Think this underestimates quality of life benefits.
Recently went from a 500mbps line + wifi bridge (~ +2ms, 1.5gbps throughput on wifi) to a 1.6gig line with wired 2.5gig and was surprised that it made a noticeable difference in casual browsing. The numbers say it shouldn't but it did
If 30 bucks more saves me time on downloads AND every single click on browsing a bit snappier...that makes sense to me even if I don't care how many concurrent 4K streams the pipe could carry
A really good CDN like Steam can absolutely saturate a link like that. I'm on a gigabit line (which actually performs at more like 1.1), and I've seen 120MB/sec download speeds on Steam. With today's games often weighting in at 50GB+ that's not nothing, either.
Recently upgraded my WAN to 10/10 Gbit/s P2P Fiber. The router is a UCG-Fiber, connected via a DAC/SFP+ cable to a USW-Flex-2.5G-8-PoE switch. My APs were already Wi-Fi 7 with 2.5GbE PoE, so no change there.
Total cost was around USD 400. The result: effectively unlimited bandwidth, and, best of all, an average latency of 1ms to the internet. Do I need it? No. Do I love it? Absolutely.
Video production. Gigabit is 125MB/s. If you’re shooting a day in 10bit 4k (pretty standard today) you have like ~1TB of data. If you need to get that footage to an editor or a post house it would take over 2h at max speed. That’s why many still ship hard drives with courier.
I’ve spent way too much time trying to solve the large file transfer problem using hybrid p2p. Check out https://payload.app/. It’s tested in controlled env for 10Gbps+ but have not been able to test that over WAN just yet. I have 10Gbit residential if someone wants to help benchmark.
I have a 2.5Gbps connection, costs me something around $75/month. I would never consider going less. It is about peak not sustained use for me. If I am downloading something I don't want to sit around and wait for it.
For a developer, there is a lot of benefits in having at least 1 Gb/s internet connection. Obviously, downloads of software, docker images take significantly less time than 100 Mb/s connection could ever provide. But the benefits do not end there. Publishing of build artifacts, websites etc. are significantly sped up as well.
And the most important perk: you can self-host certain parts of your infrastructure by keeping VPS or cloud-based facade for SSL termination, while back-channeling all the traffic to the actual worker machine that sits in your basement behind the NAT. By doing so, you can immensely economize on your monthly spend by reducing it N times, where N is typically ranging from 2 to 10.
P.S. Some context: I am a long time internet user who first connected in 1996 and went through every wave of infrastructural changes, starting with dial-up 33 Kb/s, then 56 Kb/s, then dorm ethernet 10 Mb/s, followed by DSL 20 Mb/s, fiber 100 Mb/s, fiber 1 Gb/s.
Since getting a unifi network for home here is the breakdown so far:
Peak utilization (from what I know this is total bandwidth used throughout the timeline) in a fairly active household when it comes to internet is under 20% on a 200/200 connection.
Majority of the data usage goes to streaming services. With software updates/downloads being second. These two account for like 80% of the traffic or even more. Browsing is next usually.
Only a handful of times in a week will some device hit 100% (200mbps) for a brief period. This is mostly not noticeable for other devices and probably why the high bandwidth is recommended. It allows for better experience overall, not necessarily something that helps you do something faster.
I'd take guaranteed 100Mbps without outages over best effort 1Gpbs any time. Unfortunately, it's hard to get this service at reasonable consumer prices, at least in Germany
To improve reliability, you can use multiple services from different vendors and implement automatic roll-over with Mikrotik and the likes. This is something I have been doing back in the day for the enterprise I am still working at.
I did it at home as well. At least 2x more money to pay, but it was worth it because my bread and butter depended on having stable internet connectivity.
The reason why hard minimum speeds are so expensive is that the ISP can't oversubscribe at any point. You are reserving that 100Mbps at every upstream ISP. Even during peak times all ISPs can't touch your reserved bandwidth.
If there's any noticeable difference, it'd be due to lower latency and not increased bandwidth. I'd be cool with 5MB/s and extremely low latency if that was an option.
