These systems can be very valuable in ways you may not expect. My parent's recently captured video of a car accident in front of their house. This video greatly benefited a long-time neighbor and friend.
Anyway you get a system that has good video coverage of your building's doors and windows and can record say a few days worth of video. You're golden, right? Unfortunately you are vulnerable in a fundamental way. An intruder can find the video recorder box and destroy it. I personally know individuals this has happened to. So you come home from a long week and find your building broken into and the video lost. What can you do about this?
Simple... find a neighbor/AWS/colo box/etc and stream the video there too. It records a few TB of data and provides a backup in case of theft or destruction. This differs from typical backup situations of home users because of the bandwith involved.
Because ideally you would stream the video directly from the cams. If you have 10 cams producing 2 mbps, thats 20mbps. That's a lot of upload for the typical home connection, but for a symmetrical gigabit connection it's a drop in the bucket.
This is just one example. Having the bandwidth available makes so many things easy that were previously very difficult.
Modern games are huge and SSDs are small. Buy all your games on steam. When you want to play a game just tell steam to get it and it downloads at 50+ megabytes / second. Play your 20GB game in less than 7 minutes. When you're done just delete it.
There is no reason why games couldn't be designed for this use case and be playble immediately, downloading in the background.
I had 4ms ping flat and 0% packet loss to local LA Quake Live servers when I had FiOS in LA. Almost LAN-like play.
Cable internet is always has much higher ping, more jitter, and more packet loss.
Supposedly I can get gigabit internet from AT&T here in Cupertino but they cap at 1 TB and I'm not excited about paying $110/mo for the equivalent of a ~3 Mbps sustained connection.
FiOS keeps upgrading it every year or so (it started as a 15/5 I couldn't saturate), so that's nice. At least I'm basically in "first world" territory even if I live in the U.S.
I suppose when 4k video becomes more common I'll feel it, but I don't even have anything that can display 4k right now and Verizon will probably just upgrade it to 75/75 or 100/100 by that point.
One nice benefit, I have a plex server I can access remotely and it works well outside of my network. But I'd live with just my netflix account if I had to "rough it".
Unless you've throttled your torrents, or you're connected to a really slow swarm, you have almost certainly saturated your download. I have -er- 100/10 or 100/15 service from Comcast. If I'm downloading anything >= 100MB, and a member of the household is going to start a new Netflix stream, I need to pause the download, or else the stream will be degraded for a long time.
Also, unless you're using a decent router, it's very possible that your router can't route and/or NAT at 50mbit or faster. I know that Apple Airports can and Ubiquiti EdgeRouters[0] can. I would also expect that an ISP-provided router would route fast enough.
[0] If you're in the market for a new router and are somewhat network savvy, or are comfortable with running OpenWRT on your router, I strongly recommend the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It routes and firewalls at ~1Gbit/sec (when offloading is enabled) and costs right around $100. Check out the Newegg reviews that aren't "It's slower than I expected" or "It's totally broken" for an idea of what you'll be getting in to. I've had mine for nearly a year and -other than the eventually dodgy external power supply[1] it shipped with- it has been rock solid.
[1] The unit I got had been sitting in a box in a warehouse in Florida for ~two years before it arrived on my doorstep. The failing power supply presented as infrequent spontaneous reboots with nothing unusual in syslog, which became more and more frequent until the power supply just stopped providing power entirely. Replaced it with a wall wart that I had on hand and have had no trouble since.
'Tis true that the forked version of Vyatta (Vyatta 6?) that the EdgeRouters use is rather different than OpenWRT, but if one has figured out how to work with OpenWRT's UCI configuration system, one can figure out how to work with Vyatta's configuration system, too. And, both OpenWRT and Vyatta run on top of Linux, so -if needed- one has a Linux system that one can configure directly.
I'm sure there's some kind of fallback to SD from Netflix, their webpage claims I need 5Mb/s to get 720p, and 25Mb/s for "Ultra HD" (whatever that is and I'm pretty sure I'm not getting that for old episodes of Firefly) leaving me with somewhere between 25-45Mb/s. I'm pretty sure my wife isn't gobbling all that up with whatever it is she's watching. Web browsing is much lighter.
So all told, worst case I'm looking at
- 6Mb/s torrents
- 5Mb/s Netflix
- let's say 5Mb/s for my wife's video
- some fraction of 1Mb/s for our collective web surfing
Maybe 17-20Mb/s?
Amazingly, with all that going on, if I go do a speed test, it still showed me around 40/50 so I'm definitely under that.
We have a 3.0/0.5 DSL connection which can support 1 high quality or 2 medium to low quality Netflix streams. Web browsing is tolerable when everyone is online, but the second the uplink bandwidth is saturated (0.5Mbit/s) everything else grinds to a halt. I think you'd notice it too if your connection weren't symmetric. That is, your connection was 50/5 or 50/10.
We were on-track to get a 50/50 fiber connection (the service supports up to 1000/1000) - however the ISP hasn't yet started to build the network out to our village - a year later than they said it would be available. In contrast, our neighboring villages all have their service, but there is a risk they will pull out since the build cost is 3x what they forecast (narrow country roads where the only option is to dig up the road, rather than run cable under verges or sidewalks).
FWIW, the build cost is a measly £600,000 - or $929,670, which in my estimate works out at between £600 and £1200 per resident.
The trouble is that Virgin Media have much cut out for them if they want to match the availability of VDSL in the UK. Therefore, I can imagine they will be targeting large towns on the commuter belt long before they consider more rural villages.
I remember back when we had DSL we could saturate it, even with just some casual youtubing.
Funny thing is, we never asked for or paid for symmetric connections, our phone company just did it one day as part of a system upgrade and sent everybody new routers. And they've done at least one bandwidth upgrade since then.
I grew up pretty rural so I can definitely sympathize with your pain. The first world will arrive soon!
Well your HD streams are very compressed and possibly downsized resolution.
People DO want 4K 60 fps uncompressed streams, but there is just no way to support them all at once.