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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

25 Gbit sounds nice, but even my 1 Gbit line is mostly wasted. I use a Raspberry Pi as my torrent box which seems to cap out at 7 MB/sec write speed. Even Steam tends to only download at 30-50 MB/sec most of the time.

People tend to grossly overestimate how much bandwidth they need, especially non-technical people. Even a 100 Mbit connection is more than capable of letting a family of five all stream Netflix at the same time, but that won't stop Xfinity from up-selling them to a 300 Mbit plan.

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The limiting factor for me is usually uplink speed, especially when moving media around or dealing with backups. I can easily saturate 1G (up) right now, but I’m stuck with crappy xfinity with max uplink speed of 40Mb(bits)/sec. That’s on their highest plan, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Yep, uploads to a service like Backblaze are the only way I have saturated 1G lines.

I dunno, I'm downloading from steam at 89 MB/s right now and I'm pretty sure I'm the limiting factor there.

Both my wife and I work from home and are on video conferencing a good portion of the day. I also build locally and push artifacts to the cloud and those clock in at 10+ gigs from some classes of devices and I obviously have to wait for them to build and upload before I can test (yes we have a full CI pipeline but during crunch time it gets smashed and I can be waiting in line for hours, or build it myself in 10 minutes). All things individually don't require such a large pipe, but they add up, quick.

25 is probably overkill, but I would take 10 in a second.

I currently pay for 78Mbps for myself and my partner. At most I am going to downloading something from steam (~10Mbps), watching something from YouTube (~10Mbps) and my partner will be streaming something to the TV (~10Mbps)

Even at this extreme there's still ample headroom, and our rate is ISP limited; so the line can do much more.

I have a 1G symmetric line and with a fast enough disk write setup I can hit ~108MB/s for Steam downloads and still be on video calls and stream content simultaneously (different people usually). It’s definitely not wasted for us.

From what I can tell, with Steam, I limited by the datacenter itself. I have friends in my local area, and also nearer the same datacenter, all on much higher bandwidths and write speed, but still hit 10Mbps at best.

Saying that, I am no Steam power-user. Most games will be <10GB with updates <1GB

At this point, I have no services or use cases for anything faster.

Symmetric 1G also lets you run services legit out of your home which is nice occasionally.

Gigabit is definitely worth it for me. I can start download for a 50+ GB game on Xbox game pass and be ready to play in a few minutes. I often get home and finish eating by 9pm, and not needing to wait 45 min to an hour to download a game makes a huge difference.

I have a 970/390 Mbps link (France, Orange) that I took more for the fun than anything else. Despite having a lot of self hosted environnements I will never even come close to that with current equipment and technology.

It would take a huge leap in a service requirements to change that, and would mean that I have to change my server and probably switch

I would pay a lot to not have to worry about bandwidth anymore. Too bad the only available ISP in my area only offers up to 50mbps even though they're already using a fiber line.

For the Rpi, the storage device might be your limiting factor... (not the storage device itself, but connection to it from the Pi)

It is, for sure. It's an old external hard drive.

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