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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

I am struggling to see a use case for more than 1gb up and down. Which I have with Fios right now.

Very few things seem to go above 100mb (hard wired). The single exception I have seen is my Xbox which sometimes gets up to 500 when downloading a game.

I guess if you have a big family and a lot of things are downloading or streaming at once, but are people really hitting a limit. Even Netflix’s recommendations are super low.

It just seems like we have some pushes for these crazy speeds(maybe for marketing or increments) when the reality is the speeds to you will never utilize it.

I feel like I am missing something for how you could possibly justify this in your home.

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I think it makes sense for offices where there are more people doing more things.

It is expensive to use more than 1Gbps. Need router that can do 2.5GBps or 10GBps. For business have separate access points, need switches and APs that can do 2.5Gbps.

That I agree with, I guess I kinda always figured that businesses could already get internet at higher speed / bandwidth. Otherwise many offices would be abysmal.

The use cases might lag behind the infra. All the services we use today are designed around the constraint of lopsided upload/download bandwidth on broadband. If you build it, it will come.

I get what you are saying, but Fios launched their 1gb internet in 2017 and it feels like most services have been stuck at their specific speed since then.

I was curious, so I just went to download the Windows 11 ISO from Microsoft. That is capping out at about 70 mbps. Downloading an almost 7gb file in 2 minutes.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying "oh we don't need this speed". But clearly things have not been changing. We have been past my current download speed from Microsoft being a minimum for a while.

Try Steam

I just tried it and it is currently at about 918, which yeah it is high and using a lot of the available speed.

I mentioned Xbox getting to 500, so yeah there are some that are. But you're not downloading a game every day, at least not ones that are 50gb and won't just finish very quickly.

So that is 2 things that actually seem to utilize the speed that I can get, but it doesn't seem like the rest of the internet is anywhere near this capability and hasn't really been changing much.

An era of uncompressed 4K?

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