as if I was coding in ASM, then I think of what is the closest way I could get that ASM with whatever high level language I am working in.

You can teach a monkey how to do what you do, but not think how you think. Good programmers are a combination of creative and obsessive, two uncommon traits.

Many programmers have an issue of using the wrong tool because they don't understand the minor differences between two tools. All they know is doubles and ints are both numbers, so they don't care which ever they use, and their decision may not make a huge difference 80% of the time.

Unless you're working on a complex problem that other programmers can't understand in the first place, and the most minute detail is important. Then you find yourself trying to explain to the other programmers that by not doing something, they're now using an extra cacheline and causing a 10% hit in performance on their quad core and a 35% performance hit on a dual socket server.

Kind of like saying North Korean may be a bad place to live, but at least it's not driven by money, like the USA.

Forgot to include the 20/20 for $40/month connection which is good for "HD Video Conferences" or the 70/70 for $70. Nothing special about the 70Mb package, I guess they don't quite recommend it for Web hosting, like they do the 100Mb package.

Ha! My ISP clearly advertises that I have a dedicated connection where "speeds never go down or change". They even recommend that I can Web Host with my 100/100 connection at home. Should I take them up on that?

This is why we need more competition in the USA. I'm lucky here in the midwest in a rural area where Charter doesn't care.

Laws, regulations, and policies are written around "broadband".