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Comment by ExoticPearTree | Hacker News Reader

Oversubcription is the norm for residential customers. And it makes sense in the way that you don’t download at max speed 24/7 content from the internet and you don’t upload either. The usage tends to be: access an article/picture, then read/watch, rinse and repeat. So for those few seconds/minutes you don’t use the internet connection.

When people watch a movie on Prime/Hulu/Netflix, sure, you have constant usage, but 4K streaming is less then 20Mbps…

Most people never use the full amount of even the lowest guaranteed availabke bandwidth per customer.

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Game downloads can be tens of GiB per day, and are only growing. Multiple 4K streams can add up. I wouldn't be surprised if folks are saturating links during prime time hours.

As is the risk of over subscription. However, most game services tend to schedule their downloads in the middle of the night, and video stream is very "bursty", and downloads chunks of data every few seconds.

Also, with people/services moving to AV1 encoding, we're already seeing improvements in efficiencies in regards to bandwidth.

Disclaimer: Former YouTube Serving Engineer

> However, most game services tend to schedule their downloads in the middle of the night

Except that usually doesn't matter because almost all game updates are released slight before prime time (or on prime time) so players can enjoy it when they get home! (I guess this only applies to multiplayer games, but that's a MAJOR part of the industry nowadays).

I would guess about 10% of an ISPs customers are gamers. Maybe lower. Again game updates are not that big, compared to your connection, so most of the day your connection is idle

Do most people game? Or actually stream 4K?

If you look at households, I'd say a significant minority do both.

Yeah.. they are not.. even tens of GiB per day is not a lot compared to your connections 1000gb/s. Netflix 4k stream is not the norm, and still only about 20mb/s so you would need to be running 50 4k streams, and even then, chances are you neighbours out of the house, or flipping instagram, so the bandwith is available..

Btw netflix did colocate with isps at one point, they might still do.

> Multiple 4K streams can add up.

Not really at these scales. Back of the envelope calculation:

A Netflix 4k video stream is 15 Mbps.

The article states the most common Swiss deployment is 10Gbps shared between 32 customers. 10Gbps is about 600 of those Netflix 4k streams, 20x more than the number of customers sharing that bandwidth.

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