Ask HN: Is 10mbps good enough in today's world?
It once used to be 4-6mbps. Today's world with high feature websites and bloated javascripts and http/2 and high amount of streaming , is 10mbps good enough ?
and that's a great article, I remember it quite well. at the time it was written, I was working for Lotus/IBM in Cambridge (no not that one, the other one) and the company had offered us all experimental free ISDN so, yes, please - and, yeah, speed good latency bad. go fig.
What kills me is the 1mbps up, you need at least 5 to survive and participate in the average internet.
I'd trade my 15/1 for 10/5 in a heartbeat.
I don't love my network being this slow, but I'm able to do most things without pain, including streaming Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/YouTube, though I often get the lower resolution versions of those streams. Latency is much more of an issue, for me...when it climbs, I find working difficult. I do a lot of my development on servers a few hundred miles away, because I can't realistically download a bunch of VM images or OS install ISOs and that's the kind of work I do, so having ssh be responsive is really important.
But, sure, faster is better. I don't like that our telcos in the US lag the rest of the modern world by at least a generation of tech. Average broadband speed to price ratio in the US is something like 14th in the world; embarrassing for the nation that did most of the innovation of the early internet. Likewise, we're way behind on mobile broadband accessibility, price, and performance.
Also check that you're getting the service you pay for. Most plans are "up to" N Mbps. It's pretty common to get 3 Mbps down on a nominally 10mbps connection. Cable internet in particular is prone to congestion in densely populated areas if the ISP hasn't installed sufficient bandwidth. And assuming you're using wifi, signal strength/quality/interference can affect your download speeds as well. There are plenty of tools available to investigate that.
ICSI Netalyzr: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu (connection shenanigans detection)
Well of course you get by, but streaming a youtube video alone is pushing it so browsing simultaneously will suffer. And if you want to download something it gets even worse and takes quite some time.
This obviously only gets worse and worse if the connection is shared.
Yes, it works - but for a power user it is quite limiting. But why not try it and upgrade if need be?
Of course, you're right; all other things held fixed I'd rather have a faster connection. But in practice the cost is such that I'd want a compelling reason, and I just don't care that much.
It's good enough for three working people, that do not use Netflix. I also get to have a nice home server with a few services (including my own email with my own domain).
I'd say it's enough if:
- you also get 10mbps in upload
- latency is in the range of an ftth connection
It's definitely optional. But if you look at what most bandwidth goes to, it's streaming video.
For games, latency now matters more. Bandwidth has just outstripped most use cases. Streaming HD music is trivial. Applications maybe, but how many days do you download something new? Eventually you have your setup.
I was hoping the hacker homes in gigabit areas would come up with some way to exploit the pipe, maybe Jevon's paradox would kick in. I'm not sure that's happening.
The upshot is it means fiber's speed advantage might not matter long term, and we can close the gap with 5g and have the last mile problem solved, increasing competition, quality and availability for broadband, while all our connections become portable.
Some games are over 50 GB nowadays. That would be something like a 12 hour download on 10 mbps.
Rationally, that shouldn't be a problem, for a couple of reasons.
First, downloading a game should be a relatively rare event, because between game downloads you presumably are playing the games which should take a lot longer than downloading the games.
Second, even 12 hours to download a game is a lot quicker than buying it on DVD or Blu-Ray online and having it shipped to you. It's quite a bit slower than buying it in person at a local store (travel time plus an hour or so to copy from the discs to your computer depending on the speed of your disc drive), but buying in store has its own annoyances (especially if it is a hot new release that is hard to find in stock).
But people aren't rational. They don't see waiting 12 hours to start playing the hot new game they just bought and happily think "Wow...this is way better than how it worked before I got this 10 mbps internet connection!".
They see a 12 hour wait to get their game and think that their internet sucks.
Maybe off-peak speed increases, or a button where you can give them an extra dollar for a faster hour.
We have since moved and now have gigabit internet up and down and usually get 930+ u/d wired and 250 u/d wireless. Our whole house is wired for gig-e. It's overkill.
The closest I ever get to using it is connecting to my job. In the middle of the night, I can get 80Mbps.
Even if we did stream 4K content at 15K - 50K we would be fine with 200Mbos.
But if you don't have a lot of data needs you can get by on 10mbps, Netflix uses 5mbps for HD. You may find remote backup solutions painful though.
I'm a bit far from the nearest tower. On a lucky day I can get 3-4Mbps down with 100-200ms round trips, low packet loss.
Unlucky days: complete link drops, timeouts, crawling speeds at few kb/s at most.
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