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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic....

He mentioned that over 20Mbps you really don’t notice better browsing speed. He’s right. I have gigabit internet - usually around 950Mbps up and down. Nothing takes advantage of it in the real world. The best real world throughout I’ve gotten is through my work VPN in the middle of the night or transferring something to AWS. Even then it’s only 100Mbps. BackBlaze tops out at around 70Mbps with multiple threads running.

Video streaming at its highest but rate is only 15Mbps.

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I have had the opposite experience. I've had symmetric gigabit for a few years now and I monitor my upload and download rates in my bar on Linux. YouTube 4k videos can saturate around 500mbps (if you are scrubbing thru), backblaze can saturate all available bandwidth (but you need extremely high concurrency), game downloads can usually go to around 700mbps (on Steam, Origin and Epic launchers actually go faster). All in all I find it is useful day to day, but not quite as useful as you'd think. There are still way too many web servers that throttle download speed per connection or IP, however I've noticed there are less now than 4 years ago as gigabit consumer internet is becoming more common.

Worth noting this experience is from Phoenix, AZ (which is especially relevent because backblaze servers are in Sacramento and Phoenix).

I went from 100Mb Virgin Media Cable to 20Mb BT Fiber-to-the-Cabinet when I moved house (lack of other options in the new house). Normal internet browsing was unaffected, and I can still game while my partner watches Netflix.

The only time that it is tedious is when (for example) Overwatch ships a multi-GB update, and it hasn't auto-updated because my PC has been off. That used to be a "go downstairs and get a can of coke and it'll be pretty much done when you get back", but is now "go do something else for half an hour".

> Video streaming at its highest but rate

I expect you meant "bit rate", unless you're streaming a particular kind of video ;)

I was going to edit it...but your reply made it worth keeping the typo....

You ISP most likely has really crappy transit/peering. It doesn't help much if the last mile is gigabit, if the mile before that is also gigabit and shared with thousand(s) other users.

That’s true. The further out you choose servers for the speed tests, the worse the results. If I choose the server that is closest I get above 900. If I choose a server across the country, it’s about 150.

This is why most well-known speed test sites are useless, in that they are carefully gamed by the ISPs, so that they show you only the maximum speed you could reasonably achieve to their highly localized high speed network. It tells you little or nothing about what you could get to anywhere else.

The dslreports speed test is pretty good, and the one from fast.com should give you a pretty accurate picture of what you could see from the Netflix infrastructure.

Beyond that, you need to run your own CLI tools and be in control of both ends.

Just for a data point:

So I went to fast.com and it’s showing 150/73 using WiFi. Speedtest is showing 249/66. I am on the second floor. When I am right next to my router, speedtest maxes out at 371/354 wirelessly to the closest server.

Dslreports is 319/94.

This is on my iPhone 8 Plus. Usually my iPad is a little faster.

The benefit is more noticeable when you have more clients using the connection - big family with phones, tablets, desktops, etc.

Steam and torrents take advantage of all my gigabit bandwitdh. But generally if I'm using all of my bandwitdh, it's that I am consciously downloading/uploading stuff to do just that.

Are you sure there's not something on your network limiting your connection? When I had Gb many things were significantly faster. Most downloads would be at least 100Mbps. Steam would be 300-500Mbps.

Web browsing specifically has marginal improvements as the speed increases towards Gb. Latency has a larger impact as a percentage.

Speed tests show 950/950 wired, but I don’t do anything bandwidth intensive. My house is wired for gig e. My son may benefit with his PlayStation and Xbox.

The most bandwidth intensive thing I do is probably “download Linux ISO’s” on but torrent

What does slow it down is the 400 requests to go out and grab the JS, ads, graphics, etc.

Torrents.

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