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Comment by godzillabrennus | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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