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Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

I don't have fiber, so I'm at the mercy of how much demand there is for Comcast at any given time. Sometimes it works great, other times not so much. I'd rather just install games locally like with Game Pass, Steam, or EPIC. My local computer can handle these games just fine. I'm definitely not the target audience since I can afford the hardware.

The only place I can think of in the US with fiber are university dorms.

Outside of providing a cheap substitute for hardware, the only other use case I can see this for is for MMO's that have drastically changing environments like Rec Room, VR Chat or anything like 2nd Life

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You don't need fiber. As for use cases, i just now played an hour of The Division 2 on my laptop (with intel integrated gpu) using 4g connection from my phone.

You do if you don't want lag or weird graphical artifacts. You need fiber if you want a local install experience.

The experience playing on 4g was about the same or even better than local install with Geforce 1050.

My connection degrades depending on peak demand, because cable, and because internet duopolies. It's great that yours doesn't, but that's not reality for everyone.

Also for most people in the US, 4G has significant usage caps.

Also - not everyone lives in the US :)

That’s why I brought it up. Our internet services are worse than most industrialized countries. It’s both slower and more expensive. To my knowledge only Canada’s internet services are worse

Currently, Ookla ranks the US's average fixed broadband speeds as 11th globally. This outranks Sweeden, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, Portugal, Israel, Poland, Germany, Finland, Belgium, Russia, Estonia, the Netherlands, and so many others. It might be more expensive than many other countries, but its definitely not the slowest average internet out there.

https://www.speedtest.net/global-index

I used to live in both Taiwan's and Japan's major metros. I have doubts that they are slower and more expensive than the US's metros unless their fiber network was somehow destroyed.

Depending on the time frames in question, it easily could have been that Japan and Taiwan had massively faster internet on average. Ten years ago, a 10Mbit connection here in the US seemed to be pretty dang fast.[0] However, speeds in many metro areas in the US have massively caught up to the rest of the world. Rural areas are still often left in the cold, but in many cities its not uncommon to find 200Mbit+ residential internet connections available. And like I've mentioned elsewhere, gigabit is available in literally hundreds of towns in the US. The average AT&T internet user these days has ~99Mbit, the 90th percentile having 323Mbit.[1] I doubt that was the case even five years ago. So its not a case of Japan or Taiwan's major fiber metro areas getting destroyed, but more of the US finally getting good metro fiber deployed to more customers. Maybe the internet hasn't changed in the last decade where you're at in the US, but its very different in many other areas.

Of course this speaks nothing to the average prices these consumers pay. However, its probably a lot cheaper to wire up an area less than the size of California (Japan + Taiwan) with a much more massive population density. If everything else was equal (its not) it would have surprised me for internet to have been more expensive in Japan or Taiwan than in the US.

[0] https://transition.fcc.gov/national-broadband-plan/broadband... [1] https://broadbandnow.com/ATT-speed-test

1. You'll never have a local install experience

2. Anything above ~25mbps connection will give you the optimal experience you can have

So no, you do not need Fiber, you just need a decent broadband connection.

> The only place I ca think of in the US with fiber are university dorms

While definitely nowhere near the majority of the US, there are many metro areas with large residential fiber to the home (FTTH) deployments. Suggesting it is only available at university dorms is massively misrepresenting reality.

In pretty much all the areas I've lived for the last decade, FTTH has been extremely common. I'm certain lots of other people have had very different experiences from me. Lots of other people have had experiences vastly different from yours.

https://broadbandnow.com/report/fiber-optic-availability-map...

https://www.att.com/shop/internet/gigapower/coverage-map.htm...

https://www.verizon.com/home/fiosavailability/

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