There's still no point in gigabit broadband

_fw

Just download a PS5 game with your PS5 connected to your router. Justified.

gambiting

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).

functionmouse

it's great because when your connection drops to 10% its normal speed, you no longer notice

CarVac

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.

fg137

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.

GauntletWizard

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.

perching_aix

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.

oytis

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

infecto

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.

Havoc

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

ballooney

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.

compounding_it

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.

hnlmorg

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.

kator

Oh, and while you're at it, 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

dzonga

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.

abujazar

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.

gib444

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

garganzol

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.

klabb3

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.

glimshe

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.