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Comment by bsdetector | Hacker News Reader

> Wireless is way too slow

Way too slow for gigabit internet, not way too slow for what most people actually need.

T-Mobile LTE in one city had an average of 28 Mb/s, enough speed for Netflix 4k, and 95 Mb/s max observed speed. I hate to support cable monopoly arguments in any way, but really for most people 100 Mb/s is overkill.

Of course the cell network couldn't support everybody's internet use with the towers covering such a wide area as today, but wouldn't fiber to the neighborhood and then wireless within it make a lot more sense than running expensive cable to every individual house? It wouldn't be gigabit, but if I could use uncapped tethering (due to smaller tower coverage area) that would be fine with me. T-Mobile LTE is plenty fast enough for anything I use the internet for.

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That's an interesting perspective. I mean, today, it seems impossible to imagine any use case for > 100Mb/s. After all, it can stream 4k HD video!

But I think the very way we use computers is restricted by what is possible on commodity infrastructure. The fact that 100Mb/s is overkill for many customers is simply because the average speed is much lower, so nobody has bothered to develop applications that make use of that additional bandwidth. If 100Mb/s became something everyone had, I'm sure we would start to see applications that require such speeds to be useable. I don't know what those applications would be, but I'm sure they would come to exist.

A 56k modem is overkill if you're browsing a text-only internet, but it would be pretty hard to use the internet of today with one :).

In the 56k days people could imagine sending audio one day, and dream about video. If we can't imagine a compelling use requiring gigabit, maybe there just isn't one.

I'm hoping that some experts here could clue me in, because with wired U.S. average according to Akami at 11.5 Mb/s it seems that a neighborhood wireless would be plenty fast for at least the near future, and much cheaper to build and maintain. Having fiber direct to the house would be better of course, but to me it just doesn't seem worth the cost.

Lets assume you get 100 ms higher latency with wireless. And you make around 100 clicks per day. Over your lifetime, you would have lost one hour of your life because you used wireless! When you are on the death bed you will think about all the things you could have used that hour for instead!

Lets take it a step further and count everyone who is using wireless today, that would be millions of hours lost. Think about what those millions of hours could have been used for instead!

That hour might be nothing for you, but for the whole humanity, it's a lot!

Sure, but reading these slides already used up a good chunk of the hour applying its lessons would have saved me...

The 0.1s wait time is less important than interaction error that happen due to latency in a dynamic UI. Also, surely some network round trips are not due directly to user input, but are still important to coordinate with other events.

100ms of network latency wastes a lot more than 100ms of user time per click, because loading a web page involves multiple round trips to the server. In the case of HN's front page, it took about five.

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