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There's still no point in gigabit broadband

· 27 comments · 750 words · Viewed ~6,357 times

Six years ago, I nearly got my ISP to upgrade our fibre connection to 1Gbps. As I said at the time:

This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years.

What's the point of Gigabit broadband?

Well, it's a few years later and Virgin Media have just given me their Gig1 package for £30 per month. Nice! With all the inflation related price rises, it's great to get more for less.

But I'm still left wondering if this is massive overkill.

What can you actually do with their promised 1,130Mbps?

Online video calling isn't that intensive. All the 4K streaming services recommend 25Mbps - so I guess I could ask 40 friends to come round and stream simultaneously. Downloading Linux ISOs is pretty speedy on a connection half as fast - and is usually limited by the upstream. Same for game updates.

I've wired most of my house with Cat6 Ethernet - but most of my switches and ports are 1G rather than 2.5G, so the max bandwith isn't likely to get to any single device. The best I've got directly is around 940Mbps which is about what I'd expect from a gigabit port.

All my WiFi devices are limited by the reality of radio physics in a noisy environment - so about 450Mbps when close to the router. Some of my rooms are hard to reach, so they have HomePlugs beaming data across our electrical wiring. Again, physics dictates a fairly modest speed there.

I've got a VR headset - but haven't found anything that taxes its download speed. Especially given that it uses WiFi.

My 4K Fire Stick has a wired Ethernet connection. Its built in speed test maxes out around 80Mbps. In fact, most of the online speed tests I tried couldn't saturate the pipe - tapping out at around 700Mbps.

Some AI models and training sets are multiple terrabytes. But are they really likely to be downloaded multiple times per day? If they are, is there a real difference in waiting 7 minutes rather than 3.5?

Everyone jokes about website bloat, but the reality is much more prosaic. Latency to a CDN is a bigger contributor to the perceived slowness than the limits of a home connection.

So what about upload speed. The Internet is an inherently sucky medium; people download far more than they upload. In this case, upload is limited to "only" 110Mbps. Even if both of the people in this house were full-time Twitch streamers, I doubt we'd saturate that.

It's 2026 and I can barely recommend 500Mbps broadband. For most domestic uses, including working from home, it's rare to need more than 100Mbps. Sure, faster is always nicer and cheaper is always preferable, but what am I actually going to do with this speed?

Back in 2012, it was reasoned that the fastest legal use of the Internet was 2.5Mbps. We've blown past that limit thanks to video streaming and calling. But, on the assumption I'm not going to be using my connection to mirror Linux ISOs, what can I do with it?

I guess I can run a personal VPN from home. Handy if I want to stream geolocked content when I'm out of the country. But, again, 1Gbps is overkill for that - especially as I'm likely to be either on a mobile hotspot or hotel WiFi.

I could livestream all my security cameras 24/7 to a secure back-up vault. That isn't going to touch the sides of my upload speed.

Perhaps I could self-host all my stuff? Again, for personal use I'm limited to whatever speed my laptop or phone can get on a public connection. Given the risk of botnets, DDoS, hacking & the like, I'm not sure I'd want much public-facing stuff on my residential IP address.

To be clear, I think it is a great thing that the UK Government is pushing ISPs to deploy gigabit everywhere. It isn't at all useful now, but will probably be crucial in the future.

So if you have any ideas for what I can do to saturate this connection, please drop a comment in the box.

In the meantime, if you join Virgin Media using this link we will both get £50 bill credit.

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27 thoughts on “There's still no point in gigabit broadband”

      1. @loke @blog
        Yes, bursty stuff like that definitely benefits (same when I need to move data between work and home when I work remotely). An especially if another family member is trying to do something at the same time.

        For the provider we're probably at the point where sub-1G equipment is starting to become unavailable; it may be cheaper to upgrade users than to keep providing the old service.

        Reply | Reply to original comment on fosstodon.org

  2. We required the 110Mb upload for regular film uploads to Vimeo and the broadcast authorities. Perhaps you should get into feature film or documentary making from home? It was an absolute godsend for us (admittedly moving from a 10-25Mbs 4g connection)!

    Please note, I'm not suggesting a YouTube channel! It's overkill for that.

    Reply

  4. I’m honestly not even sure what speed I am getting from Virgin, I’ve never had any issues.

    Although intrigued by which HomePlugs you have! Tried the Virgin booster box but it whacks all the older 2.4ghz devices and just messed up so many connections I ditched it.

    Reply

  9. Become a video producer. Create up to 15 versions of a video per day that need to be signed off. Each one is over 1GB and takes how long to upload? Downloading ProRes video clips from picture agencies like Getty? You might have 50 of those in a 10 minute video. Gigabit Ethernet made it easier to work at home than in the office.

    Reply

  11. @Edent I have a 300 mbps download connection, which is generally plenty. The problem is the 20 mbps upload. Even switching to a "1 gbps" plan doesn't increase the upload speed. I work remote and often find myself transferring large files to/from servers at my work, and a symmetric 1 gbps link would be beautiful even if I wouldn't saturate it all the time.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on techhub.social

  12. @ocdtrekkie @Edent I would think about in terms of enablement rather than % utilization. 95% of the time I'm not holding a fork, but if I had no forks that would be a little bit inconvenient. I rarely saturate my Internet connection, but I can do backups, install updates, and generally not worry too much what is happening at the same time as people are on calls. When the marginal cost for the extra capacity is low (because it's all the same kind of fiber anyway) then it's a good value.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on mastodon.sdf.org

  17. I think there are at least a couple of cases where 1Gbps (or more!) is genuinely warranted:

    • Family with multiple children who are all gamers, especially if they like to play the same games together - then being able to update said game quickly and simultaneously is quite nice.
    • Hosting something like FoundryVTT with large maps / visuals / etc - being able to send the data to four or five players in 5-10 seconds vs a couple of minutes is really noticeable.
    • Certain types of WFH where you're transferring large files to/from your local machine on a regular basis (video editing, as someone above pointed out, maybe 3D modelling / CAD too?)

    In both cases it's not technically necessary, but is noticeable and does make life nicer. And it's not needed 24/7, only in small bursts. But you buy the 1Gbps package because there's no option to temporarily upgrade your speed for these situations - and even if there was, I suspect it would be so inconvenient you'd only do it a couple of times before upgrading.

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  18. @ocdtrekkie @Edent we don’t have fibre to the house, and it is not even available in our bit of SE London. However I really don’t mind, I barely hit the limit of a (very decent and reliable) VDSL line. Yes, I’m sure we’d occasionally benefit, but in reality we could probably get away with 10Mbits on a 95% basis. However as a radio amateur I would like VDSL to die purely as it’s often the source of significant interference issues https://rsgb.services/public/publications/vdsl/measuring_and_reporting_vdsl_radcom_may%202020.pdf

    Reply | Reply to original comment on mastodon.radio

  19. @blog I've been on FiOS gig for almost 10 years. The price paid has barely changed, so it's gotten cheaper comparatively.

    I could save about $40 a month if I went from gig to 300 Mbps, but only $15 if I want to 500.

    I really notice a difference when downloading games and software updates. More so the former, but really seriously just recently when I got a really high-end nvme SSD.

    Downloading a 35 GB game at 100 MiB/s is pretty neat.

    If only my work VPN wasn't limited to 200 Mbps…

    Reply | Reply to original comment on mastodon.social

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