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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Heh it's honestly wild to me anyone needs over a gig. My work has a one gig fiber line supporting hundreds of employees and usage generally remains below 10%.

The high expense of 10gig is, in part, because it isn't widely necessary and the people buying it are willing to pay extra.

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> The high expense of 10gig is, in part, because it isn't widely necessary and the people buying it are willing to pay extra.

I think the price has more to do with where you live and how the market is structured than how necessary it is. In Japan where there is competition between ISPs, I pay about $40/mo for 10Gbps.

Routers have also come down in price to where they are pretty affordable for consumers. I use a Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway Fiber [1] which has three 10Gbs ports (two SPF+, one 10GbE) for $279. A TP-Link router [2] with an upstream 10GbE port and 2.5GbE LAN ports and Wi-Fi 7 is about $140. 2.5 GbE NICs have become cheap and ubiquitous and could commonly be found on $150 mini pcs (before memory and SSD prices went crazy).

Yeah it's more than more than most people need, but I definitely appreciate having the increased speed when downloading 50GB games, uploading 200GB files to YouTube, or backing up files to the cloud. I've probably never maxed out the full 10Gbps, but exceeding 1Gbps is pretty easy in relatively common use cases.

[1] https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cloud-gateways-compact/c...

[2] https://amzn.asia/d/03EKpC8E

And if you don't need a router, you can get 10gbit ports for much cheaper than that. The Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S gives you one copper 1gbit port, four 10gbit-capable SFP+ cages, and is ~150USD [0]. Their whole lineup of switches with SFP+ ports can seen here [1].

[0] <https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in>

[1] <https://mikrotik.com/products/group/switches?f[0]=s%3Ac&f[1]...>

I put 5Gbit internet into my home (fiber) to build my startup. I'm processing terabytes of data. I have over 100TB of storage in my basement. I can regularly saturate my internet connection. That said, I remember well when a 1Gbit connection provided enough bandwidth for a 500-person call center for daily workloads (back about 10 years ago).

That puts you in an extreme minority, even amongst enterprise businesses. Many medium sized enterprises have storage that looks like "a couple dozen TB total" for hundreds of staff.

Having 100 TB of storage in your home basement is an even more extreme minority than that. ;)

A gigabit connection is more than enough for a 500-person call center today.

Much works on 10/100 if you wanna know the truth about it - but it is really nice to hit full speeds when copying terabytes around.

Agreed. We had IP phones with 100 Mbps switches in between most of our computers and the rest of the network for a long time and very few people noticed. It'd only really be when I was installing a system upgrade or something, and I'd be like "man, it'd be nice if this didn't take an extra two minutes". For normal web access, 100 Mbps and 1000 Gbps aren't really discernable, until you're downloading large files. A lot of 4K streaming videos though, you'll start to feel it quite a bit faster.

And then hilariously, once you go above a gig, the reality is most sites won't serve them to you any faster than that anyways.

I found the nicest thing about fiber is I can hit over a gb/s uploading, which is often much more critical-path for whatever I’m doing than a download.

If that 500-person call center is a BPO, they'd have trouble with today's data-heavy workloads. I do agree, though. I'm in an extreme minority when it comes to this much bandwidth in my home.

Off topic (sorry). Interested to know what your startup is?

I appreciate the interest, but it's not public yet.

Depends a lot on your work type and your prior exposure. If you only work "locally" and upload/download rarely, you may be way less demanding of your network than if you actually do distributed work with remote storage, high-bandwidth communicating tasks, etc.

Over 20 years ago, I was used to having 1g LAN for basic workstations and laptops in an office setting and probably 10-20g uplink from the building (shared by hundreds of staff). I also used 1g at home for my very small LAN between laptop, desktop, and SAN functions. But, my home ISP links were often terrible, such as 128k ADSL or even just a tethered GPRS phone at some points.

You end up with entirely different work styles when you have these different resource constraints.

1Gb Internet service seems low these days, much less 1Gb LAN. I have 3Gb Google Fiber service and actually get 2+ for individual downloads from some internet services like Steam. Even at 2Gb it's annoying to wait tens of minutes for 100+ GiB games to download. If I go on vacation I come home with 10s of GiBs of photos and videos on multiple devices that start syncing with cloud storage.

During the day I need to pull large data files from the work VPN so it's nice that that can happen at full speed even when Steam and movie streaming are also at full throttle. Combine that with backups and moving various files back and forth to my NAS and I'm very happy to have 10Gb local wiring.

This is one of those things where I just have to express that a lot of the HN crowd is entirely divorced from the reality the rest of the world experiences. ;)

Nearly nobody has multigig anything in the home, a probably surprisingly large percentage of business networking is 1gig LAN or less. And most people would not notice the difference if they did.

I am glad it works for you, but everyone else most certainly doesn't need it. (Yet.)

Personally, I do try for mostly gigabit in my home, because I do selfhost, but I have a ~800 Mbps download service (200 Mbps upload, it's asymmetric) that was only 500 Mbps when I signed up. And to be honest most of my patch cables are CAT5e because I'm cheap. I do make sure to run CAT6 through walls though because I don't want to ever have to do it again.

Also, I used to have Astound, and I feel so much sympathy for Google Fiber customers, you have no idea what's coming. If you thought Google had a reputation for bad customer service... just wait!

I disagree. I pay $120 a month for 5Gbps symmetric connection. I could upgrade that to 10Gbps for 2x, but there is no reason at this point. Even the local max from the cable company is more than 1Gbps, 1.2Gbps down / ~300Mbps up for around $80. Everything is streaming now. I work from home, on video calls. My better half will be watching something the on AppleTV streaming, the kid will be doing the same. I have Backblaze running to do backups to the cloud. 3 different laptops that will run TimeMachine backups to the NAS. The AppleTVs also have the Infuse app on them to stream local video files from the NAS. The security cameras are a constant 60Mpbs 24/7/365 to the NVR. The laptops can push a gig wireless and 2.5Gbps when plugged into the Thunderbolt docks. It is not clear that I need 10Gbps everywhere, but it has its uses. The NAS is at 10G. The link from the main switch to the router is 10G. The 3 APs in the house are at 2.5G and the 2 outside are at 1G. There was a noticeable difference when after I right sized the shared links paths up from 1G. When I say noticeable it both perceived and measured. I used to work doing switch bring up and competitive testing so I have a pretty good idea how this all comes together. Given that a reasonably cheap set of APs can now handle clients at above 1G and internet speeds in some areas being above 1G, moving to at least 2.5G in places is useful and not divorced from reality. I am in tech, but I have help my not tech friends upgrade APs, et.al. for their normal everyday home use cases and they have all been quite happy with the change.

Not being divorced from reality is the only reason I have not dropped $5K on the new Dream Machine Beast that was just released and have not swapped out my Enterprise 48 PoE (1st gen.) for the newest version that has 12 10G-BaseT ports.

I have it more for the fast nas access and being able to treat nas disks as more or less the same performance as if they were directly sata in my machine. Significantly less so about the external network aspect.

It doesn’t have to be expensive.

You can hook up a few key components cheaply and 10gb pci cards are something like $20.

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