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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 )

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.

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

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.

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