The author is talking about using one device at a time. And if you’re living along then gigabit might be surplus to your needs. However many of us have families.
I work from home and since getting gigabit, my video conferences have stopped degrading in quality right around the time the kids get home from school.
QoS is designed to minimise these issues by prioritising real time protocols and other latency-sensitive traffic over other traffic. But that doesn’t mean that slowdown isn’t happening.
With 500Mb you’ll be fine 99% of the time. But you don’t have a whole lot of spare head room. And I’ve found that I have dipped into that headroom a surprising amount (eg when I’d need to pull large docker images as part of a new build process I’m testing locally)
The point of Gigabit isn’t that IPTV is better quality, because it isn’t going to be. It’s so that you can get more done concurrently without depending on QoS to save your arse.
Also you made a comment elsewhere that WiFi speed would be less than gigabit but that’s not true. WiFi 6 (which was released 5 years ago) supports up to 10Gb/s. And WiFi 5 (802.11ac) can do up to 1300Mb/s and was released in 2013 (more than a decade ago!).
The Oculus Quest (original) supports 5GHz 802.11ac and in fact requires it for wireless streaming. I have noticed that games will download very fast on my Quest 2 over Gigabit internet too.
I think that is more so due to overhead in writing files and most likely also doing some live decompression or some other stuff. After all it does not download single file like iso would be.
It actually isn't all that different. A lot of modern games are basically a smallish exe and a single giant Assets file that's many many GB, and is some sort of encrypyted (or not) filesystem image.
Exactly this. ISPs are tricky players when it comes to peering. A typical symptom: servers in local region/country can easily saturate the connection, when anything external gets cropped down to 20-50% of a declared full speed.
You also have to factor in that your connection can drop to 10% far more often because of connection pooling. Each of your neighbors has a gigabit of bandwidth to use too.
Like in a perfect world, if everyone's cars went 10x faster, traffic would be a thing of the past. But because we can't have nice things, we would actually just be stuck in gridlock behind 10x more car crashes.
I started with gigabit Fios when they first deployed in my area then ended up dropping to 300. As a single user, even if I'm saturating the link, I think I'm too used to being patient to accept waiting an extra few minutes or queueing up an overnight download for something massive.
Every online service I've used has been flawless, from streaming media to cloud gaming, and I'm in a fully wireless house with a single Ruckus AP covering it all.
I've seen over a thousand+ devices being covered by a 2Gbps pipe on a large network and not even saturate the link even during peak - and they were throttled to 150mbps per device.
This is like Bill Gates' 640 kB of memory quote. Lack of fiber and Gbps+ adoption is the reason why video meetings still suck and streaming has visible compression artifacts.
Virgin (cable) gigabit is definitely pointless due to the latency. Not to mention the congestion and outages
A good Openreach ISP (FTTP) however, fairly worth it on a good deal. You get more upload with more download bandwidth, so if you do lots of off-site backing up it can be very useful
When a game I play drops its monthly 30 gigabyte patch, and it downloads in 5 minutes rather than 50 minutes or more, I find it to have plenty enough of a point.
You could argue that waiting an hour once a month is not that much of a hurdle, sure, but in my judgement it is. I like this. I wish it could go even faster. I'm so happy that the era of waiting a substantial amount of time for data transfer is just ~not a thing anymore.
Though a gigabit subscription here is dirt cheap and always has been, so that helps too.
Don't let your average usage fool you. You do notice the snappiness of downloading a large file and having it take a third to a tenth the time. You rarely manage to fully saturate a gigabit connection, but while downloading isos and software updates in seconds rather than minutes, your Internet stays snappy the whole time.
Yes, your overall usage of gigabit is only a few percent. It's way oversold anyway, so you could never use all of that. It's still way worth it for those short bursts of speed.
I work from home, and in video games. I download multiple 80-100GB builds every single day just to do my job. Virgin's 1.2Gbps connection is barely good enough. The moment they bring 2 or 3Gbps out on their nextfibre service I'll upgrade to it almost no matter the cost. I'm jealous of our European neighbours where you can get domestic 10Gbps connections.
