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Comment by adamcharnock | Hacker News Reader

What is the practical consumer (or even SME) use of a 10 or 25G connection?

As a consumer I’d definitely get it for the fun of it, but what is the point in reality?

We’ve just launched an ISP a couple of weeks ago here in Europe. Peak bandwidth use is about 3mbps per customer, and customers will download the same amount of data regardless of their plan.

I acknowledge this could be lack of imagination on my part, but the progression of bandwidth availability seems to be wildly outstripping demand (at least when it comes to fibre deployments).

Perhaps someone living in SF with a 25G connection can disabuse me of this notion.

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I work from home and regularly need to download large files from work servers. Several months ago I noticed that my internal network was 100Mb/s, which was dreadful. Downloads of 500MiB files would take tens of minutes, because Tomcat would drop connections on such a slow download. And even without dropped connections it generally took a long time to download anything, and Zoom call quality was regularly degraded (I sometimes heard my colleagues as androids and vice versa). I fixed the issue and now I get the full 700M/s that my ISP offers (and 1G/s internally over a Netgear switch for NFS transfers). I could get a 1G/s, but it would cost me more and 700M/s is fine for the most time. But sometimes to get a shorter feedback loop on what I'm doing I could imagine getting a 5G/s. I think it would be optimal. But 10G is clearly overkill.

"Zoom call quality was regularly degraded"

It sounds like something else was dodgy on your previous network, surely Zoom cannot use up 100mb/s connection

When one side sends data at 1Gb/s and the other receives at 100Mb/s, it's worse than if the first side sent data at 100Mb/s. Here's a description from Julia Evans: <https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/07/12/netdev-day-2--moving-away-fr...>

Basically my ISP router would receive data at full speed, while internally I would have a lot of dropped packets.

Additionally, I usually use the web browser to view Jira or copy files over NFS during calls, and I'm sure there are some background apps contributing to the traffic as well.

The one thing that fixed all my problems was reconfiguring the network driver to set 1G bandwidth on my NIC instead of the 100M that it set automatically. Yeah, Linux Desktop problems...

> Basically my ISP router would receive data at full speed, while internally I would have a lot of dropped packets.

This is not how this works. The other end of your zoom call doesn't go "hey the person I'm talking to is on a 700mbits line, so that's how much data I'll send." By that logic you could extend this to the network of your isp, which is probably 10 or 100gbits, so you should have a lot of packet loss where the transition from 10gbits to 700mbits happens. And it's not even clear how the other peer could even know how fast your internet connection is, or the internal network of your ISP. That is what congestion control is for. Your peer can't know your modem's connection speed nor your LAN's speed. Software will simply observe how fast it can send data before packet loss starts to happen. This obviously requires that the there is some sort of feedback by the peer you're talking to. If you're using TCP, the OS will do that for you for free. With UDP, you have to implement that logic yourself in your application. And that's why it doesn't matter where the bottleneck is, it could very well be somewhere "in the middle" between two ISPs.

> I noticed that my internal network was 100Mb/s, which was dreadful. Downloads of 500MiB files would take tens of minutes, because Tomcat would drop connections on such a slow download. And even without dropped connections it generally took a long time to download anything, and Zoom call quality was regularly degraded.

Was you network setup broken? Did your firewall block ICMP? Ancient servers like tomcat and apache should handle slow networks in stride, even with modern updates - and 500MB at 100mbps is 40 seconds?

Now I can't imagine running 100mbps today for a home network... So upgrading makes sense. But your problems doesn't sound like they were caused by your lan speed.

In my case it was either 1G or 10G (no in-between), price difference between 1 and 10 wasn't huge, most of the cost was installing the actual fibre optics in the house.

10 Gbps can give you some advantage when downloading big games from a network that can support it on high end hardware.

Games are competing for "who can eat the most storage", it seems, and at 231 GB for CoD:MW (https://gamerant.com/pc-games-file-size-hd-space-biggest-hug...), you'll wait over half an hour before you can play with "only" a 1 Gbit connection.

The bigger the game, the bigger the incentive to just re-download when needed if you can do it fast, since your storage is limited.

The 10 -> 25 Gbps step is definitely just bragging rights, which I'd call well deserved given the lengths you have to go to to actually reach those speeds.

I can't imagine ANY reason that a private household would actually need a 10G or 25G connection unless it's doubling as a workplace and they're hosting servers. Even that seems like a temporary stop-gap situation, get some rackspace in a datacenter already!

Maybe they're not selling enough 25G to their business customers and they're trying to get private users onto 25G?

I can see that. Certainly if they already have the infrastructure deployed then a residential usage pattern on 10G is going to look identical to that on 1G (and I’d wager identical to that on 100M in most cases). In which case they can get more recurring revenue for likely only an increased one-off cost.

