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Comment by C4stor | Hacker News Reader

I wonder where is the breakpoint in throughput where it become useless to have more. While ATT stance of 50/10 is certainly not enough for common usages, 100/20 starts to be in the range of my small household peak usage and I probably wouldn't notice.

In my opinion, the killer feature at some point stops being throughput and becomes latency. On 80% of the web, loading a webpage will fetch 100 1kb file (I'm exaggerating), and it's way more important to have 15 ms latency to the servers serving those files than it is to have 100Mbps, 1Gbps or w/e throughput.

The fun fact is that fiber deployments are usually seriously improving latencies over copper ones which is what will get noticed when browsing casually.

So I wonder if the american congress could cheekily say "Sure, 100/20 is good enough as long as you ensure a 15ms roundtrip latency to any server located in the US...good luck with hawaii"

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It never will be enough. Content will fill the capacity. Video will be streamed lossless. Websites will load 30MB of JavaScript because they can.

56k was enough for text, then came images, then came videos, then came 4K video. We’ll definitely find creative ways to saturate 1Gb connections eventually.

But emails will forever have tables.

But none of this already fills the capacity. Websites are served on slow as hell aws virtual web servers, delivering their content byte by byte or so it seems. Content is already not filling the capacity 99% of the time apparently : 4K video is 16Mbps, which is less than 2% of a 1Gbps fiber connection capacity. How often does one watch 50 4K videos simulateneously ?

When you do the maths, nothing is getting that big in fact, and when it does, either it's served by slow (both in bandwidth and latency) servers anyway, either it's time insensitive in the sense of "it will run over night". I never could for the life of me convince steam/epic/whatever to give me more than roughly 50MBps. I wish I could, but I suppose it's too expensive for them ? (or they don't have correct CDNs in Europe ? I don't know). Seriously, the only sites saturating my connections are... bandwidth checkers. Everything else seems to be happy with 1 to 10% of that.

So I'm very not convinced that we'll ever commonly fill 1Gb connection. Also our brains, the ultimate piece in the information transmission chain, can't really make sense of 1Gb of (correctly compressed and packed) information per second anyway. And this hardware part won't get upgraded soon.

> 4K video is 16Mbps, which is less than 2% of a 1Gbps fiber connection capacity.

OK, so you have two of those going and a twitch stream, someone's downloading a new game as well (and wants it now not in two hours), plus a bunch of other things going on... it adds up and it's good to have the burst capacity for large downloads when you want it.

> I never could for the life of me convince steam/epic/whatever to give me more than roughly 50MBps.

Did you mean bits or bytes there? 50 MBps == 400Mbps.

I regularly get several hundred Mbps out of the game services like steam here in the UK... wonder what's different?

FYI Amazon/netflix give a minimum of 25Mbps for a 4K stream and it seems to be recommended that you have at least 25% over that for a "good" experience. The streams are HDR as well as 4K which might explain why that's so high. If 8K gets established, we're likely talking about 100Mbps just for one stream.

>someone's downloading a new game as well (and wants it now not in two hours

That isn't a very compelling need case. I can obviously see why some would pay more for that. But my mom won't.

The average person doesn't spend much time waiting for large downloads to finish.

> That isn't a very compelling need case.

There are a lot of things we don't need, but which can change the way we use tech. My mother didn't need 20Mbit, but later when she had it anyway she discovered Netflix was quite good. Being able to get a game almost instantly rather than later changes your actions around that as well.

> I can obviously see why some would pay more for that.

Who wants to pay more? 900/900 is available for £25 per month in my street now. We should be demanding good service (i.e. overprovisioned for our needs) at a reasonable price.

Even governments, who get cheap access to capital, don't pay taxes, don't have to take profits, can't do gigabit in the USA for under 50 bucks. Upgrades cost money.

OK, but other places can do it.

They may have more dense populations but it does seem the US often gets left behind on these metrics, and usually some or other de-facto monopoly is behind the scenes being obstructive.

I think that’s why we see slow increases of bandwidth. Jumping from 10M to 1G is really expensive and services to make use of it will take a decade to adjust/appear, especially if everyone else is still on 10 or 20M. So the investment might not be immediately useful for a ISP.

What we’re seeing however is companies who’d rather keep charging $50 and offer zero upgrades because there’s zero incentive to.

In Italy we went from an average of 2GB of mobile data to 50GB because a new player entered the market and existing companies had to adapt because they were obviously bleeding customers. I’m sure it cost them money, but it happened, and now people can use more internet for less money.

Now you can argue that my mom doesn’t use more than 2GB/month, but now she can, and so can I, without having to pay $100/month like you do in the US — I pay €8 for 50GB

> 4K video is 16Mbps

Highly compressed 4k. With enough bandwidth we could actually stream Bluray quality without compromises. Sure, it's probably not the first item on the list priorities but it's a needless limitation entirely due to lacking network infrastructure.

