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Comment by uncertainrhymes | Hacker News Reader

The level of detail is very nice, I wish more tools exposed this as easily.

That said, please remember this is a test of you through your ISP to a (hopefully) nearby Cloudflare node. It isn't necessarily testing 'the Internet', since Cloudflare sometimes has creative peering relationships to origins that are not being measured here.

Also, for the people complaining they only have 300 Mb/s -- unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies there is nothing faster about having more bandwidth. You should care about latency, packet loss, and cache hit rate.

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> Also, for the people complaining they only have 300 Mb/s -- unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies there is nothing faster about having more bandwidth. You should care about latency, packet loss, and cache hit rate.

Haven’t downloaded any 150+ GB games (or patches even these days) off of Steam lately I see

Yeah. Comcast is shorting me by a solid 50Mb/s and this is the reason it's annoying. On top of the fact that their garbage excuse for a website is literally completely broken. Every time I've tried to use it for the past year it just sticks me in a login loop. What a truly miserable company.

I recently discovered that using the Verizon website on Firefox is pretty much impossible, it similarly has nightmarish login/account issues. Whatever issue the browser has with the site even managed to break their new account flow on two installations I've had done in recent months. The installation and appointments were scheduled and performed, but nobody in their support teams can find either account in their systems and I have not received a bill.

1Gb symmetric at both locations in NYC though and a free Xbox One S and $300 Visa giftcard.

They have essentially paid me to use them as my ISP, and contact from their support teams attempting to figure it out is getting increasingly infrequent

Congrats! Once in a while, the stupidity in systems like this finally works in your favor.

I think the parent comment is still mostly relevant here. 150GB downloads are not common even for those with games that big. A new install is most likely a ~monthly operation and updates that aren’t ready by the time you notice them will be rare.

Sure it would be nice for those few instances, but those are not worth the additional cost for almost any individual or family if they actually work out the time saved waiting.

Is saving 30 minutes on a one time download that imperative? Personally, 300 Mbps on my 400 Mbps plan while upstairs on a wifi connection seems pretty good for my situation. It at least justifies the cost of those mesh routers I bought.

> unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies there is nothing faster about having more bandwidth

Well, having a good network card and frequently downloading large files (which I'm guessing lots of people do here, especially those in ML/AI and related fields), I'm not sure why the downloads wouldn't go faster if you didn't have more bandwidth... People use the internet for more than just watching movies you know.

Yeah, for sure, I'm often syncing multi gigabyte repositories while me and my wife are on video conferences. You really feel the extra bandwidth then.

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