When I clicked through to the provider it looked like the only difference between 1/10/25G was the setup cost. But I might have mis-read.

For download?

Working from home with large media assets of any sort.

For upload? Yes, I need ANYTHING faster than Comcast's BS so I can actually do any work OR even backups without killing my ability to do other things.

Right, that's totally reasonable, it sounds like you need an SLA (service level agreement) from you ISP, like a business-class service at 1G up/down.

Bu can you really make use of 25G or 10G service to the point where 1G is unacceptably slow? Probably not. It would strongly depend on the bandwidth of whatever you're connecting to.

As a deluxe nice-to-have with bragging rights, sure, but it won't make an operational difference except in very specific scenarios that almost no household would actually need.

Init7,OP’s isp is a non profit

No, they are a regular for profit company.

Regardless, their monthly (annual actually) fees are the same for 25G/25G as for 1G/1G. Only the setup fees are higher, which they attribute to more expensive optics. 10G/10G is completely identically priced to 1G/1G.

Internally:

Every once in a while, I move VM images between machines. Even at 1Gbps, it's a drag to sit there and watch them transfer. Not really a big deal, but it'd be nice to see them move faster.

Externally:

I back up my Google Drive periodically. 500GB takes a while to transfer.

I agree, and this is totally the kind of thing I would do too. But I don’t think this represents average consumer behaviour.

> I back up my Google Drive periodically. 500GB takes a while to transfer.

Do you download the whole thing each time, vs just changed files?

Either way, (scheduled!) periodic backups sounds like a thing that could happen over trough (well, while you're sleeping), in which case a 200Mbps connection would be more than adequate for your use case (~5.6 hours for 500GB).

The numbers obviously scale linearly with the size of your download (a common anecdote I hear re: people filling up TBs of hard drives is via lots of RAW photos), so in that scenario, you'd need to transfer 30-40TB overnight (8 hours) in order to saturate a 10G uplink; you'd likely saturate hard drive write speeds first, not to mention you'd need multiple HDDs/SSDs connected to even store that much data in the first place.

It was a cinch when I had an always-on Windows box. I'd make a request via Takeout, save it on my Drive, and the Backup and Sync app would automatically download it to my local copy of the drive. But that box is now running Ubuntu, and I haven't gotten around to replacing Backup and Sync with one of the other (non-free, non-Google) options.

I would be very surprised if you could even break 2.5 gbps towards google drive. Saturating 25 gbps to anything the peer out of country would be basically impossible most places.

I have 10G in Tokyo and I think it’s about $60 USD per month vs $40 for 2G. It’s definitely overkill but it sure is nice to download a 60GB steam game in a minute or two.

The problem with 10g is that most servers aren’t on 10g yet and if you’re transiting a peering connection of a smaller ASN at some point, even that is likely not 10g

Agreed, I struggle to get anywhere close to 1gbit/sec apart from Steam.

What do you use for a router? I've got 10G (price difference from 1G was even less percentage then yours) internet myself but currently just use an RB4110 as router which is the primary bottle neck. Would be nice with something reasonably priced and sized which can route 10G or close to 10G with NAT so I could utilize my uplink a bit more.

I’m still waiting for a reasonable prosumer one to come out. I’m using an intel 2 port NIC in my desktop (so only 2 devices including the desktop get 10G), and everything else is 1G.

This hardly is relevant to your internet speeds with steam downloads. It is much more CPU dependent when you are operating at such high speeds.

A modern CPU + NIC combination will be twiddling its thumbs on a bulk download at 10G. There's a whole sleuth of optimization and offload features between the NIC and the CPU, and they work particularly well with a low number of high bandwidth data streams.

The real problem starts when you're doing lots of small packets all over the place. Which is not something you'll likely run into at home, ever.

No, it's still nothing to do with that for steam. Its their compression.

> What is the practical consumer (or even SME) use of a 10 or 25G connection?

Remote file storage, leasing servers for things like icecream, or basic HPC, self-hosting for a small business, even a small DC can run off it.

Remote file storage I can just about see. But most consumers are streaming content (certainly TV, but possibly increasingly games), so where are all these multi-gigabyte files coming from on average 20/30-year-olds laptop/iPad? I don’t think people are shooting that much video, are they?

Renting storage, and accessing it over 10gbps at home may be cheaper than building your own multi-tb storage rack.

Absolutely. But from what I’m seeing, the average consumer’s need for storage space is decreasing not increasing.

Average consumer? Internet companies are responsible for a few percents of the labour market in some parts of the world.

Not so few people genuinely need gigabit+ internet for work.

At what speed do you start to run into limits on the server side when it comes to remote file storage?

is this the icecream you speak of? https://github.com/icecc/icecream I've never heard of it so I was intrigued.

Yes, so far a tool in a way better condition than distcc, though both are very poorly maintained.

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