God bless email and it's tables.

Similar to the Jevons Paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

For a household, it's certainly not enough.

1- Streaming 4K videos through Netflix, Youtube...

2- Downloading a video game and waiting 4 minutes instead of 4 hours.

3- Using a cloud backup service to sync 2/3 Terabytes of data.

4- Running a full bitcoin node, because why not.

Well : 1. A 4K video, if I estimate it at 56 GB per hour, need roughly 16MBps. Even if 3 people are using that, that's 50Mbps needed.

2. Downloading a video game is usually capped by the server providing the download and not by your fiber connection speed.

3. Same for cloud backups, I never witnessed a case where my connection got saturated by this, usually server side won't handle that much throughput.

4. I wouldn't know, i don't think it's that typical though ?

Point is, all of this roughly fits in a stable 100Mbps connection actually providing it's announced bandwidth (and not the shitshow that usually is a 100Mbps ADSL connection). 200MBps would be plenty, 1 Gbps will be unused.

Steam downloads saturate my 600Mbps cable downstream. I use rclone to backup my VPS to google drive and it saturates my VPS's 1Gbps upstream. Just because your ISP has bad peering doesn't mean they all do. I felt compelled to register an account for the first time in years just to tell you how wrong you are. I can't imagine going back to 50Mbps speeds.

> Downloading a video game is usually capped by the server providing the download and not by your fiber connection speed.

Steam and Microsoft are very obliging with that, games can come down very fast on a gigabit connection.

Installing Blizzard games through Battle.net regularly comes close to capping my gigabit connection too.

I made very similar points 6 days ago. [0] Personally I get almost no benefit from 100mbps over 40Mbps, or perhaps even 25. Huge downloads are rare events, and often aren't time-critical. Backups and automatic updates don't generally need to be fast.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26553690

> Huge downloads are rare events, and often aren't time-critical.

But if you have access to high speeds, behaviour changes. I can play that game pretty much now, rather than later or tomorrow, so maybe I will, rather than think about whether I want to later, maybe, or if I should just do something else.

That's a good point. If it's really fast, then it becomes a 'non-event'. Clicking 'Install' and 'Run' start to converge.

For me though, installing a game is a rare event, and that's not just due to the inconvenience and delay. If 40Mbps is appreciably cheaper than 100, I'll take 40.

Thats fair enough, all comes down to your usage patterns!

I think once you've gone past enough for the household's streaming needs - multiply each person by two 4K streams in case they have the tv on and a video on their phone, and a bit extra for music, always-on devices, browsing etc - you really are only looking at "burst" capacity, and whether it matters to you to get the big things fast.

OTOH it's becoming a bit of a moot point here - with 900/900 available for £25 (~$34) per month, why not?

> all comes down to your usage patterns

Right on. I think for most people the 'ceiling' is probably something like 25Mbps. I suspect that few households ever try to run multiple 4K video streams.

When we discuss improving Internet infrastructure, the emphasis should be on ensuring everyone has access to at least 25Mbps, rather than on further improving Internet speeds in places where there's already an acceptable service.

> I think for most people the 'ceiling' is probably something like 25Mbps.

That's one 4K stream and no slack. Fine for a single person, maybe. But even for just the two of us, if I'm watching a UHD stream on netflix/amazon and she's upstairs playing a game and watching twitch, that's not enough. A family with kids is going to struggle to enjoy modern services on that, and that's before we get into larger downloads.

That's really not enough for a household in 2021, and I see no virtue in trying to 'make do' here.

> the emphasis should be on ensuring everyone has access to at least 25Mbps

I would be surprised if (here in the UK) there were many places you couldn't already.

According to figures I can find from 2019, we were at 53% having access to 300Mbps+, 42% with access to 30-300, 4.5% with only 10-30 and 0.5% under that, which is pretty good going. That lowest 5% are clearly lagging and in need of modernising, but I don't think it's wrong to say we can improve it for the 42% as well, especially as the network we roll out now is the network that forms usage patterns over the next several years. It's not just about right now.

Fair points.

I wonder if 5G could help with the 'last mile' problem, regarding serving sparsely populated areas economically. It's fast enough to be used for home broadband.

Well, my initial point wasn't that bandwidth is _bad_, it isn't, but rather that the fact that ISPs got everyone, apparently including lawmakers to focus on it isn't good for our actual usages, where latency and its stability are the primary drivers or perceived performance.

It's no wonder, since bandwidth has ample room for easy improvement, while providing a good and stable ping is actually a bit difficult. But I still find it heavily biased, and a bit sad.

You're not wrong - I think we need both, modern usage patterns are already soaking up bandwidth in not-particularly-ping-sensitive applications like video streaming, but other uses absolutely do demand quality of connection and low latency.