But beyond work - the ability to download any game from steam within 10-15 minutes max is amazing. I play online games with friends twice a week and sometimes we decide what to play that evening spontaneously - and being able to download a 100GB game and play it the same evening is a game changer(pardon the pun).
Yes. Our build system produces complete packages of the game, and I'm a platform engineer - so within one day I'll often download a PC package, one for PS5, Xbox, Switch, Android and iOS, depending on what kind of thing I'm working on. So yes all of them are completely unique. Or I'm looking at builds made for different backends. Or I pushed a preflight for overnight cooking/building, it takes about 8 hours - so I need to download the output to see if it works across different systems.
For a proper distributed internet it seemed like a good idea, but silicon valley has rather scorched the earth, and so it’s not that useful for passively consuming slop and adverts.
If the author ever talked to a gamer, they would have learned how ignorant they are.
edit: in case it's not clear, when every other new game from major publisher starts at 50GB or 100GB and can sometimes be 300+GB, waiting 2hrs to download it is terrible and horrible for energy use.
The author (me) does play games. I'm on PC, Oculus, and console. The console downloads are limited by the upstream. The VR games are limited by WiFi. I've never noticed the PC games getting close to the max download speed I have.
But, to go to your edit. Is there a significant difference between waiting 90 minutes and 45 minutes? Either way, you set the download going, grab some food, have a bath, whatever, right?
Not everyone plays the same games, play games in the same way, or has the same lifestyle as yous.
Just one example: If I find two hours on a weekday evening to play games (when I am often occupied by other things on other days) and I want to play the latest games, I don't want to spend 90 minutes waiting. If that window is gone, I need to move on.
(You could argue I could plan ahead, look up how large the game is, download it a day before blahblah. You'll be absolutely correct, but I can also assure you almost nobody does that. Network speed can be also very unstable/unpredictable.)
And I'm sure people who are on Game Pass would like a word with you.
Edit to recognise your edit, as you’ve clarified that were talking about downloads - a once a month experience.
That sounds more like a time management problem - buy your game, go to bed, and it’ll be there when you wake at 2:30 for your next gaming session. ;)
~You appear to be confusing latency and bandwidth. While they are to an extent two dimensions of the same problem, it’s latency that affects gaming regardless of bandwidth.
More bandwidth will not reduce latency, and gaming intentionally only uses limited bandwidth (notwithstanding streamed rendering, but that’s a minuscule minority).
The time management problem is having a job, family, and other commitments. Some of us only get a couple of hours a week to play games. Your solution would mean we’d have to wait a whole week after buying a game before we can play it. And I’m sure you can appreciate that’s not a particularly constructive recommendation.
And that’s before you take into account how large some updates are. Fortnight updates, for example, are large enough to be entirely new games in their own right.
Console games today are routinely >50GB, and more frequently >100GB for the most popular titles. On common residential plans, it can take upwards of an hour before installation even begins.
I'm not a gamer, but I hear with how often there are required updates before playing, slower internet is pretty disruptive to quick drop-in multiplayer sessions with friends.
Think this underestimates quality of life benefits.
Recently went from a 500mbps line + wifi bridge (~ +2ms, 1.5gbps throughput on wifi) to a 1.6gig line with wired 2.5gig and was surprised that it made a noticeable difference in casual browsing. The numbers say it shouldn't but it did
If 30 bucks more saves me time on downloads AND every single click on browsing a bit snappier...that makes sense to me even if I don't care how many concurrent 4K streams the pipe could carry
A really good CDN like Steam can absolutely saturate a link like that. I'm on a gigabit line (which actually performs at more like 1.1), and I've seen 120MB/sec download speeds on Steam. With today's games often weighting in at 50GB+ that's not nothing, either.
Recently upgraded my WAN to 10/10 Gbit/s P2P Fiber. The router is a UCG-Fiber, connected via a DAC/SFP+ cable to a USW-Flex-2.5G-8-PoE switch. My APs were already Wi-Fi 7 with 2.5GbE PoE, so no change there.
