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Not certain I buy this argument - higher throughput tend to require more modern hardware throughout the whole chain, and modern hardware also tends to have better latency than old. So for most people, they will get improvement in both latency and throughput if they would get a gigabit fiber connection. But sure, if you are comparing chains of the same hardware generation, go for latency in most cases.

You're all using the same equipment, regardless of the tier you sign up for. The firmware in your modem or their router limits the maximum packet rate, but individual packets and small groups of packets are always traveling at gigabit speeds, regardless of the speed cap.

That difference in latency isn't even what matters; it's the latency from the various types of modems. With the direct connection of fiber providers, you can often get sub-millisecond latency from nearby collocations, and rarely do ISPs have more than a few milliseconds of latency.

With cable providers, DOCSIS adds ten to twenty milliseconds of latency. You'll get about double that latency With LTE providers and low-eath-orbit satellite providers that have nearby ground stations. With geosynchronous satellite providers, you'll get several hundred milliseconds of latencu.

A 50 Mbps fiber plan will get an order of magnitude lower latency than a gigabit plan from anyone else.

This is called being “confidently incorrect”. As mentioned above, I have those millisecond-class pings at 200x faster than that piddling 50Mbit pipe (for $60/month). There’s no imaginable advantage to getting a slower, more expensive connection.

I was just being unclear.

Everyone from your fiber provider is getting fiber-class latency, regardless of the plan's max speed. The fiber ISP in my area uses 10 gig ONTs for everyone, and limits each plan's speed with PPPoE. This is pretty common, and likely yours is doing the same.

On the other hand, everyone using the cable provider in my area, whether on their fastest or slowest plan, is getting the same tens of milliseconds of DOCSIS 3.1 latency, on a node that has tens to hundreds of gigabits of bandwidth but is using TDMA and FDMA to share it between a few hundred users.

My point is that the lowest-tier subscriber from your fiber ISP is getting magnitudes lower latency than the top-tier subscriber from my cable ISP. If either of the switch plans, but don't switch ISPs, they'll have the same latency.

> With cable providers, DOCSIS adds ten to twenty milliseconds of latency

Are you sure? I'm on cable (Xfinity) and ping to 1.1 is varies from 11 to 13 ms, and I see as low as 7.2 ms to some random Xfinity thing that is not at my home but on their network.

I've got an ancient DOCSIS modem, a Motorola MB7621, and my understanding is that newer modems have lower latency than mine.

I don't know about where you live, but by far the lowest latency option for me is symmetric gigabit. And my options jump from 200/20 to 1000/1000, and 200/20 was for sure not enough for everyone to stream and video chat at the same time.

Multiple video chats can saturate 20 Mbps up, but if they offered 200/200 it would be more than plenty. Them not offering reasonable plans in between a little to low and way too high doesn't mean that it couldn't exist, it just means that they aren't offering it, likely because they have paid your local government to prohibit any competition, allowing them to force a large portion of their customer base to use a more expensive plan than they need, because no one else is going to offer a reasonable one.

My wife and I occasionally work while we're visiting her parents. We get away with doing teams calls at the same time on a 15/15 wireless link. Congestion only starts if our son downloads something while watching YT, while we're on calls.

It surprised me, but it works. And despite my 1125/50 connection at home, it surprised me how easy it was to adapt to lower speeds.

That being said, given the option I'd say 200/20 is my preferred minimum.

Even if you don't _need_ gigabit speeds, in a world in which most fiber has already been laid down and running new fiber is cost-efficient, there is no reason why every home _shouldn't_ be gigabit capable.

Also, Netflix 4K streams at 15Mbps on average. Four phones streaming whatever plus someone or two playing a game is enough to mostly max out a 100 Mbps link. This is a real possibility in the rural settings that qualify for this bill. (Large families in large homes that are heavy TV viewers with nothing to do for miles on end.)

> how tech savvy someone is

> rare power users

I would expect a lot of overlap between these two groups! Extremely common things tech people do that benefit greatly from high-bandwidth connections:

- disk backup to the cloud

- use Docker

- have a household with multiple HD TVs (Netflix recommends 30Mbps per stream)

- software installs/updates as a brief interlude instead of an ordeal

Essentially, high-bandwidth connections let you use the Internet like it's functionally infinite instead of something rationed.

Saturating even a 100 megabit connection to a cloud provider gets really expensive, really fast. That's 45 gigabytes/hr. Only a subset of power users are going to have daily or even weekly sustained full-speed transfers of that size, and 100 Mbps is usually the bottom tier plan, from a US telco.

Even if you are doing that to initially back up your network or install Call of Duty, after the initial usage you're only making differential updates, unless something goes very wrong, which hopefully doesn't happen even once a month.

For some users, it may be worth an extra $1000/yr to get the gigabit plan instead of 100 megabit, so that a Call of Duty install could theoretically happen in tens minutes instead of an hour or two, but really it's going to take an hour for your computer to decompress and write the data. Everyone else paying that $1000/yr extra is just wasting their money.

