Hacker News Reader

Comment by gfo | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree with you, but I think most HN readers are power users.

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.

View on HN

Anyone who plays video games on computer, ps4, or xbox one also regularly saturates their connection. Game updates are a daily occurrence on Steam for me (mostly because I have hundreds of games) and giant updates are normal on console

I'd beg to differ, especially if your console or PC is networked wirelessly. 802.11n can only do 600mbps in the best conditions. Residential gig pipes are not uncommon anymore.

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.

I regularly see consistent 80 - 90 MB/s from Steam downloads. CDNs are powerful things.

The Steam client starts to throttle its network throughput based on disk performance these days. I've got games installed on SSDs and on spinning rust, and I'll see download speeds back off on the spinning rust while it unpacks files despite there being plenty of resources to cache files otherwise. This is very different from the times where it would attempt to download everything first and then begin to unpack files.

>Residential gig pipes are not uncommon anymore

I'm not convinced here in the US, although maybe it is slightly more common in those who download lots of games or updates

I can’t get more than 430/430 wireless with either my laptop with 802.11ac or my iPhone. My old 802.11n 5ghz laptop gets around 100/100. I have the bundled modem from AT&T with gigabit internet.

Not that it’s a big deal all of our bedrooms, living room, and office are wired for gig-e.

Steam can saturate most connections but I've never seen Sony or Nintendo's download servers saturate even a 50mbps connection.

Possibly true for those, but Microsoft's CDN was incredible back in the Zune heydays. Only thing able to even remotely saturate a connection

>I don't disagree with you, but I think most HN readers are power users.

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!".

It depends on how you define “power user”. Many power users don’t understand a lot of the issues surrendering this either.

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.

I was thinking of updates before even getting to the third paragraph of your comment - to that question I would answer a definite 'yes'. I think slow Internet poses a massive security risk in this regard. It isn't even about users choosing to run or not to run updates - my parents had such slow Internet at one stage that a large Windows or OSX update would never get a chance to download before the next lot of updates arrived. They'd be several updates behind through no choice of their own.

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.

Power users are mostly families watching videos etc. I downloaded less on a 50/50 connection than my mother does on her ~1.5mbit DSL line.

The real difference is streaming almost everything vs needing to wait until a download finishes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com