Comment by apeace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apeace | Hacker News Reader

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I have been working at startup ISPs for the past several years. Your intuition is correct.

Nobody uses 1Gbps. Nobody. Not download, not upload.

I did work for an ISP that served a lot of video editing shops, and I could see them potentially using >1Gbps at night, when they upload all their video to the cloud. They are one of the few customers that I have seen saturate 1Gbps.

Most people don't realize: your bandwidth is fine. Your latency is bad. Latency has so much to do with the internet experience.

You can have 20-50Mbps in a household with two parents and two kids, and your internet experience will be great if your latency is great.

There are three factors that determine the quality of your internet experience: 1) bandwidth, 2) latency, 3) packet loss. In practice, #3 is not usually an issue. But every ISP only advertises #1.

When you get introduced to fiber, the biggest upgrade you get is in latency.

So you are completely correct: you will never use 5Gbps. You won't even use 1Gbps. But the upgrade to fiber will probably make your internet experience feel a lot faster, due to lower latency.

> There are three factors that determine the quality of your internet experience: 1) bandwidth, 2) latency, 3) packet loss. In practice, #3 is not usually an issue. But every ISP only advertises #1.

Fully in agreement. I've always hated that (outside of enterprise use) latency is never discussed - sure assuming a similar latency 1Mbps and 100Mbps is significantly different but 100Mbps and 10Gbps (except if you're shuttling files every so often) is already at the point of diminishing returns. Maybe there's a consumer use case that changes this in a few years, but everyone should focus on latency first. Unfortunately, there isn't much of a focus here - whether due to technical reasons or due to... ISP politics reasons (peering and transit fights are "fun" to watch, and is something that an average person is unaware of, even if they knew about corporate lobbying politics).

I think the reason it's not discussed by consumer ISPs is because the big guys are using a wide range of technologies, from DSL (yes, still) to cable to fiber. They don't want to talk about how their 200Mbps cable customers have significantly worse internet than their 200Mbps fiber customers. If they did that, they'd have to go deploying fiber into all the places that use other technologies.

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