Also I definitely saturate my gigabit link on download all the time, and sometimes on upload too, but I realize I'm not the average person in that regard.
Also, behind all these NATs and blocked ports, the whole system is designed to not be used. Update it so everyone has strong connections with consistent bandwidth and low latency with IPv6 and perhaps we would see more possibilities with home internet use.
The upload is so pathetic because cable doesn't have symmetric bandwidth, you have to choose if you want more download channels or more upload channels. Most households don't need much upload, thus the ratio.
10mbps up is a minimum requirement for me though IMO.
I have 3 gbps of upload bandwidth at my house. (1 Comcast fiber line with 2 gbps symmetric, and one Verizon fiber line with 1 gbps symmetric.) I still host everything on One Drive because what the heck is the point of hosting your own servers as a consumer?
Even when I’m working from home and uploading large files to S3, it barely hits 100Mbps on a good day and the CLI automatically uses multiple streams to upload.
My VPN connection to our AWS network also rarely hits 100Mbps.
Actually low upload bandwidth makes it harder to give 3rd parties data :P
Question, does AT&T fiber do fiber all the way to the home? Because I know one of my family members has their fiber offering, but they have serious bandwidth issues around normally busy hours - suggesting even with fiber they're over provisioned.
That said, AT&T has been selling their U-Verse FTTN (fiber to the node) service as "fiber home internet" for many years now. This is still based around DSL technologies but have fiber terminated much closer to the house than at a central office. If they're not on a Gigapower plan with a true optical network terminal inside their house, they probably don't actually have fiber.
The central office is connected by a single fiber to a spliter that services up to 64 homes.
So when you buy 1Gpbs internet, it actually goes through a 2.5GBps fiber shared with up to 63 other houses.
In the context of this article, I feel like most readers don't fall into this category and probably aren't getting that amount of return on their higher speed investments.
Though, your comment brings up an interesting point - I wonder if internet speeds would play a factor in getting more users to run their updates? In general they're disruptive so there are other issues, but it could be part of the overall frustration. Personally, I have a fast connection so I rarely have this specific problem.
I've seen some ridiculous download speeds from Steam, but never enough to saturate my gig pipe even during a full game installation. I just can't see Steam providing that kind of bandwidth to it's users when the filesizes can get upwards of 50gigs. They would DDOS themselves.
Not that it’s a big deal all of our bedrooms, living room, and office are wired for gig-e.
I'm not convinced here in the US, although maybe it is slightly more common in those who download lots of games or updates
A percentage of HN readers perhaps. Gigabit isn't even available here in Indy for the vast majority of people.
Fastest I can get is '100mbps' for 60$ a month plus fees with a 1TB cap and it's not even close to actually being 100mbps from AT&T. Netflix degrades itself probably once an hour on average while watching HD (not 4K) and if nothing is running I'm lucky if I can pull 500-750 kilobytes a second (a whopping 4-6% of my advertised speed) from my gigabit server I rent (but a friend in another city with gigabit can almost max out his advertised speed pulling from it).
Allegedly AT&T has up to gigabit for about 20% of the city if you happen to live in a fiber neighborhood. If I went witha business line, at a considerably higher cost (if they'd even allow it at a residential address) I could get up to '300mbps'.
I've been seeing people talk about gigabit at their homes for years no and I'm just like "whatev!".
I’ve known many people who perceive stuttering, slow page loads and game lag as a result of a slow connection. The ISP’s could solve this but I’d imagine it works in their favor. While I’m more than capable of tweaking SQM/Cake (OpenWrt) values and testing (keeping ping times below 40ms), I believe a simple consumer friendly (read: automatic) solution is sorely needed.
Incidentally I think Windows Updates are getting better in regard to disruptiveness. What I wish they would do though is implement some kind of "reboot as many times as you need to apply the update and then just power down once it's done". I will hit 'Update and shutdown', then turn on my PC the next day and have to wait for the second stage of the update to run. Though again, it seems vastly improved as of late - that second stage takes very little time at all.
The real difference is streaming almost everything vs needing to wait until a download finishes.
Sounds like an inconsequential detail, but I can't readily think of any recent experience where I actually did have to wait for a download to finish before I could continue doing anything. Most things are either streaming or background, nowadays.
Perhaps Steam?
I'm on 400/25 and I always dread installing Battlefield 4 after a fresh install. I think it's around 60-70GB right now and takes around 45 minutes to get everything downloaded.
Steam can hit 40MBps (over 300mbps) regularly for me.