Total cost was around USD 400. The result: effectively unlimited bandwidth, and, best of all, an average latency of 1ms to the internet. Do I need it? No. Do I love it? Absolutely.
Video production. Gigabit is 125MB/s. If you’re shooting a day in 10bit 4k (pretty standard today) you have like ~1TB of data. If you need to get that footage to an editor or a post house it would take over 2h at max speed. That’s why many still ship hard drives with courier.
I’ve spent way too much time trying to solve the large file transfer problem using hybrid p2p. Check out https://payload.app/. It’s tested in controlled env for 10Gbps+ but have not been able to test that over WAN just yet. I have 10Gbit residential if someone wants to help benchmark.
I have a 2.5Gbps connection, costs me something around $75/month. I would never consider going less. It is about peak not sustained use for me. If I am downloading something I don't want to sit around and wait for it.
For a developer, there is a lot of benefits in having at least 1 Gb/s internet connection. Obviously, downloads of software, docker images take significantly less time than 100 Mb/s connection could ever provide. But the benefits do not end there. Publishing of build artifacts, websites etc. are significantly sped up as well.
And the most important perk: you can self-host certain parts of your infrastructure by keeping VPS or cloud-based facade for SSL termination, while back-channeling all the traffic to the actual worker machine that sits in your basement behind the NAT. By doing so, you can immensely economize on your monthly spend by reducing it N times, where N is typically ranging from 2 to 10.
P.S. Some context: I am a long time internet user who first connected in 1996 and went through every wave of infrastructural changes, starting with dial-up 33 Kb/s, then 56 Kb/s, then dorm ethernet 10 Mb/s, followed by DSL 20 Mb/s, fiber 100 Mb/s, fiber 1 Gb/s.
Since getting a unifi network for home here is the breakdown so far:
Peak utilization (from what I know this is total bandwidth used throughout the timeline) in a fairly active household when it comes to internet is under 20% on a 200/200 connection.
Majority of the data usage goes to streaming services. With software updates/downloads being second. These two account for like 80% of the traffic or even more. Browsing is next usually.
Only a handful of times in a week will some device hit 100% (200mbps) for a brief period. This is mostly not noticeable for other devices and probably why the high bandwidth is recommended. It allows for better experience overall, not necessarily something that helps you do something faster.
I'd take guaranteed 100Mbps without outages over best effort 1Gpbs any time. Unfortunately, it's hard to get this service at reasonable consumer prices, at least in Germany
To improve reliability, you can use multiple services from different vendors and implement automatic roll-over with Mikrotik and the likes. This is something I have been doing back in the day for the enterprise I am still working at.
I did it at home as well. At least 2x more money to pay, but it was worth it because my bread and butter depended on having stable internet connectivity.
The reason why hard minimum speeds are so expensive is that the ISP can't oversubscribe at any point. You are reserving that 100Mbps at every upstream ISP. Even during peak times all ISPs can't touch your reserved bandwidth.
If there's any noticeable difference, it'd be due to lower latency and not increased bandwidth. I'd be cool with 5MB/s and extremely low latency if that was an option.
The author is talking about using one device at a time. And if you’re living along then gigabit might be surplus to your needs. However many of us have families.
I work from home and since getting gigabit, my video conferences have stopped degrading in quality right around the time the kids get home from school.
The author (who I understand to be incredibly handsome) has a family, multiple devices, servers, VR headset, and too many smarthome gadgets.
Even when I was on 500Mbps, I never noticed a slowdown while things were accessing the net simultaneously.
QoS is designed to minimise these issues by prioritising real time protocols and other latency-sensitive traffic over other traffic. But that doesn’t mean that slowdown isn’t happening.
With 500Mb you’ll be fine 99% of the time. But you don’t have a whole lot of spare head room. And I’ve found that I have dipped into that headroom a surprising amount (eg when I’d need to pull large docker images as part of a new build process I’m testing locally)
The point of Gigabit isn’t that IPTV is better quality, because it isn’t going to be. It’s so that you can get more done concurrently without depending on QoS to save your arse.
