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What's the point of Gigabit broadband?

· 52 comments · 450 words · Viewed ~2,235 times.

(This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years.)

My yearly contract with my ISP has just come to an end, so it was time to shop around for a better deal. They presented me with the following monthly options:

  1. Drop to 100Mbps for the same price I'm paying today (£44)
  2. Keep at 350Mbps for a tenner more (£55)
  3. Rise to 500Mbps for a fiver more (£49)
  4. Go to GIGABIT for a lot more (£60)

Mmmmmm GIGABIT...!

Obviously it's classic anchor pricing. And obviously I fell for it. And obviously I negotiated a £50 bill credit for signing a new contract. But I only went with the half-gig option. Even then, I feel like I've bought a sports car and use it to pootle to the village shop and back.

Netflix reckons that 25Mbps is good enough for its 4K service. Even if my wife and I are both watching super-high-def-hdr-surround-sound-smellovision - what do we do with the other 450Mbps?

Once in a while we might download a 60GB video game (!!!). At 350Mbps, that'll take 22 minutes. At 500Mpbs, 16 minutes. That's six whole minutes saved (!!!). Going to 1Gbps means the game is downloaded in 8 minutes. But that's assuming the game company's CDN can sustain that speed. It probably can't.

Now we're in the land on constant video calling, the faster upload that we get is nice. Sadly it's hard to get symmetric speeds in the UK - so we're stuck with "only" 40Mbps up. But, again, even with both of us streaming 720p laptop-cam footage, it's not really taxing the connection.

It's nice when I have to upload a large file to, say, YouTube. But most of my work is now "Cloud Native" so I'm rarely emailing megadocs to my colleagues.

Perhaps VR is the thing which will consume this data? I don't really know much about it - but strapping two 4K monitors to your face, surround audio, and positional metadata doesn't sound like it is going to tax my fibre connection.

I suppose if you're a family of 10, then having 100Mbps each is handy. Delivering Gigabit is essential to the future - and I'm sure something will come along to gobble it all up. But what?

I'm not quite so thick as to say 640k ought to be enough for anybody. But right now I'm struggling to think what I can do to take advantage of this glut of bandwidth.

Any suggestions?

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52 thoughts on “What's the point of Gigabit broadband?”

  4. Eric Andersen says:

    I think the problem stems from the inconsistency of service, so while nominal 100Mbps should be adequate for common use, there are times when that service as delivered drops to much lower levels. Buffering, pixelation, stalled performance are all symptoms. SO, to avoid the dips in service, we up the ante. If dips at 100Mbps drop to 10Mbps, perhaps dips in gigabit service drop to 100Mbps. So we buy “up” to avoid the lows.

    Reply

  5. said on twitter.com:

    We had the same price increase that you quote for similar speed bracket changes. By any chance are you with an ex record label turned broadband provider? Anyway we dropped to 76Mbps from 150Mbps a year and a bit ago but instead of paying £45 we now pay £18. Never been happier :).

    Reply | Reply to original comment on twitter.com

  7. Mike says:

    Utilise some of the upload bandwidth to seed a bunch of torrents for Linux distros or whatever 24/7 on something low powered like a Pi.

    Reply

  9. Rich says:

    Wow, it's expensive in the UK! Check out the prices that French ISP SFR-RED are offering for €25/month:
    https://www.red-by-sfr.fr/offre-internet/
    1gbps down, 500up, unlimited minutes to French landlines and mobiles, unlimited minutes to landlines in most Western countries, and an extra €2/month if you want TV.
    That's FTTH btw.

    Reply

    1. Sava (no kiddin' 😳) says:

      please do remember it's applicable only to big cities.
      no SFR could ever give me a FTTH gigabit in our village where 10Mbit ADSL is considered to be a friggin' miracle 🙄

      Reply

  12. Alex B says:

    The only use cases I can think of are people routinely working with high resolution, high quality video - e.g. animators, video editors, or people doing digital forensics on filesystem images.

    Reply

  13. says:

    Wait! I know the answer to this one ...
    So mostly of course it is bragging rights. But let's look a the reverse, if you're any type of IT professional or guru then living in a house with a pathetic DSL connection (say 5 Mb/s) is a mark of shame.
    For my part coming back to the UK with its SLLOOOOOOOW Internet except in a few City areas (yep most of London can say screw you) means that I had personally to choose something a lot slower than 1 Gb/sec internet.
    I can say that when (not in the UK) I used to cloud my entire large home setup I got upto 40MB/sec upload to my cloud providers. Every day just opening a few VM's caused a daily upload of about 0.5TB.
    Combine that infamous home web server was pushing over 500Mb/s constantly, and yes the 1Gb/sec symmetric connection I used to rely on came in very handy.
    Back in the UK you just can't get this sort of things unless you have somebody like Hyperoptic in London. Yep, I'm jealous.

