Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com