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Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

> but the US situation in 2026 is appalling.

1Gpbs symmetric is not 'appaling' come on now.

I guess I'm getting old, but I have to wonder what people are doing that they need more than a gigabit. I don't think I've ever been able to use more than about 50 mbit due to constraints on the other end.

You don’t really need it but it is nice when downloads are really fast. Though most services cap downloads at 2 - 3 Gbit/s.

> I guess I'm getting old, but I have to wonder what people are doing that they need more than a gigabit.

I have a hard time believing there is anything they can do to saturate 1 Gbps connection at home. It's probably just bragging rights on speed test reports, without any relevance to real usage.

I appreciated it for my Google Takeout download - they seemed to cap per file speed, so I could get multiple going. Getting it done quickly was important since google would force 2fa re-auth if you waited literally 30 seconds between files, ~80 4G files

Besides that, my two housemates streaming 4k while I'm downloading an iso can definitely hit the cap. The extra headroom is nice, versus just falling over

If you're downloading AI model files, which are tens or hundreds of gigabytes, or downloading large datasets to fine tune them, and then uploading them to various cloud providers, you start waiting around a lot. Uploading videos to be processed on a cloud GPU to produce gaussian splats and then you have to wait and download the results.

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