Also you made a comment elsewhere that WiFi speed would be less than gigabit but that’s not true. WiFi 6 (which was released 5 years ago) supports up to 10Gb/s. And WiFi 5 (802.11ac) can do up to 1300Mb/s and was released in 2013 (more than a decade ago!).
The Oculus Quest (original) supports 5GHz 802.11ac and in fact requires it for wireless streaming. I have noticed that games will download very fast on my Quest 2 over Gigabit internet too.
Just download a PS5 game with your PS5 connected to your router.
Justified.
In my experience, the Sony servers can barely saturate a 500Mbps pipe.
Steam will near saturate a 1Gb pipe for me.
I have downloaded quite a few Linux ISOs from mirrors at 90MB/s.
I think that is more so due to overhead in writing files and most likely also doing some live decompression or some other stuff. After all it does not download single file like iso would be.
It actually isn't all that different. A lot of modern games are basically a smallish exe and a single giant Assets file that's many many GB, and is some sort of encrypyted (or not) filesystem image.
That's due to your ISP's peering, not the server.
Exactly this. ISPs are tricky players when it comes to peering. A typical symptom: servers in local region/country can easily saturate the connection, when anything external gets cropped down to 20-50% of a declared full speed.
My experience too. For some reason the Sony servers are terrible. I'm lucky to see 100Mbps speeds, and that's on a gigabit link.
I think your local ssd cache is the only thing being saturated.
I get barely 250 in europe.
They most likely can, but they purposely don’t.
it's great because when your connection drops to 10% its normal speed, you no longer notice
You also have to factor in that your connection can drop to 10% far more often because of connection pooling. Each of your neighbors has a gigabit of bandwidth to use too.
Like in a perfect world, if everyone's cars went 10x faster, traffic would be a thing of the past. But because we can't have nice things, we would actually just be stuck in gridlock behind 10x more car crashes.
I figured 300 megabit Fios would be enough but I think that when you cheap out, they more severely throttle places like Youtube on the backend.
I started with gigabit Fios when they first deployed in my area then ended up dropping to 300. As a single user, even if I'm saturating the link, I think I'm too used to being patient to accept waiting an extra few minutes or queueing up an overnight download for something massive.
Every online service I've used has been flawless, from streaming media to cloud gaming, and I'm in a fully wireless house with a single Ruckus AP covering it all.
I've seen over a thousand+ devices being covered by a 2Gbps pipe on a large network and not even saturate the link even during peak - and they were throttled to 150mbps per device.
Oh, and while you're at it, 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
people tend also to confuse latency vs speed.
if u have lower latency <25ms & a 25Mbps .. your connection feels faster than having 100ms latency + whatever speed.
Not really because the latency of, say, clicking a web link and the website showing on screen depends on throughput, not just ping latency.
latency and bandwidth
This is like Bill Gates' 640 kB of memory quote. Lack of fiber and Gbps+ adoption is the reason why video meetings still suck and streaming has visible compression artifacts.
Virgin (cable) gigabit is definitely pointless due to the latency. Not to mention the congestion and outages
A good Openreach ISP (FTTP) however, fairly worth it on a good deal. You get more upload with more download bandwidth, so if you do lots of off-site backing up it can be very useful
I get 8ms on OpenReach vs 15ms plus on Virgin
When a game I play drops its monthly 30 gigabyte patch, and it downloads in 5 minutes rather than 50 minutes or more, I find it to have plenty enough of a point.
You could argue that waiting an hour once a month is not that much of a hurdle, sure, but in my judgement it is. I like this. I wish it could go even faster. I'm so happy that the era of waiting a substantial amount of time for data transfer is just ~not a thing anymore.
Though a gigabit subscription here is dirt cheap and always has been, so that helps too.
Don't let your average usage fool you. You do notice the snappiness of downloading a large file and having it take a third to a tenth the time. You rarely manage to fully saturate a gigabit connection, but while downloading isos and software updates in seconds rather than minutes, your Internet stays snappy the whole time.
