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Comment by hackermom | Hacker News Reader

When 100 mbit/s isn't fast enough you know it's time to get checked out for Download's Syndrome.

I live in Sweden and can tell you that, "My bandwidth is full-duplex 100 Mbit, which is a bit slow by Swedish standards," isn't really true. Sure, fiber is common in certain areas but full-duplex 100 mbit? Not many have it because very few need it. It's far more common to go with your cable provider's offer of 10/1 or 25/1 mbit because that's fast enough.

Can everyone in the neighborhood (assuming they all use same provider) max out their connections at the same time? AKA Does the upstream provider have that much bandwidth?

No, the provider wouldn't have the bandwidth, which is why the fine print always says that they only guarantee up to x/y mbit.

Definitely not, I mean, even web hosts and colocation centers will oversell their bandwidth.

That said, I ran a internet radio station + free image host node on my residential connection and was pushing a few TB/mo up and never got any complaints. And BitTorrent is obviously quite popular in Sweden so I'm sure there's a bunch of seeding going on.

I'd be surprised of most people chose cable over fiber - everyone I know choses to download TV after it airs in America instead of paying comhem 500 kr/mo for shows that are 2 years out of date.

But true, while 100/100 Mbit is commonly an option in big cities (when I looked for an apartment in Malmö a few years ago, all the ones I looked at had 100M-1Gbit), I'm sure most people go for the cheaper 100/10 option, since most people aren't uploading anything. One friend has 250/50, which seems like a good compromise.

Yeah, same here in Slovenia - even though FTTH providers have 100/100 available, people usually opt for cheaper 100/10 or 10/10 options because of pricing (100/100 is 100€/mo, 100/10 is 27€/mo, 10/10 is 22€/mo, which is a noticable difference).

Also I noticed there are very rare use cases when I'm able to actually get over ~30Mbit or so downstream, usually the servers I'm downloading from aren't capable of delivering data so fast.

He doesn't seem to complain about it, just subtly bragging about the state of Internet connectivity in Sweden.

I live I'm Sweden and my 100/100Mbit full duplex connection is part of my rent, so basically I get it for free, but that is one of the perks living in a large city. And yes, I really do get the full bandwidth all the time.

Smaller cities usually have decent connections over DSL or Cable though, so bandwidth is usually not a problem anywhere you go in this country.

I've been on 100 mbit/s for a couple of years and I'd consider upgrading to 1000 mbit/s if it was full-duplex.

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