What's the point of Gigabit broadband?
(This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years.)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:
- Drop to 100Mbps for the same price I'm paying today (£44)
- Keep at 350Mbps for a tenner more (£55)
- Rise to 500Mbps for a fiver more (£49)
- 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?
Reply to original comment on twitter.com
|That was in 2008, and you’re asking the exact same question in 2020.
Reply to original comment on twitter.com
|Reply to original comment on twitter.com
|Eric Andersen says:
Reply to original comment on twitter.com
|Reply to original comment on twitter.com
|Mike says:
Reply to original comment on twitter.com
|Rich says:
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.
Sava (no kiddin' 😳) says:
no SFR could ever give me a FTTH gigabit in our village where 10Mbit ADSL is considered to be a friggin' miracle 🙄
Reply to original comment on twitter.com
|Reply to original comment on twitter.com
|Alex B says:
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.
Alex says:
L: shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/12/w…
C: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253734…
Reply to original comment on twitter.com
|SB says:
It hits 60MB/s, while my Wife is on a Webex call and my kids on Zoom.
Gigabit is totally worth it.
Jon says:
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.
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.
Mike says:
What if you put the milliseconds on a blockchain?
Sean says:
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 to original comment on twitter.com
|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 to original comment on twitter.com
|Reply to original comment on twitter.com
|Reply to original comment on twitter.com
|Alex says:
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 to original comment on twitter.com
|And the setup I have cost only around £30 pcm due to local fibre digs.
Reply to original comment on twitter.com
|Neal Harlow says:
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.
Neal Harlow says:
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 to original comment on twitter.com
|@Edent La la la can't hear you (I'm getting 500 Mbps installed on Thursday and it's exciting because my little rural village is getting fibre)
Reply to original comment on mastodon.green
|@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 to original comment on mastodon.social
|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 to original comment on bsky.app
|@Edent yes, I definitely agree. Latency, reliability (and upload speed if, as with Openreach fibre, it's not symmetrical) are all more important to me than download speed.
Reply to original comment on mastodon.social
|@Edent Also my rural village house has stone walls so I can only get 40Mbs on the WiFi, so I don't know how I'm going to use that bandwidth. But HALF A GIG! And it's cheaper than ADSL
Reply to original comment on mastodon.green
|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 to original comment on bsky.app
|@Edent Yeah, getting fibre installed in Jan & opted for 300, I'm thinking over an order of magnitude improvement is enough excitement for now & doubt we'd notice any extra speed
Reply to original comment on crispsandwi.ch
|@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 to original comment on hachyderm.io
|@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 to original comment on fosstodon.org
|@Edent I do agree, I have 1gb at home and the only thing that hits that is my Xbox. It's fun to see the numbers go up quickly but 500mb would do me and most families fine. Some areas now have 2gb!
Reply to original comment on mastodon.social
|@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 to original comment on burningnebula.net
|@Edent Word! We're (family of 4) on 100 Mbps and it's plenty for at least 99.9% of the time. Probably simply 100%.
Reply to original comment on toot.re
|@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 to original comment on mastodon.me.uk
|@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 to original comment on seocommunity.social
|@Edent We were on 150Mbps but now on 300Mbps. It's probably overkill but I deal with some fairly large sites so had to go higher to get better upload speeds.
Reply to original comment on mstdn.social
|@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 to original comment on sonomu.club
|@Edent I'm in the weird place of being trapped on VDSL (and thus 75 Mbps), and I could juuuuust do with that little extra boost (not to mention the latency improvement), but even I can't imagine what I would do with more than 100–200 Mbps.
Reply to original comment on tilde.zone
|