Yes, your overall usage of gigabit is only a few percent. It's way oversold anyway, so you could never use all of that. It's still way worth it for those short bursts of speed.
I work from home, and in video games. I download multiple 80-100GB builds every single day just to do my job. Virgin's 1.2Gbps connection is barely good enough. The moment they bring 2 or 3Gbps out on their nextfibre service I'll upgrade to it almost no matter the cost. I'm jealous of our European neighbours where you can get domestic 10Gbps connections.
But beyond work - the ability to download any game from steam within 10-15 minutes max is amazing. I play online games with friends twice a week and sometimes we decide what to play that evening spontaneously - and being able to download a 100GB game and play it the same evening is a game changer(pardon the pun).
Is that 80-100GB of unique data multiple times per day? Is it encrypted with a different key every time? Sounds very interesting.
Not OP, but modern asymmetric cryptography on the Internet negotiates a new encryption key on every connection.
True, but that is transport (TLS). I was asking about the underlying data.
Yes. Our build system produces complete packages of the game, and I'm a platform engineer - so within one day I'll often download a PC package, one for PS5, Xbox, Switch, Android and iOS, depending on what kind of thing I'm working on. So yes all of them are completely unique. Or I'm looking at builds made for different backends. Or I pushed a preflight for overnight cooking/building, it takes about 8 hours - so I need to download the output to see if it works across different systems.
For a proper distributed internet it seemed like a good idea, but silicon valley has rather scorched the earth, and so it’s not that useful for passively consuming slop and adverts.
If the author ever talked to a gamer, they would have learned how ignorant they are.
edit: in case it's not clear, when every other new game from major publisher starts at 50GB or 100GB and can sometimes be 300+GB, waiting 2hrs to download it is terrible and horrible for energy use.
The author (me) does play games. I'm on PC, Oculus, and console. The console downloads are limited by the upstream. The VR games are limited by WiFi. I've never noticed the PC games getting close to the max download speed I have.
But, to go to your edit. Is there a significant difference between waiting 90 minutes and 45 minutes? Either way, you set the download going, grab some food, have a bath, whatever, right?
Not everyone plays the same games, play games in the same way, or has the same lifestyle as yous.
Just one example: If I find two hours on a weekday evening to play games (when I am often occupied by other things on other days) and I want to play the latest games, I don't want to spend 90 minutes waiting. If that window is gone, I need to move on.
(You could argue I could plan ahead, look up how large the game is, download it a day before blahblah. You'll be absolutely correct, but I can also assure you almost nobody does that. Network speed can be also very unstable/unpredictable.)
And I'm sure people who are on Game Pass would like a word with you.
Never generalize your own experience.
Please can you enlighten the ignorant that are also gamers? :)
downloading a game on steam can fully utilize gigabit speeds, and modern games can be 100+gb
I play games but I suppose I don't download a 100GB game frequently enough for it to matter to myself.
Edit to recognise your edit, as you’ve clarified that were talking about downloads - a once a month experience.
That sounds more like a time management problem - buy your game, go to bed, and it’ll be there when you wake at 2:30 for your next gaming session. ;)
~You appear to be confusing latency and bandwidth. While they are to an extent two dimensions of the same problem, it’s latency that affects gaming regardless of bandwidth.
More bandwidth will not reduce latency, and gaming intentionally only uses limited bandwidth (notwithstanding streamed rendering, but that’s a minuscule minority).
You cannot defy the laws of physics.~
The time management problem is having a job, family, and other commitments. Some of us only get a couple of hours a week to play games. Your solution would mean we’d have to wait a whole week after buying a game before we can play it. And I’m sure you can appreciate that’s not a particularly constructive recommendation.
And that’s before you take into account how large some updates are. Fortnight updates, for example, are large enough to be entirely new games in their own right.
Console games today are routinely >50GB, and more frequently >100GB for the most popular titles. On common residential plans, it can take upwards of an hour before installation even begins.
I'm not a gamer, but I hear with how often there are required updates before playing, slower internet is pretty disruptive to quick drop-in multiplayer sessions with friends.