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Comment by loloquwowndueo | Hacker News Reader

Why do people need 2.5Gbps internet access or 1.7 Gbps on a home wifi network? What are folks doing at home?!?

It's nice to be able to do networked stuff with the network.

32GB isn't very big these days. In terms of cost, a decent cheeseburger costs more than a 32GB flash card does.

A few months ago I needed a friend to send me a 32GB file. This took over 8 hours to accomplish with his 10Mbps upstream. 8 hours! I felt like it was 1996 again and I was downloading Slackware disksets with a dialup modem.

We needed to set up a resumable way to get his computer to send that file to my computer, and be semi-formal about it because 8 hours presents a lot of time for stuff to break.

But if we had gigabit speeds, instead? We could have moved that file in less than 5 minutes. That'd have been no big deal, with no need to be formal at all: If a 5-minute file transfer dies for some reason, then it's simple enough to just start it over again.

A few things come to mind:

- Games (400GB for Ark, 235GB for Call of Duty, 190GB for God of War)

- LLMs (e.g. DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp at 690GB or Kimi-K2 at 1030GB unquantized)

- Blockchains (Bitcoin blockchain approaching 700GB)

- Deep learning datasets (1.1PB for Anna's Archive, 240TB for LAION-5B at low resolution)

- Backups

- Online video processing/storage

- Piracy (Torrenting)

Of course you can download those things on a slower connection, but I imagine that it would be a lot nicer if it went faster.

I have 1Gbit at home, but almost never reach those speeds when downloading games. It’s one of those cases where it makes sense (I want to play now!), but I’m under the impression the limit is upstream (at steam most likely), rather than on my connection. (I do get those speeds on speed tests, doesn’t seem to be my setup).

ISPs happily collaborate with and put speed test servers in privileged locations on their network so you will get higher speeds there even if the actual peering to the outside world is much slower.

As I was typing this it came to mind. Will test against one of my own servers one of these days to confirm.

You can try Fast.com (Netflix) or Cloudflare’s one which are explicitly designed to work around this by serving the test data from the same endpoints the serve actual customer data, so ISPs can’t cheat.

This still doesn’t guarantee however that you will achieve this speed to any random host on the internet - their pipe to Cloudflare/Netflix may very well be fat and optimized but it doesn’t guarantee their pipe to a random small hosting provider doesn’t go over a 56k modem somewhere (I jest.. but only a bit).

Given that whether you get 30mbit or 30gbit from Netflix won’t make a blind bit of difference it’s not that useful a test. It doesn’t do upload either as Netflix is all about consumption.

Test to where you want to exchange high speed traffic.

Fast.com does an upload speed test, but it's hidden behind the "Show more info" button.

I get full speed on steam downloads, even set the limit lower so youtube doesn't buffer.

Steam is tricky cause it has multiple potential bottlenecks. The steam cache, internet connection, decompression (i.e. cpu) and storage. Often hard to tell which limit you're hitting

I have 5 gigabit and usually get ~1.2 gbps, sometimes get up to ~2 gbps from Steam.

You might check what region Steam is downloading from (it's in settings -> Download or something similar). If it's selected poorly, you might do better by picking one yourself.

I get about 2Gbps max on Steam and Xbox on an 8Gbit connection. The limit could also be due to your disk drive while Steam is installing the downloaded files.

> 400GB for Ark

Ark is a strange case. It compresses very very well. Most of it ends up with compression ratios of around 80%.

> Total size on disk is 628.32 GiB and total download size is 171.42 GiB.

From SteamDB's summary of Ark's content depots.

Is the connection the bottleneck for 700GB?

To not bottleneck the mechanical hard drives in their NAS, or to download games at a reasonable speed.

Or even just work stuff, I've had to shift around several TB of 3D assets for my job while working from home.

My anecdata is that I can download a steam or Xbox game (100+GB) in a few minutes. Plus it's just fun. High number = better and all that.

This is like asking why would anyone need more than a standard 110v North American electrical outlet in their home? Why would you ever install a higher capacity 220v socket somewhere?

Because it's a utility and there's a wide world of use cases out there.

For electrical maybe someone wants to charge an electric car fully overnight, or use a welder in their garage. Or use some big appliance in their kitchen.

For Internet maybe they make videos, games or other types of data-heavy content and need to be able to upload and download it.

All the replies you get here are totally valid, but Ill throw in another one.

Why not? Life’s too short anyways, and playing around with tech is one of those things that bring me joy.

It is 2.5Gbps internet shared with everyone in the household. Once you start dividing by 4 or 5 people that number doesn't seems that impressive.

It wasn't that long ago "internet" at home is literally just one person using it.

Homelab or they are into big data set usage.

Or they seed large datasets for other researchers.

To transfer files? Like large virtual machines, huge video files. Backup their files quickly. To support a homelab to learn new skills. To stream uncompressed video. To download 300 GB monster games.

Some people can manage with slow network speeds at home, even though 100 Gbps single mode fiber is perfectly doable nowadays. And it's reasonable, because new SSDs do almost 120 Gbps.

1 Gbps made sense 20 years ago when single hard disks had similar performance. For some weird reason LAN speeds did not improve at the same rate as the disks did.

But then again, I guess many could also still manage with 100 Mbps connectivity at home. Still enough for 4k video, web browsing and most other "ordinary" use cases.

> For some weird reason LAN speeds did not improve at the same rate as the disks did.

When it comes to wired, sending data 15cm is a very different problem than sending it 100M reliably - that and consumer demand for >1Gbps wasn't there which made the consumer equipment expensive because no mass market to drive it down, M.2 entirely removes the cable.

I figured 10Gbps would be the standard by now (and was way off) and yet its not even the default on high end motherboards - 2.5Gbps is becoming a lot more common though.

Most software and CDNs also don't utilise fast connections properly. It's kind-of a chicken and egg situation where hardware doesn't improve because customers don't demand it because software and services can't handle it (and you can start from the beginning).

It is very slowly improving, but by far the fastest widely used services I've seen are a few gacha games and Steam both downloading their updates. Which is rather sad.

Windows Update is slow, macOS update is abysmally slow, both iOS and Android stores also bottleneck somewhere. Most cloud storage services are just as bad. Most of these can't even utilise half a gigabit efficiently.

> I figured 10Gbps would be the standard by now (and was way off) and yet its not even the default on high end motherboards - 2.5Gbps is becoming a lot more common though.

All the new MacBook Pros come with 64Gbps wired networking.

With an adapter you can also connect 100GbE, but that’s not very special.

100Gbps over the LAN is unlikely to do you much good because not only is it expensive to get that kind of bandwidth end-to-end over the internet but most OS’ network stacks and protocols (HTTPS/etc) are not efficient enough to take advantage of it (you will be bottlenecked by the CPU). So there is very little consumer and even business (outside of datacenters) demand for it because even just sticking a 100Gbps NIC and pipe in a consumer machine is unlikely to give you any more than 10Gbps anyway.

My ISP just offers 8Gbit to almost everyone, so why not. I don't really need it but it feels nice to know I won't get throttling while someone else is streaming or downloading something

Shuffle around RAW files if you are doing photography. These are 50-150MB files. A lot of them.

I can't comment on the internet, but high-bandwidth wifi helps with VR streaming quality.

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