Also, Netflix only uses 16 Mbps at most, for a 4K video which is only a small portion of their catalog and only available to their top-tier subscribers. The extra bandwidth is a recommendation to allow for other users to still use the network and also to account for a special case of high latency that used to occur when saturating the connection on the fastest plans some ISPs offered. Here's some good research into actual streaming usage: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/ (It's WSJ, but there's no paywall)

On top of that, the cheapest plans offered by most telecoms in the US are over 100 megabit, so you still get a guaranteed three 4K streams Netflix without issue, but realistically could pull off double that.

You're right -- saturating a 100Mbps connection is really hard. But I'm not talking about running servers from one's home. The goal isn't to saturate your connection for the month, it's to make it so that if your usage "wants" more bandwidth, it's there for you. I don't know about most people's usage, but I can say that Docker & NPM in particular benefit from a very fast connection.

> which hopefully doesn't happen even once a month.

This is the mindset I was referencing. Nobody thinks about how often their computer has to write to its local disk, and if you have a sufficiently fast Internet connection you can adopt the same carefree attitude towards Internet use.

> an extra $1000/yr

This is the disconnect. In my area, the price gap is much smaller, less than half that. The bigger consideration for us was going to a gig connection was also the only way to get a connection without a usage cap and therefore a predictable bill (Xfinity is the other provider).

Incidentally, it looks like the WSJ test used mobile devices like phones and tablets. AFAIK all the major streamers deliver lower-bandwidth content to those devices by default, so this is not the best test.

Gigabit is practically a requirement if you homelab

All other things equal, higher bandwidth links are inherently lower latency.

Propagation delay usually dominates latency, so it's generally not the biggest factor, but on a simple local network with two PCs and a switch, you can expect about 1ms latency with 100BASE-T, and 0.12ms latency with 1000BASE-T.

  | Component                                      | 100 Mb/s            | 1 Gb/s            |
  | ---------------------------------------------- | ------------------- | ----------------- |
  | Propagation (30 m)                             | ≈ 0.15 µs           | same              |
  | Two NIC serializations (TX + RX, 1 500 B each) | 2 × 120 µs = 240 µs | 2 × 12 µs = 24 µs |
  | Two switch serializations (store‑and‑forward)  | 2 × 120 µs = 240 µs | 24 µs             |
  | Processing in switch + NICs                    | \~10 µs             | \~10 µs           |
  | **One‑way latency**                            | **≈ 490 µs**        | **≈ 58 µs**       |
  | **Ping RTT** (×2)                              | **≈ 1 ms**          | **≈ 0.12 ms**     |

They're not sending out 100BASE-TX ONTs to lower-tier subscribers. You're all using the same hardware; they're just limiting the packet rate to match the plan.

Regardless, the latency difference between 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE‑T pales in comparison to the difference in modem speeds between different providers' network types.

Fiber providers with an ONT get LAN-like speeds, while cable providers' DOCSIS modems add tens of milliseconds of latency, LTE modems are similar to double that of DOCSIS, and satellite providers range from similar to LTE all the way up to hundreds of milliseconds of latency, depending on the orbit and if there are ground stations nearby.

Again, within any provider, you get the same latency with any the plan, but changing providers can have order-of-magnitude differences.

What had made you suppose fast means laggy? I upgraded to 10Gbit Internet because their fiber is cheaper than the 1Gbit connection. I get 3ms pings to Google, or 5ms on older IPv4.

Fast, low-latency, and cheap is a pretty great combo.

More so, there's diminishing returns above a reasonable speed, and below a reasonable amount of lag, and gigabit speeds are well past that point, but for many ISPs the lag is fixed and before that point.

Which is to say, every major telco offers faster speeds than the majority of their subscribers will ever use, often even on their bottom-teir plans, but a significant portion of ISPs have enough lag to affect their users, even on their top-tier plans.

If you're trying to push telcos toward offering a more useful product, don't set a goal for them to offer higher speeds, which are already high enough for the vast majority of customers, but instead push for low latency, which most telcos cannot provide even between the customer's equipment and the telco's equipment.

Fiber providers have excellent latency, and of course that's what you should get if it's an option, but many subscribers are stuck with telcos that use DOCSIS over a cable network or LTE over a cellular network, and nothing can be done to reduce the latency for current generations of those protocols, but there's no technical reason the protocols couldn't have lower latency, so pushing telcos toward offering lower latency could make it happen, creating an actual useful improvement.

There's no reason to artificially limit the speed. If your city has fibre, everyone can have gigabit internet.

There's no savings for the ISP to throttle your pipe.

Most ISPs are guaranteed a monopoly by the local government, so anything they can charge for, they will charge for, because there's no other option.

Many fiber ISPs will offer a 1 Gbps/1 Gbps standard plan and a cheaper plan e.g. 100 Mbps/100 Mbps. This allows customers to get fiber broadband even if they do not want to pay $70/mo.