The Gigabit Age Is Upon Us | Hacker News Reader

The Gigabit Age Is Upon Us

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12 pointswillbarkis19 comments

Can home consumers actually utilize gigabit connections to any significant degree yet? You need a sending pipe that'll accommodate you in order to actually get what you're paying for. I've got a 60mbps pipe and rarely manage to saturate it outside of things like Steam downloads.

To put it another way, Netflix 4k streams only require 20mbps throughput. I'd have to be watching 4k streaming video on 3 devices concurrently to saturate my current connection; what on earth would you need to do to actually get your milage out of a pipe that's 17 times larger?

Probably. Imagine having children. Streaming (up and down), videochatting, gaming, torrenting, downloading patches and so on. They will not hit 1Gbit/s all the time but when everyone is on the net at once it will be nice to have some "room".

That, and, downloading GTA 5's 59 gigabyte installer in 12 minutes was nice... Or, when I was about to leave on a road trip & downloaded my entire itunes library in just a few moments. Lots of cases where insane speed is beautiful.

//moved to Chattanooga for gigabit($70 a month). Love it. :)

Those are definitely great cases, but they only apply when the upstream can actually give you data that fast. My question is more - are there enough upstreams providing pipes big enough that gigabit users can actually use what they're paying for on a regular basis?

I do have kids - 3 of them. They aren't torrenting age yet, but we certainly do more than our fair share of video streaming. Gaming is not bandwidth intensive. Downloading patches is, but that's not really sustained throughput.

A bigger pipe will certainly get used occasionally, but I can't help but think that the vast majority of that pipe will sit completely unused for a large percentage of the time you're paying for it. Torrenting is just about the only circumstance I can think of where you might actually get to fully utilize that pipe, specifically because you aren't bound to a single upstream, but you'd almost have to go looking for files large enough for that throughput to matter. An uncompressed blu-ray is what, 25GB, and that's still less than an hour to download on a 60mbit connection. Given that compression is a thing, it just seems like your chances to actually utilize it will be minimal at best.

The rest of the world is fast moving towards 1000mb/s internet meanwhile I'm sitting here in Sydney with my 'Ultra-fast' 6mbps ADSL. I can't even watch HD youtube properly and these amazing advances are going on well beyond my reach. Australia is quickly lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of technology and it needs to make serious roads toward correcting that if it wants to be taken seriously on a global stage. /rant

I think it's even worse that we _started_ moving towards gigabit (the NBN was going to announce gigabit service just after the last election) and then elected a government that's moving us _back_ to cable.

indeed, but sadly I won't even get cable. My area is already 'serviced' by cable according to NBN Co. and isn't due for a rollout until after the end of 2016 and even then the current cable where available is overloaded as is. Even if I can get hooked up to it it will likely not be an improvement.

I'm moving to Seattle, and impulsively ordered 1Gbps residential internet service "just because" (from CenturyLink - IIRC it's ~$110/mo).

I since realized that I had no idea what to do with a 1Gbps residential pipe, other than "download things really, really fast."

So, I Ask HN: does anyone have any ideas for interesting use cases for Gigabit home Internet?

UHD video streaming (and I don't mean the super compressed Netflix version of it).

http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warri...

This makes me envious. In the UK, Holy Mother State has determined that 2Mbps + nasty contention ratio + fair usage policy and/or usage cap = "broadband".

I hear you. In Canada, "broadband" is 1.5Mbps down and 640Kbps up. Hilarious.

The CRTC is about to review that, likely in early 2016 it will be at least 5Mbps down and ~1 up.

We (Northern Canada) are holding things back :)

Not just up north. I'm in the Maritimes and its the same here.

I mean our infrastructure up here is holding the CRTC back from upping the minimum requirements. It's going to take a massive investment to bring northern Canada up to those speeds, and the CRTC is going to pay for it.

I work for the telco up here....

That's the government definition, but are better plans available for reasonable cost?

A countryman of mine posted in reply to your comment that Canada defines broadband as fairly slow, by modern standards, but I get 28Mbps/1Mbps right now (over cable) and my daughter just ordered a 25/10 DSL package (from the same service provider; two different physical plant owners, same ISP over top). Both plans are reasonably priced, I think (at least compared to the big incumbents and to what we are used to :->).

28/1 is a crazy DL/UL ratio. It's probably beyond the point where the narrowness of the uplink slows downloads.

I wish the official broadband definitions included something about the uplink.

The official definition, at least the FCC one, addresses speed in both directions.

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