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Comment by traskjd | Hacker News Reader

We've had gigabit internet in most metro areas of New Zealand for many years now (I pay $110 NZD = ~$80 USD a month to have no data cap either). In mid-March 2019 the infrastructure provider (Chorus) began testing 10Gbps connections with small businesses.

I moved to Seattle in 2016 and found there was only 1 provider who could do 1Gpbs, and even then only to some select locations in the city. Somehow moving into the Amazon/Microsoft center of the tech universe was like going back in time.

Now if we could just resolve the speed of light issue between the bottom of the south pacific and US-EAST1.

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I'm living in France in a medium-sized city, and I pay 20€/month ($25) for 1GBps internet (that's actually a 1 year discount, it's gonna be 30€/month).

Also my 4G mobile plan is 60Gb/month for 10€.

Broadband and fibers are about 35€ a month in France with the two providers. They do a single package with phone, internet and TV over internet.

It's misleading to call it 20€/month because of one-off discounts.

I guess it's a FTTLA 1GBps internet.

It's FFTH

I'm living in france too, I pay 40€/mo (~$48) for ~8Gbps fiber.

You seriously get 8 Gbps on anything else than torrents? I get 400 Mbps in Canada and there so many time where I download and I hardly get more than 100 Mbps... Steam and torrents are pretty much the only times I get my full 400 Mbps.

That would mean the servers don't give you more than 100, but your provider does honestly provide you a 400 Mbps channel.

I max out at around 1 Gbps on steam, although I think I might be bottlenecked by my cpu for decompression. Servers that allows clients to pull 8Gbps are very rare.

Torrenting linux iso is indeed very fast :)

GBps != Gbps

Bytes != bits

Yeah sorry, I meant Gbps

4 gbit connections are now available in most metro areas :)

I'm all for progress but... Why?

What possible use could an end user have for a 4gbit connect? The router alone is going to set you back a few hundred bucks.

> What possible use could an end user have for a 4gbit connect?

Who knows. I was excited to do icecc over a gigabit WAN on those "cloud" servers.

4k, 8k and future proofing? How many 4K 5.1 high quality streams can 1g handle?

Roughly 9~ concurrent streams (if we're talking uncompressed blurays) assuming the network infrastructure is dedicated. OTOH If talking Netflix 4k, the number of streams capable here is just about infinite :)

> How many 4K 5.1 high quality streams can 1g handle?

1 Gbps can handle about 8¹ to 40² 4K streams.

¹ 2160p60 on Blu-Ray goes up to 100 Mbps

² Typical 4K Netflix streams are in the 15-20 Mbps region, with a recommended Internet bandwidth of 25 Mbps.

If someone hacks into your computer, they want to exfiltrate the data fast, right?

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Future proofing and it gives people the possibility to think big. If most of the country is stuck at 20 Mb, then most people will think in and build 20Mb applications.

Who knows what people will cook up if they are unbridled. Of course limiting users also breeds innovation to overcome the limitations (youtube-dl is a good example), but artificially creating limitations for the sake of money, isn't a good argument IMO.

If you want applications for the future, don't limit it.

You mean well, but to be entirely honest, I'm happy if the 20Mb sentiment persists. Because no matter what you do, there will always be some people who cannot get gigabit (physical limitations, work abroad, etc.), but nobody cares about them.

Plenty of things come to mind that can involve a lot of data

- Docker and other VM images - Backups - 4K video editing synced to shared NASes when working from home - Build and content syncing for gamedev when working from home

4gbit/s is still slow enough for me to spend minutes syncing a mere 100GB, even if I can exclusively saturate that link and not share it with a roommate. That's smaller than some blueray disks and many steam games in their compressed/compiled/processed states for a single platform - no debug symbols, no built object caches, no source assets. It's not uncommon for me to resync a significant portion of that due to mass rebuilds, poorly handled content refactoring, or just switching projects when my local disks (mechanical, SSD, and otherwise) are all full.

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