I find what you say to be true though, most services can't saturate my link - but I'd double check because exactly 100mbps is suspicious.
Also don't use speedtest.net, try fast.com (run by netflix) - ISPS are known to "cheat" on speedtest.net (they can host a speedtest server inside their network) but fast.com downloads actual movie fragments from netflix's cdn.
Dropbox does not throttle at 100mbit/s either.
Maybe it's a problem with your ISP or your router?
Trust me, once you get a faster connection you definitely won’t want to go back to 100.
It’s kind of like high DPI displays.
I had a 1G connection, but my most often used desktop would often switch to 100M, and it would take me weeks to notice. I would absolutely get a 1G connection again if it were reasonable, but a solid 100M is fine for everything other than really large up/downloads. Symmetric 10, with decent latency isn't that bad either.
> It’s kind of like high DPI displays.
Yeah, I've had those too, and I don't find them worth it. A slightly higher than 'normal' dpi, that I can run at 1:1 was pretty nice until my eyes got older.
100 is good most of the time but then happens the moment you need some big chunk of data (ex: a game of 150 GB) and then you need to wait quite a bit.
Also, if you have a larger household with everybody streaming and playing games, 100Mbits can saturate pretty quickly.
As I don't have kids, 100Mbits is mostly OK for me but occasionnaly I wish I had more. Like when I moved my photo backup, 500GB to upload was a pain at 100Mbit/s, but obviously this is not something I need to do everyday.
It's just preferable, of course, if people who use the service more, effectively pay more for it. As someone who's in the top few percent of Internet users, I know this would mean I would pay more, but I'm okay with that. Seniors who check their email once a week shouldn't be spending $60 a month on Internet.
Just think of all the crypto mining out there for example, imagine how many people could accidentally allow crypto mining software to be installed and all of that data being transferred for half a month and then BAM big bill.
Or someone makes malware that just transfers junk data purely to rack up data charges for kicks, or worse someone at an ISP does it to boost earnings or because they hate their employer and want them to eventually get 'caught doing it'.
Not to deride your point, but crypto mining typically uses very little data since you only need the data contained in the block header, and don't need all of the transactions.
Fine, change my crypto malware thought to a distributed storage malware. Several years ago there were a handful of distributed peer-to-peer file storage and backup system programs where you'd select how much of your storage you wanted to donate to the pool and that would determine how much you would get to use in the collective cloud for storing stuff.
It wouldn't surprise me if someone had malware out there doing this for their own uses, if you had a botnet of 100k computers and took 1 gig from each, and had a 100x redundancy you've got 100 gigabytes of distributed storage for whatever which you might be using for your own backup or for file sharing...
Actually I bet you could do this for hosting stuff on the darknet, if you had a decent amount of machines on a botnet, say 10,000 machines, and needed just 100mb for your entire darknet site, you could have all 10,000 machines hosting it and serving it via 10,000 tor connections... interesting. This would be a hell of a plot device or potentially even a practical deployment for espionage use or general criminal activity. Have one machine somewhere under your full control randomly loading 1 or more of the sites at random to load the actual darknet site.
Ideally, the per usage rate you pay for Internet should both be much more granular than mobile ISPs use (by the MB would be nice), and so inconsequential that you don't need to worry about it as a daily aspect. (Nobody spends serious thought about the cost of turning on the light switch when they enter a room.)
Most of my software updates run in the background.
Xbox/Steam is the only thing I notice downloading and I usually just play a different game if it needs a big update.
Work is the only reason I pay for 300mbps. Otherwise, 100mbps would be more than enough for me.
Upload is where I really feel the lack of bandwith. I don't have fiber avaialable at my new apartment, and the cable companies only offer 20-25 mbps upload. Hard to run a plex server for my parents and inlaws with that little bandwidth.
I'm probably not going to apply that MacOS update until the weekend, so I can download it at 3AM. I don't care if it takes 2 minutes or 20 minutes (or, heck, 200 minutes!) to download season three of The Wire as long as I can start episode one "quickly enough" because the rest will follow.
That's just a small example, but not having to plan my life around large downloads is in and of itself a benefit of the fast connection.
But then redownloading a non-new game from playstation network goes only a few mbps, and my playstation 4 is the only wired connection I maintained
Some of the services that you would think have highly connected CDNs or could leverage multi participant torrent like downloads just... dont? Games are like 40gb+ these days but I still expected it to take 20 minutes
Any way thats what I’m paying a premium for
Spoil me