    Reply

  14. Alex says:

    I think you’re right. I think we’re getting to the point where latency is going to be far more important than bandwidth for things like cloud gaming (including VR).

    Reply

  16. SB says:

    I WFH and have to download 4GB files multiple times per day.
    It hits 60MB/s, while my Wife is on a Webex call and my kids on Zoom.
    Gigabit is totally worth it.

    Reply

  17. Jon says:

    You allude to 100mbit satisfying a house of 10 so I'm going to latch on to that.
    Avg web page size=3MB/24mbit https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/
    Start render might be about half the page, say 10mbit to be round. A 100mbit connection might take 0.1s to start rendering the page, while 1gbit takes .01s. 1000 page loads avg per day, 30.5 days a month, this is ~45 minutes.
    Streaming audio/video quality is proportional to bandwidth, and 100mbit can incur performance hits, depending. No you don't need a gigabit, but just factor in the rare but not completely inconsequential occurrences.
    Unknown native app bandwidth changes. It is smaller but probably not inconsequential. I'll skip it to be generous.
    Your large downloads easily save 5-10 minutes. How many large downloads a month? Maybe 2? Well that conveniently gets us to 1 hour a month. That is each person in your house. How much does your household get paid? How do you value your time? Family time? Free time? Are you sitting there very every web page load (yes)? Are you sitting there for every large download (no)? Is this very hand-wavy (yes)? How much time is otherwise occupied by work, kids, life?
    Where are you spending your very few dollars difference to get the value an extra hour a month per household member would get you? There is some function of salary and valuation of free time where gigabit makes sense.

    Reply

    1. says:

      I said that gigabit, divided by a house of ten, gets everyone 100Mbps each.
      But, regardless, I don't think you quite understand how time works. If you have nine pregnant people, you don't get a baby in one month. You can't add up all the milliseconds you save over the year and use them for something useful.

      Reply

      1. Mike says:


        You can’t add up all the milliseconds you save over the year and use them for something useful.

        What if you put the milliseconds on a blockchain?

        Reply

  18. Sean says:

    I have Google Fiber in the US, which provides 1Gig up and 1 Gig down, and I can say I can’t imagine my life without it. One of the biggest reasons I love it is that it just saves time. 6 mins vs 3mins is a big deal. 3 mins can be spent playing games with friends who already have the game. Google Fiber also has very low ping, so almost everything I do is instantaneous. I am a software engineer and all the tools I need to downloaded are finished in a matter of seconds and it doesn’t prevent me from continuing to do my work; the limitation is now my brain and not how fast I can download something. It is really a major quality of life improvement, and time is our most precious resource.

    Reply

  19. said on twitter.com:

    Symmetry is far more predictable, you can sell the entire port or divide it up better. It is also how IP transit (ISPs to ISPs etc) is bought.

    Back when I did such things, it was B2B and we sold ports and 250/250, 500/500, 1000/1000 then 10G. We did oversell though 😅




    Reply | Reply to original comment on twitter.com

  20. said on twitter.com:

    500/500 here, moving to 1000/1000 soonish.

    I wanted fibre for stability, and to feed our servers without worrying about performance / user experience.

    Our jitsi instance can be bandwidth hungry, and file transfers are like lightning.

    Do we stress the link? No.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on twitter.com

  21. said on twitter.com:

    5 of us in the house. 2 people working and 3 children home schooling all on video calls. Or later in the day a child watching an UHD movie, another gaming, us still working. It often creaks under the pressure. We get FTTP next year and gigabit broadband and I can’t wait.


    Reply | Reply to original comment on twitter.com

    1. Alex says:

      We have both A&A FTTC 65Mbps and Virgin 350Mbps and I can’t tell the difference. According to my gateway Virgin falls over more often, that’s about it.

      Reply

  23. says:

    It all really depends what you do.
    It's all about the upload speed for me - I'm regularly creating and uploading multi-gig video files and so the speed is very handy in regards to my workflow - I treat file transfer as if it is across a local network.
    Moreover with both my Wife and I working at home - I can do this while she teaching online and I don't have to worry I'm impacting here.

    Reply

  26. Neal Harlow says:

    I have a 30 devices, and my 3 daughters stream TV and do remote learning via google meet due to covid 19, also I work from my home office and REMOTE DESKTOP into my customers environment to assist with issues. I never thought I would need a gigabit network at home, but after all that and turning my house into a smart house. I am wondering when they will come out with 10 Gigabit for the home. Most datacenters all ready have 10 Gigabit BW to service there customers, but with the new way of doing work from home. BW is running out fast I think. Datacenters may have to to upgrade to 1000 Gigabits BW in the future to keep up.

