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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has 1/1000th of that bandwidth to the Internet, and yet still only saturates that connection when transferring from some nearby sites, I'm curious how useful having a 10Gbps local connection will actually turn out to be in practice. Being able to download Linux ISOs faster is the prominent use case that comes to mind.

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{ Multiple people in household each having multi-party high resolution video calls | band practice | data manipulation collaborations | 4K TV on demand } can suck up the bandwidth when the priority is smooth real-time with low interactive latency.

It's not always going to be peak demand, but it'll be noticable when everybody piles on at particular times of day.

TBH I have relatively low bandwidth most of the time and don't notice download speeds at all as I queue the things I want and return to working on what's in front of me.

You absolutely cannot saturate a 10 Gbit link with today's consumer's needs, let alone with today's consumer hardware.

That's hundreds of Netflix 4k streams.

Sure, but the OP talked about being happy with a 10Mbps link.

I think a lot of modern households might find that constraining, even if a 10Gbps link was massive overkill.

There are two orders of magnitude in between of course :)

Personally I found that going back from a 1Gbps link to ~100Mbps has felt a little sluggish, particularly when downloading games. It's not a huge thing, but being able to get that new game pretty much now was great.

Never download software updates or games?

Band practice?

Edit to clarify: I cannot fathom live collaboration over the internet when even 15 ms lag is annoyingly noticeable (10 ms latency with a midi keyboard seems like the cutoff for me personally at least).

Video games. AAA titles, even not brand new ones (like Red Dead Redemption 2, Flight Simulator X) can run in the 100GB+ range.

Forget ISOs, those are only a few Gb each. LLMs, on the other hand, can easily go into triple digits at full fidelity.

Assuming they allow server use-cases without booting you off, I could see it being a boon for indie web services. Even fairly old (5-10 years) computers are already mind-bogglingly powerful (I've been playing with a toy myspace clone that can do ~15k profile pages rendered per second including db queries on an 8 year old computer with an i5. Throw caching nginx in front and it saturates my 1 Gbit adapter so I'm not sure what it can do), so if you had uncapped data transfer, you could e.g. try to start up a reddit competitor out of your home (legal risks of user-submitted content aside), and at least on the infrastructure side, could probably scale to 1-10M users on 10 Gbit/s. At least in the US, uplink capacity and legal risks seem like the biggest blockers for techies to be able to bootstrap services from home at more-or-less $0 operational cost and few thousand upfront cost.

My household of 5 adults maxes out a gigabit connection routinely. Streaming video, cloud based gaming, video calls, downloading game updates, backing things up to cloud storage. It adds up. I anticipate some might argue "that's not right" or "that's not possible, your network is wrong" - all I can say is that it happens and that it'd be less likely to happen with a 10gbps connection.

Large families.

Is that a Jab at my friends in Utah?

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