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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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