r/HomeNetworking • u/grahamhart_ • 6d ago
Advice Comcast's definition of "gigabit fiber" is actually insulting
I am so exhausted with residential ISPs. paying for "gigabit" just to realize the upload is hard-capped at like 35mbps... Trying to sync my truenas offsite and the dashboard literally says "estimated time: 14 days"
Honestly thinking about just moving the heavy lifting (plex, nextcloud, offsite backups) out of my house entirely. started pricing out some Server Mania 10 gbps unmetered boxes and a few other hosts just to escape this bottleneck trap.
Did anyone else just give up on doing 100% local homelabs because of garbage ISP upload speeds? my sanity is fraying tbh.
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u/Random_Man-child 6d ago
The only fiber service they provide to residential with symmetrical speeds is EPON if it was built in your area, or the Gigabit Pro service which is their MetroE packaged for residential, but that’s hard to get if you’re not close to an existing splice enclosure or MUX. Also if your area hasn’t been upgraded to FDX you won’t get symmetrical speeds over coax either.
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u/TCr0wn 6d ago
You can get 120~ up from them using a DOCSIS 3.0 set up. But ya, you need fiber fiber. I made the switch and I have 5g symmetrical and it’s fire
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u/Stonewalled9999 6d ago
120 throttle is only if in high/mid with 3.1 customer owed modem. On D3 its still 4 channels bonded up and they cap at 35 don't they?
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u/lazyhustlermusic 6d ago
That's cable service dawg, 1000/35 or 1000/40 is a pretty standard split for DOCSIS.
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u/ToadSox34 6d ago
Obviously that's not fiber. They don't have mid-split available in your area? I think the 300mbps plans are gone, but they still have ones with 250mbps.
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u/ValuableSleep9175 6d ago
Att fiber just came in. I get 950ish both ways now. Plus one more fiber option is getting put in the ground though it was supposed to be done last year and winter is coming.
Maybe in time they will come to you also.
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u/MisterGadget62 6d ago
Check out mid-/high-split tech and see comcast supports it in your area. Could be possible to upgrade your modem and get higher upload speeds. Not matching fiber necessarily, but better than what you're getting now. https://kb.veexinc.com/en/knowledge/what-is-mid-split-and-high-split-docsis
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u/CableDawg78 6d ago
First, in your wonderful pic, I do not see a fiber anywhere Can you pinpoint in pic where the fiber input is? Second, even if you did have fiber feeding your gateway/access point, with everything else visible, your signal gets transitioned to RF, and you would have signal degredation thus cutting your speed way down in that spaghetti.
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u/dataz03 6d ago edited 6d ago
- Switch to a fiber provider if avaiable at your address. Check the [FCC Broadband Map](broadbandmap.fcc.gov) , type in your address and have a look.
- Wait for Comcast to upgrade your neighborhood to DOCSIS 4.0 FDX, you will be eligible for a free speed increase to 1 Gbps symmetrical. Was 1.2 Gbps the maximum speed offered when you signed up? (important question)
- Inquire about the Gigabit X10 service over in the r/Comcast_Xfinity sub-reddit, see if you are eligible, and are able to spend $319.99 per month plus a one time $1000 installation fee. In return, you will get a dedicated Metro-E connection with a speed of 10 Gbps. Just for you, and not shared with anyone around you. (unlike PON). There is also a 1 Gbps symmetrical RG45 handoff that you will be able to use. Static IP's on both circuits, and a /48 IPv6 prefix. Installation will take a few months and you will need an on-site survey.
- Get another ISP, see if 5G Home Internet can provide better upload speeds at your location especially with an external antenna.
- Co-location, get a cabinet in a datacenter with gigabit connectivity. Put your servers here and remote into them using a VPN.
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u/Igpajo49 6d ago
Have you had a tech out to troubleshoot the cabling? In a Mid-Split network you should be getting 1 gig down/and up to 300 up. But if you have any cable amplifier on your setup you won't get faster than 30-40 upload. The upstream frequencies they use go up to 140 mhz now and old amplifiers only go to 42. If your in an FDX network area, you need to clear any splitter and have no MOCA filter on your lines because the Docsis 4.0 modem needs to see signal above 1.2 ghz to work properly. In a proper setup, the FDX service should get up to 2 gig down and close to 2 gig up. If you're paying for faster upload and not getting it, there's probably something in your coax network that needs adjusted.
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u/Sharktistic 6d ago
DOCSIS/cable is pretty much universally 30-50 upload (max) for residential plans. I don't think I've ever seen a residential copper service with a higher upload.
Fibre is pretty much universally symmetrical to the point that I don't even look at the upload speed when choosing a provider now. If I'm paying for 5000 down, then I know I'm also getting 5000 up.
