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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

I have 1Gbps down, and the only application I've found to saturate it is downloads from USENET (and with that I need quite a few connections downloading different chunks simultaneously to achieve it).

I have never come remotely close to downloading anything else -- including games -- at 1Gbps.

The source side certainly has the available pipe, but most (all?) providers see little upside to allowing one client/connection to use that much bandwidth.

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Part of it is hardware too.

Only the newest routers do gigabit over wifi. If most of your devices are wireless, you'll need to make sure they all have wifi 6 or newer chips to use their full potential.

Even if upgrading your router is a one-time cost, it's still enough effort that most people won't bother.

This tracks. I recently upgraded from 100mbps to 500mbps (cable), and barely anything is different— even torrents bumped from 5MB/s to barely 10MB/s. And there's no wifi involved there, just a regular desktop on gigabit ethernet.

Same here. My ISP recently did a promo to try out 1G/1G for free for a few months. I decided not to buy it after the free trial and went back to my old 500/200 line instead of paying 40% more. Yeah, it takes a minute longer downloading the latest LLM from huggingface, so what.

Steam downloads easily saturate my 1 Gbs. Same for S3 transfers.

Steam downloads can easily max 1Gbps for me.

Steam and the ps5 store can fill out my 1 gigabits connection.

Steam can fill up much more

I'm getting my Steam games at 2Gbps, and I am suspecting that my aging ISP's "box" is to blame for the cap (didn't want to pay my ISP for the new box that officially supports 8Gbps symmetrical, and just got a SFP+ adapter for the old one). I pay 39€/M for what is supposed to go "up to" 8Gbps/500Mbps on that old box.

Games from Google Drive mirrors are coming at full speed too. Nice when dling that new Skyrim VR 90GB mod pack refresh

Steam used to max out my internet, but now its smarter about it and starts to decrypt/expand the download as its going instead of doing it in phases. This quickly maxes out my IOPS on even NVMe drives at only several hundred megabits for most games I've tried recently.

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