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Comment by jgalt212 | Hacker News Reader

Truth, but how many people must be in your household such that one would need 2 Gbps internet? For me, I think I'd need 20 people under my roof for this speed to have any chance of making any sense.

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It is not about having a consistent need for High Speed , or in this case 2Gbps Internet, it is about there when you need it. Things like uploading or downloading games, movies, patches that could be done in seconds instead of sitting there waiting for minutes.

exactly! this is the point that most people miss when this conversation comes up.

What percentage of the population would ever see a benefit?

I was on a ~200 Mbps connection for a while and to be honest, a 1 GB file takes less than a minute, which is crazy fast.

I get that things will change in the future, but right now, I'd say 98% of the population would be happy with a 100 Mbps connection.

It’s also a case of not knowing what you’re missing until you have it, like getting glasses for the first time. I would accomplish so much less if I had to consider a 100mb speed limit.

> It’s also a case of not knowing what you’re missing until you have it, like getting glasses for the first time. I would accomplish so much less if I had to consider a 100mb speed limit.

Not really, I have access to fast internet and feel like I do just fine at 1/10th the speed.

I don’t know about you but other than me, no one in my house used substantial internet bandwidth. Netflix and YouTube mostly. If I throttled the house to 50mbps no one would notice.

For me, I pay for the highest speed because I know I'll never get there. If I paid for a 300mbps line I'd get maybe 10-20. If I pay for a 1.2gbps line guess what? I get about 500mbps. That's definitely more than enough for basically anything I do right now but lowering my speed to the lower tier will mean I'm invariably half way back toward 10mbps.

I agree with every word you said. You will probably need it only for 1% of the time.

But you see, 100Mbps Internet connection dont often give you 100Mbps connection all the time, if gives you a share of total connection, whether that is building, floor, flat, etc that guarantees under X condition you get 100Mbps. So in reality you really want this number to be at least 10X because the system was designed to be oversubscribed. ( And it is not the fault of any body, the tech was designed as such. ) And it is especially true for DOCSIS 4.0.

And in the case of Network planning, it will actually be better if they could speed up your 1% need so you leave more time and space for others. ( Of course some people abuse the network but that is a different story )

BackBlaze backups and copying files back and forth to S3 over symmetric fiber.

Doesn’t matter if you upgrade speed if your whole service is built around bandwidth caps.

“Now you can hit your bandwidth cap in half the time!”

— Comcast

This argument sucks! Just because you can't figure out how to use it, doesnt mean there aren't 50,000,000 legit uses or future uses that nobody has thought of. Build it and they will come... If people had crazy fast network speeds at home, I guarantee you'd see services pop that could utilize them. As it is now, nobody can see past their app store and streaming video services, so we will just keep getting stuck with shitty upload speeds, and potential for new products and services stifled.

I had symmetrical gigabit fiber up and down via AT&T. Besides speed tests, the only times in the real world I ever remember getting close to those speeds were multithreaded BackBlaze backups, torrents, and connections to AWS for copying files back and forth to S3.

Both steam and the PS5 store can max out my gigabit connection.

But imagine a world where everyone had 2Gbps Internet but your site could only push 0.2Gbps per user.

Then soon your site will be the slowest one around and you’d want to catch up.

Some people work from home and do things like push Docker images or ML models up, especially over VPNs. Some other users create video content or work in creative spaces that deal with larger files. Comcast’s 45mbps aka 5.625MB/s limit on their highest tier 1200mbps residential service is absolutely a friction point for many of us today.

You’re going to fine your VPN is still going to be a limiting factor unless your company has really good bandwidth to support it.

Even with symmetrical 1Gbos and pushing to AWS, the VPN was slowing me down.

Luckily, we started implementing zero trust and not needing a VPN. But I would still just launch a Cloud9 instance and do everything on it for much faster speeds

And it did help that I worked for the only company that never has to worry about or pay AWS a huge AWS bill no matter how much we used it…

At that point you also need expensive networking hardware and SSDs to get that kind of speed. Most people stream movies rather than download so there it's okay even if it takes hours to download the whole content.

