Honest question: at what point, with real life usage, is 1 Gbps actually necessary for home users?
I find that latency rather than throughput is what determines my perceived quality of an Internet connection. But am curious how others think.
I find that latency rather than throughput is what determines my perceived quality of an Internet connection. But am curious how others think.
Furthermore, 4K video is < 25mbps each per stream, usually.
IMHO we need to address the "last meter" experience before mandated gigabit internet speeds mean anything.
Upload speed probably makes more sense for more use cases though. I used to have symmetric 1Gbps fiber and never bothered to setup QOS as my upload was never saturated.
I moved and am stuck with "1Gbps" Comcast. Which really means 25Mbps upload. I had to setup qdiscs on my gateway and split my network into tiers to get acceptable upload speeds and latency for the workstations in my home. I maybe have more uploads than 'normal' people, as I have automated backups that store data off-site, but normal people have "backups" in the form of cloud storage I think.
Uploading videos (to YouTube, for example) is painfully slow. I'm simulating living in Australia when I upload a video.
Sure, if I download a torrent, it is much faster. But is not the kind of upgrade that I experienced from ADSL (7Mbit) to VDSL. Since most of the time I use the PC under Wi-Fi anyway, that doesn't go over 600Mbit/s near the AP, but really not over 100 in the location where I usually have my PC.
What I've seen instead is a much more stable connection. Giving that the network is entirely fiber and passive there weren't (so far) any interruption of service in roughly one year, while with VDSL there where time to time that the connection did not work, in one occasion for nearly a week. Also since it was copper lines in case of bad weather, or crosstalk with other users, the performance did vary a lot.
Most complaints that I've seen in various neighborhoods are from people that were not getting anywhere near their full speed. Usually the cause is their wifi router.
Sounds like instantaneous update is too, but that's a relatively infrequent use of your connection.
Most people could get away with less, but sooner or later 1Gbps will go from "excessive" to "good" to "acceptable" to "slow".
Or there's three people in your house all on video calls.
Then again I'm not a networking guy. Someone who knows more about this stuff than I do can give you more comprehensive advice and talk about stuff like buffer bloat, etc.