    Reply

    1. says:

      I get you. Five years ago, I had 30 devices - and it has only grown since then.
      But are all 30 of your devices constantly downloading at 30Mbps simultaneously? As codecs get more efficient, the need for rapidly growing bandwidth is likely to slow down.

      Reply

  27. Neal Harlow says:

    Also as a Note:
    If you by the Gigabit connection. Make sure your WIFI is one of the new types that can handle it like MIMO TRIBAND/QUADBAND Etc.... Other wise your just wasting your money unless everything is hardwired using Cat 5E or RG6 or RG58. Infrastructure is very important.

    Reply

  30. said on mastodon.social:

    @Edent I also have a gigabit connection and the biggest difference it made for me was “turning the Internet into my hard drive.” When you can download practically anything within minutes, it’s as if they were already laying around in your computer (conversely, you don’t feel the need to store as many things anymore except perhaps backing up against link rot etc).


    Reply | Reply to original comment on mastodon.social

  31. said on bsky.app:

    We're still on 26Mbps copper. When we moved house in 2012 my "red line" was 12Mbps. What we have is fine, though large game downloads resemble orders arriving tomorrow.



    The copper's on a stop-sell, so they tried to give us 150Mbps for a bit more. I baulked and they gave us 300 for the same.


    Reply | Reply to original comment on bsky.app

  34. said on bsky.app:

    I had Hyperoptic’s Gb for a while and what I noticed switching to other services was the fluidity on Hyperiotic:
    - latency was ludicrously low on their product
    - loading any web page was lightening fast . You can browse back n forth with no sense of treacle. The burst use of that 1Gb pays off


    Reply | Reply to original comment on bsky.app

  36. said on hachyderm.io:

    @Edent I would *much* rather have the option of something like 200mb symetrical than 1gig down and some small proportion of that up.



    We have 150mb at the moment and I just don't have a use for anything faster. I suspect you are right that one day VR might be the thing that needs the bandwidth, but at the same time, I suspect they will optimise it as much as possible to minimise that dependency, in the same way 2d games do.


    Reply | Reply to original comment on hachyderm.io

  37. said on fosstodon.org:

    @Edent I struggle to even justify more than 80mbps, which is why I'm still on FTTC (FTTP has been installed but costs ~£10/month more for 150mbps).



    I am however paying even less than your 2020 prices, probably because I'm a long-term customer and my ISP doesn't seem to have moved me onto their latest packages.


    Reply | Reply to original comment on fosstodon.org

  39. said on burningnebula.net:

    @neil @Edent it's the multiuser scenarios and multi*actor* scenarios that make "too much" bandwidth valuable imho. It is about having enough that it's never something you think about or worry about running out of!



    My wife and I work from home and both occasionally lob large datasets/media around while also doing videoconferencing. The house has multiple computers which sometimes do backups or download content etc etc. We have enough Mbps that it's never an issue to do anything at any time.


    Reply | Reply to original comment on burningnebula.net

  41. said on mastodon.me.uk:

    @Edent
    We're a family of 4, 2 adults, 2 kids. I'm a homeworker and tech user. The kids are both streamers. Me and my son are gamers.
    We're on 350Mb and it's probably overkill for us. Repeating others here I'd easily take a symmetric 150Mb service with reliability and low latency over a faster service.



    Just checking now, I can apparently get 1600/115 here, so what's the reason they can't do a 115/115 symmetric service?


    Reply | Reply to original comment on mastodon.me.uk

  42. said on seocommunity.social:

    @Edent
    Contention. We have been promised FFTP for some years now but still no sign of it. We have Fibre to the cabinet and copper to us - but are quite rural so its not going to happen soon. I say contention because we notice it when the 38mb we get stuttering on streaming services occasionally at peak times. 300mb would mean enough capacity in the village to avoid experiencing those.


    Reply | Reply to original comment on seocommunity.social

  44. said on sonomu.club:

    @Edent We've just had a flyer from Hyperoptic saying that we can now get fibre to our house. Once, I'd have leapt at the chance, but after 3 and a bit years with 60 Mbit VDSL, I find that it's adequate and that I find more value having a competent service via @aaisp, so I'm waiting to see if OpenReach's FTTP rollout reaches us in the near future.


    Reply | Reply to original comment on sonomu.club

What links here from around this blog?

  1. A graphic of a calendar showing the date "February 25 Sunday"What I've learned from a year of lockdown
  2. Speed test results.Review: Virgin 1Gbps Fibre
  3. List of proposed upgrades including Symmetrical data add on for £4.Virgin Media preparing to offer symmetrical upload speeds?
  4. A USB-C to Ethernet converter.Gadget Review: Benfei USB-C to Ethernet Adapter

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