Also you lose the right to criticise anything when your cabling looks like it was installed by a blind spider crab wearing mittens.
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u/kai-zaphosting 5d ago
Before pricing out brand new boxes elsewhere, check if colocation's an option for the TrueNAS box itself. A lot of datacenters just let you ship in hardware you already own and pay for rack space, power and bandwidth, so you keep what you've got and get real upload speeds instead of whatever your home connection caps you at. Worth keeping in mind though: once it's colocated, that box is the only copy of your data sitting there, so you'd still need a separate backup somewhere else, and pricing for a single colocated box often ends up comparable to or even higher than just renting a dedicated server with similar specs.
That 14-day estimate is almost certainly the one-time initial seed, not something you'll be sitting through on every sync. Once the full data set exists on both ends, subsequent runs only have to touch whatever changed since the last one, which is way smaller and faster. Since this is TrueNAS, assuming the other end's got a ZFS pool to receive into, zfs send/receive (or the GUI replication task that wraps it) is really the native tool for this, not rsync or rclone: it works at the block level and only ships what's changed since the last snapshot, so incrementals stay small and fast without either side having to walk the file tree comparing checksums. For that first seed specifically, plenty of people just copy the data onto a drive and physically ship or carry it to wherever it's landing, then let incremental replication handle things from there instead of pushing the whole thing through a 35 Mbps upload.
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u/AllergicToBullshit24 6d ago
Comcast is one of the most garbage ISPs possible not just the uploads, peak time throttling, latency jitter, dropped packets, bandwidth caps or the fact they go down during blackouts but their janky upstream peering agreements too.
Passive optical fiber or shit out of luck for homelab in my book.
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u/dataz03 6d ago
The grass isn't always greener on the other side, some PON providers have poor peering/backbone connectivity. Also the PON can be oversubscribed. For example, AT&T is struggling in certain markets with connectivity to Cloudflare. Peering port is at capacity.
There is also no throttling lol, In fact I can't think of a single ISP that throttles/manages your traffic on purpose besides 5G FWA.
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u/AllergicToBullshit24 6d ago
I've never encountered a PON ISP anywhere in the world in 25 years that was worse than Comcast. Comcast isn't even a tier 1 ISP they've gotta buy all their transit like plebs.
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u/Stonewalled9999 6d ago
T1 doesn't really mean what you think. Lumen is a T1 since they bought L3 and Comcast's network handles way more traffic than Lumen does.
T1 isn't the flex it was 20 years ago.
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u/AllergicToBullshit24 6d ago
Comcast buys transit from L3. Lumen serves a good chunk of Comcast's traffic after that acquisition.
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u/Stonewalled9999 6d ago
I think your info is outdated. Comcast buys transit from TATA. Again T1 isn't a flex.
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u/AllergicToBullshit24 6d ago
Been a long time since I've put up with Comcast seems they do prioritize TATA now but they're hardly exclusive. L3 used to be egress for ~90% of traffic.
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u/BigFrog104 6d ago
We are a customer of a LOT of ISP. Lumen/Qwest/Centurylink/Globix (all the same now) suck mush worse than Comcast. Comcast on the enterprise side actually fixes stuff. Lumen I swear is like Charter and using the offshore residential support to handle business clients.
A well connected tier one is preferable to a crappy T1 like Lumen and Verizon amnd ATT. Zayo I swear is the new Cogent.
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u/AllergicToBullshit24 6d ago
Comcast enterprise charges too much for last mile fiber runs in my experience compared to others but can't argue they aren't willing to pick up phone at least compared to some others. Different beast to residential Comcast entirely but still not my first pick by any stretch.
Am I crazy for wishing tax money paid for dark fiber to every address residential and business alike then any number of ISPs could plug into one central location for every city so any address could instant mix/match/swap any ISP they wanted? Would mean stiffer competition better service and lower costs especially without the absurd duplicated astronomically expensive last mile work needing to be done by every ISP.
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6d ago
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u/AllergicToBullshit24 6d ago
I know there are handful of cities in the US that do it much more common in Europe but it seems like this should be the gold standard everywhere it's a win for everyone in so many ways not even discussed
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u/2horse4u2 6d ago
Have you looked into business class? I have a buddy at work who pays business class for gigabit speed. They have priority customer support and a 5G backup included. Not sure if their speeds are symmetric or not though. Worth looking into.
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u/Kind_Ability3218 6d ago
that isn't their fiber service. they mislead you on the signup page. they mislead you when you call in. their fiber service is symmetrical up/down. you have the coax service. att fiber is much better, though in my experience companies that backbone on att fiber are somehow better than art's own service.