Comment by nilsbunger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nilsbunger | Hacker News Reader

We have google fiber at home - Stanford faculty homes have had it the past year, like Kansas City.

It's pretty cool. My record so far is to consume 400Mbps, using 4 computers downloading from about 10 places, all wired through gigabit switches.

In practice, though, it doesn't make much difference compared to a 30Mbps cable modem for most consumers:

most streaming video is < 10 Mbps;

large file downloads are generally limited by a server (or somewhere else in the network?), so it's hard to exceed 30-40Mbps download speed;

web browsing feels about the same, because it's limited by round trips of DNS and http requests, not by bandwidth (spdy will help here?);

many consumer-grade NAT boxes (linksys and friends) are capable of only 100-200 Mbps

The one place it's made a big difference so far is uploads. For example, backup to a cloud backup service (backblaze) often goes 50Mbps or higher. But I did have to try several backup services because some were limited on the server side to a few Mbps.

Running services from home could be a use case too, but then you get into reliability of power/etc, and the fact that so far you can't get a static IP address through google fiber.

So for now google fiber is mostly a fast cable modem from a "don't be evil" provider. I think the real disruption will come with new services that don't really exist yet. What kind of new things can be built if there's enough audience?

Most new home routers will route much more than 100-200 Mbps: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/router-charts/index.ph...

I have the Asus RT-N66U, which is rated on that chart for 730+ Mbps (of course, QoS will bring that down). Even the AirPort Extreme is rated for 400+ Mbps, but not QoS to speak of.

Some of those number are higher than I expected. Though, I am not sure it is a representative sample of what you will find on a store shelf.

Also, less than half of the list is above 200mbps, let alone "most" or "much more".

Array.prototype.map.call(document.querySelector('table.chart').querySelectorAll('td.number'), function(speed) { return parseFloat(speed.textContent) > 200 ? '>200' : '<=200'; }).reduce(function(previous, next) { previous[next] = (previous[next] || 0) + 1; return previous; }, {}) => { "<=200": 40, ">200": 37 }

Are downloads of torrents similarly limited or does the distributed nature allow for much higher speeds?

That's a great question! Downloading a 1GB file, I peaked at 65 Mbps download rate just now. It ramped up slowly over a period of a few minutes. I was connected to 58 of 60 peers to get that rate.

Sorry if this is obvious, but to clarify: is that around 8 MB/s? Or did you mean 65 MB/s?

Yes, 8 MBytes/sec, or 65 Mbits/sec.

What cloud backup provider did you settle on? Dropbox has very slow uploads for me, so I'm curious what else is out there that works.

Backblaze. But it's really cloud backup, not storage/sync like dropbox.

Backblaze has been a rock star for me over a year. It used to be very, very slow (My first backup took the better part of a week to get the "Initial" image in place) - but it was okay because their constant background backups only needed around 1 mbit to be effective (and, more importantly to me - invisible. Time Machine had a bad habit of ramping up my CPU).

But, recently, they must have made modifications to their system - because I routinely see backup in excess of 15 mbits/second. Highly recommended.

I'm finding spideroak superior to backblaze - it actually backs up my entire system rather than skipping /Library & /opt and allows me to backup external drives without needing to have them constantly plugged in. I think the pay-for-what-you-use model allows them to be a lot more flexible.

With an internet connection like that, CrashPlan might be more interesting. The fact that you could back up to a friends computer would be nifty to test.

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