I think the house with many people case is overwhelmingly more common than the single networking enthusiast gamer/pirate.

(I have gigabit at home but probably wouldn't get 2 gigabit)

>SSDs

First, who doesn’t have SSDs in computers these days? Also, spinning rust drives haven’t been frozen in time since SSDs became mainstream. Modern 3.5” HDDs can hit >2000mbps, which is 250 MB/s. See eg https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/seagate-firecuda-8tb-hd...

> expensive networking hardware

Many newer consumer-grade home routers have 2.5G ports, eg GL.iNet GL-MT3000 which is $100 right now https://a.co/d/bowJMRn

The important number here is not 2000mbps aka 250MBps. The important number is the current upload speed for the highest Comcast DOCSIS 3.1 “1200mbps” plan which is 45mbps aka 5.625 MB/s. To put that into perspective time-wise in networking terms, 802.11G was out on 2003 — 20 years ago — and that was rated at 54mbps. In other words, current Comcast aka XFINITY upload speeds could be saturated by wifi technology that is old enough to vote.

> Many newer consumer-grade home routers have 2.5G ports, eg GL.iNet GL-MT3000 which is $100 right now https://a.co/d/bowJMRn

This only has one 2.5GB port so it's only suitable for the many-users case, not the downloading-stuff-fast-alone case.

Restricting uploads ensures that you can't use any peer to peer applications to their full potential. In other words, it keeps you dependent on cloud services and other value bullshit add-ons. Why would I need cloud storage if I could just access my NAS when I'm out and about?

> DOCSIS 4.0 is capable of supporting up to 10 Gbps downstream and up to 6 Gbps upstream speeds

I choose my Comcast tier based on the upload speed, because that's the real bottleneck in the system. Making DOCSIS (almost) symmetric is huge.

If it's reliable (eg doesn't have outages) then lots of home based business could self host rather than having to use cloud, vps, co-location, etc.

For me, it’s not just about the download, it’s about the upload and the data caps. My current 1200mbps down, 45mbps up Comcast plan, which is the fastest plan available from any ISP in our Silicon Valley home, has a 1.2TB data cap. If run at full speed, that data cap is exhausted in 2 hours, 13 minutes, and 20 seconds. Not even 2 and a quarter hours of downloading. For the “best” option. Lifting the data cap is another $30/month and they make you use their router hardware which opens up your network for anyone to use — that’s how “xfinitywifi” works, if you didn’t know…and since they then don’t want to attempt to account for the traffic difference between “your” internet usage and xfinitywifi traffic, you get unlimited data “free”. IIRC there used to be no unlimited option, and if you don’t have an unlimited plan, you get overage charges up to an additional $100 per month:

``` Once your courtesy month has been used, the next time you exceed 1.2 TB in a month (and any subsequent times it's exceeded in a month), you'll be notified by email and text message that you’ve exceeded your data usage plan amount. A block of 50GB will be added to your account, and a $10 charge will be applied to your bill automatically.

You'll be charged $10 each time we provide you with an additional block of 50GB of data, with a limit of $100 per month.```

https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/data-usage-exceed-u...

The upload side would take 2 days, 11 hours, and 15 and a half minutes to upload 1.2TB. They do this to prevent torrenting and any meaningful file sharing, because “ NBCUniversal - Comcast Corporation - Xfinity” has an obvious incentive to protect their profits on the media side. DOCSIS channels are the commonly-cited technical reason. You can read more about those limits here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Throughput but the throughput caps could easily be 100mbps or 200mbps upload at my location with my current DOCSIS3.1 stuff.

Symmetrical 2gbps would be a dream, especially with unlimited data, but more than anything I’d love for these crooks to have some actual competition.

That’s been the logic on almost every speed increase that’s ever happened.

A t-1 used to be enough for 25 people officially.

That's number go up logic.

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