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Comment by orblivion | Hacker News Reader

After a long period of my life not having the fastest in speeds at home, I ended up going all in and telling Comcast "give me the fastest Internet you have". So I'm paying for 400Mbps.

...what do I need all this speed for? What could someone possibly do with 1 Gbps? It's not as though web pages will load faster, they have their own throttling. I don't think I need 400Mbps to stream 4k video. Torrents don't seem to take advantage of the full bandwidth.

I could see the benefit if I were doing 10x as much stuff _at the same time_. So is this for large families or businesses? I'm considering going down to about 100 and saving a few bucks.

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Throughput - not all about speed. Downloading a game on Steam should not cripple my ability to watch TV, as an example. Plus most machines are off auto updating nowadays, I shouldn't have to suffer because my laptop/phone/TV/toaster decided to patch itself when I don't have any control over that.

So it sounds like you're talking about doing multiple things at the same time. Fair enough, I just think 400Mbps is beyond even the point where that matters for me living alone. Though I don't torrent much, perhaps if I did I'd feel the difference.

Faster speeds help with downloads. Yeah you won't notice the difference when downloading a selfie, but when you buy Gears 5 on Steam and want to start playing, you will notice the difference between waiting ~1h45m @ 100Mbps / ~11m @ 1Gbps to get that 80GB game.

Okay, so that means certain services out there actually do let you download that fast. I guess that's different from loading assets on a website?

Most services like steam use high throughput CDNs. I can sometimes saturate my 1gbit connection while downloading games from steam or microsoft

That's true but don't forget that downloading stuff isn't sequentially related to what you can do in real life.

Your body won't be blocked for 1 hour and 45 minutes. You could choose to download a huge file before you goto sleep / work / etc. and by the time you're back it's go time.

I have the option for gigabit speeds but I stick to around 350Mbps mainly for this reason. My current speed is already more then I need. The few times I download something huge, it's usually a game, and most modern games allow preloading. If they don't, then I start the download before I leave for work.

For me the benefit isn't sustained peak use, it's about saving time when there is something big to download. I want to play a game I haven't played in a while but it needs a 4 GB patch? With 1gbps I don't mind sitting there waiting a bit, 100mbps and I'm likely to just quit and find something else to play.

As I mentioned, it seems that websites have their own throttles. Are game download servers different?

Websites usually have a collection of smallish resources to download. It's hard to keep the connection busy for long enough to get to your maximum speed if your max is big. When I was running busy webservers (aggregate of 20+Gbps at peak) that served a mix of dynamic and static content may tune their network buffers smaller to increase the number of simultaneous users at the expense of the individual bandwidth to users; it was still possible to get a very high speed download, but you needed to have very low latency to the server.

Game downloads tend to be pretty big, and some downloaders will break up the download over multiple connections which can make it easier to hit your maximum speeds. There's a lot of CDN in game downloads because of the size, and CDNs will often be close to you, reducing latency, which makes high speeds more achievable.

Unrelated, a high speed upstream connection makes offsite backup much more realistic.

It's the ability to do multiple heavy transfers at the same time, youtube videos loading instantly, game updates finishing within a minute, apps downloading in a few seconds, and never having your connection be the bottleneck to accessing a website.

It's even more important when multiple people are sharing the connection.

Downloading Steam games is one thing that actually takes advantage of my 750Mbps.

To stream 4K contents you only need 20-30Mbps. But for any kind of big download (game updates, OS updates, etc), being able to finish in less than 5 minutes is fantastic.

I'm at work, which is about four hundred people, and looking at our LibreNMS graphs, we barely hit 200 Mb/s.

I'm not against having higher speeds as an option because we don't know what the next Killer App will be and what it may need, but there is a point of diminishing returns for most people.

My understanding is that you get a lot more bandwidth to abroad, which becomes quite important when you don't live near US or Europe.

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