> A 4K video, if I estimate it at 56 GB per hour, need roughly 16MBps.

But 16MBps is 128mbps.

According to this [1], an UltraHD video is around 7 gigabytes per hour, which is 15.56 megabits per second.

[1] : https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87

> 2. Downloading a video game is usually capped by the server providing the download and not by your fiber connection speed.

If this is the case the cap is way above 100Mbps. I regularly get 4-500Mbps downloading from Steam in EU.

1gbitps is around 128MByteps. Most providers use bits instead of bytes. So it's not really a Gigabyte/second. Also most providers give you the maximal limit of the connection, not the average one. You'll probably get around 100MB/second. If a household has 5 persons, that's around 20MB/second which makes using the connection simultaneously possible without affecting anyone's speed.

Cloud storage requires very high uploads to be usable. 1Gbps is ~125MB/s which is nowadays slow compared to SSDs. So you'd need 1Gbps at a minimum and even then it's much slower compared to what's in your machine.

How often does your cloud storage provider allows you to send 1Gbps to them ? For the ones I use (dropbox, mega, google drive), the answer is never where I live. At best, it will be 10% of that, and usually less.

I've managed ~400Mbps with Backblaze. OneDrive peaks at 150Mbps (probably more but was limited by my laptop's Wi-Fi). I bet Amazon S3 would also be very fast.

Raising upload speeds would also give an incentive to cloud storage providers to take advantage of them and improve their ingestion speeds.

Inbound is very cheap in DC/cloud. The traffic is pretty asymmetric , lot more outbound than inbound , the connections are not . Your ISP may have peering limitations, or interconnect up stream might be throttling. The 1 Gbps is rated capacity to the NOC not the entire internet

From a decent VPS I have easily hit 1 Gbps with google, Dropbox and OneDrive with rclone configured well.

> The fun fact is that fiber deployments are usually seriously improving latencies over copper ones which is what will get noticed when browsing casually.

thoroughly funny becase propagation of light in fibre is a tad slower than electricity in copper.

mostly irrelevant thou also because copper is usually only used in the last mile to the consumer and maybe in the datacenter.

totally agree on your point about latency.

> I wonder where is the breakpoint in throughput where it become useless to have more. While ATT stance of 50/10 is certainly not enough for common usages

How is it not enough? That's more than double what I get.

Here (in Silicon Valley) I get 23Mbps up / 1.5Mbps down. Seems plenty for nearly anything I can think of doing. With 13 months of stay at home and three concurrent zoom session running pretty much all day, it works just fine, never a hiccup.

The only use case where I wish for more upload bandwidth is for uploading backups to remote servers.

A 4K video is 16Mbps, it seems reasonable that a household would want to have 3 of that running, or at least will want that in the near future. With the common background traffic already present on connections, it doesn't seem quite enough. It's not "super not enough", it just seems to me plausible that common households will want more.

> Here (in Silicon Valley) I get 23Mbps up / 1.5Mbps down. Seems plenty for nearly anything I can think of doing.

That’s barely enough to stream 4k on one screen. It’s common now to stream to several screens, one per person basically. Now everything is streamed, even gaming.

I imagine your ping isn’t great to go with that. Even with uses that don’t need a stream, large downloads and uploads must take forever.

Really I’m surprised that in SV you get such a bad connection, but in addition you can’t see the uses a better one would allow. That’s a bandwidth you get in rural houses around Europe, not acceptable for cities let alone a tech hub.

I would relent living in a place with less than 100/30 and 10ms ping nowadays. Luckily here you get 600 symmetrical with 3ms ping across the whole city by default, even on the cheapest plans.

On 1000/50 here in the UK, and liking it a lot. The 1000 is probably overkill, but it sure is nice that large game downloads just happen like that. This is with cable and costs £62 a month.

Recently fibre providers have started to move in with a symmetrical service and I could now move to 900/900 for £25 per month. If I wasn't planning on moving home in a few months I'd switch in a heartbeat.

We're moving to Australia and it sounds like I might have some expectation-lowering to do :/

I am on 35/7 ish, 20/1 when it rains, within 10km if the CBD of Perth, the fourth largest city in Australia. There are point-to-point wireless providers that tech savvy folk use that will get speeds in the range you are used to. I haven't taken it up because I rent and it is a substantial upfront charge for the hardware.

Who knows you might win the NBN lottery and get fibre at your house!

Who knows! I'm moving to Perth, so we'll see...

I did live there 10 years ago and had speeds around what you describe, maybe faster (having trouble recalling) via Bigpond cable at the time. It was the only decent option as ADSL was going to be 1Mbit due to distance from the exchange and the WiMax operator, Vivid, massively oversold and could often only provide 2/1.

Looks like things might not have moved on that much! I guess it just needs to be something else that goes on the list of stuff to check for before we buy a house a year or so down the line.

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