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
I work in photography in my spare time, and a single photoshoot can easily pass 2k raw photos, which I backup to three remote locations. Plus, I download every movie and TV show we consume at home, have games to play, and work as a programmer.
Honestly, if I could afford a 10 gig switch and routers (we have three at home, in mesh), I’d go higher.
Quality of life matters. If I can make a website or a download just a little bit faster, I’ll.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Justified.
I have downloaded quite a few Linux ISOs from mirrors at 90MB/s.
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.
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.
Even when I was on 500Mbps, I never noticed a slowdown while things were accessing the net simultaneously.
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.
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.
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.
if u have lower latency <25ms & a 25Mbps .. your connection feels faster than having 100ms latency + whatever speed.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.~
Incorrect assumption. Not every buys/downloads/plays games the same way you do.
Even more incorrect considering how often games are updated and how large those updates can be, especially for a new game.
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.
Lots of people here doesn't understand other people's life constraints and refuse to acknowledge that different lifestyle exist.
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.