- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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What a dumb take.
I make full use of my gigabit broadband (in both the places I have it - Bucharest and Bangkok), so there very much is a “point”. I’m not going to bother enumerating all the ways I use it though, because the response will just be “ohhhh, but normal users don’t do that”. But exceptions are normal - the mistake being made here is assuming that you represent the whole human race just because you don’t have a need for something.
Personally I think sanitary towels are useless, because I’ve never needed one and indeed the majority^* of the population don’t need them…
This is just a cope post; “gigabit broadband is so fucking expensive in the UK I’m trying to justify it not being necessary”. My gigabit fibre in Bucharest costs about 8eur/month, in Bangkok 15eur/month. I suspect if broadband in the UK were reasonably priced, this blog post would never have been conceived…
^* before you argue, remember (pre-)puberty and menopause are things.
I kind-of agree, however there’s absolutely a lot of benefits in having low-latency Internet. Given the choice between, say, 500Mb/s cable and 50Mb/s FTTP I’d go for the latter any day, but the reality is that most people who are on FTTP will just go for the faster options because they’re cheap and readily available.
While I agree that there is no real use for gigabit for the average person, I disagree that rolling out gigabit everywhere is pointless.
For anyone who wants to use the internet for more than the consumption of content, the old upload speeds were a significant barrier. Gigabit, and especially gigabit upload speeds largely removed those barriers.
Symmetric gigabit in every home has taken away a bottleneck for people who want to, for example, run a bandwidth intensive internet business from their home. It provides people with opportunities they might otherwise not get.
Symmetric gigabit is this a thing, tho? Usually consumer level broadband can be huge download, but meekly upload no matter the tech used because they’d like to sell you more expensive options. That said I’d benefit greatly with it. And agree with you (and partially OP) that it’s not for everybody. But those of us who need it, it’d be awesome.
I have 2 gig symmetric fiber and it costs $70 a month.
Speed tests confirmed that I’m actually getting 2 up 1.8 down consistently.
I have my whole house wired with cat 5e and it’s pretty nice.
Same, my ISP offers 8gb symmetrical but it’s basically their business plan for like $500 a month. I was able to max out my NVME drive downloading games though on the 2gb plan.
In the Netherlands symmetric fiber is the standard. I don’t think any company that offers fiber offers less than symmetric speeds
I have 1000 down / 1000 up personally.
They offer plans ranging from 100 / 100 to 8000 / 8000 at my address.The only company that doesn’t offer symmetric is Ziggo, because they made the (wrong) bet that they didn’t need to invest in fiber. They only offer up to 1000 / 50 over coax.
That’s as it should be. Lucky you. I’m with A1 (Vodaphone, 2nd biggest Slovene operator) which offers 1000/100 by default without an option to upgrade. Perhaps one can get faster speeds, but then it should get it as company at company price. The biggest one (just checked) offers 1000/300 with an option to upgrade. Perhaps I should check it out…
1000/300 sounds like coax to me. That is the exact theoretical speed Ziggo could deliver if they upgraded their network to DOCSIS 3.1… But ofc upgrading is expensive, so they don’t do it.
I’m with Odido myself. That is a rebrand of the Dutch branch of T-Mobile.
Quite happy with their service generally. The mechanics had no idea what they were doing when connecting everything up, but once it was working it all worked flawlessly.It’s not coax, just the speed is. But you can upgrade it, they say. We have a pretty good fiber coverage in Slovenia.
It is, in locations with consumer fiber. Had it at the last place I lived, and hands down it was the hardest thing to give up when we moved.
I have fiber in my basement and could book gbit. Upstream is still nerfed, currently I have 250mbits down, 50 up
Edit: disregard that, just checked with my ISP and apparently I have an old plan, and could book 1 gig symmetric. For thrice the cost, though
Cool, I wish we had that in Slovenia. Currently on 1000/100 fiber. 🥹
Yes, it is, but with fiber. I have 1 gig up and down through my county’s public fiber network, with a future option to expand up to 2.5 gig symmetric.
Technically it is with fiber, what operator offers you is another story. I’m glad for you, I wish I had the same option. If you don’t mind, what country and price?
I’m in Western Washington State in the US, I pay $65/mo.
On my previous coax connection upload was severely limited, even if download went up to gigabit. Now that we have fibre we can get 1 gig up and down.
I’m meant to be getting it this summer when they finish building around here. Very much looking forward to not having that bottleneck at the edge of my local network.
I know it is a bit churlish to complain that people haven’t read the post, but I literally say in it:
To be clear, I think it is a great thing that the UK Government is pushing ISPs to deploy gigabit everywhere. It isn’t at all useful now, but will probably be crucial in the future.
they just disproved your point
I have to move very large (5 GB or larger) files around over the internet quite often. I am thankful to the 99% of people who are buying gigabit broadband despite absolutely not needing it for making it cheap and convenient for me.
Yeah, OK.
Who does this guy work for? Comcast?
It’s not gigabit if you’ve got 110 Mbit/s upstream.
I want gigabyte internet
This whole blog post is moronic, if you don’t need it, buy a smaller package.
For me the extra price is peanuts, and it’s absolutely amazing to be able to play a new game minutes after I bought it instead of hours.Before we moved we didn’t have fiber, and downloading a game could take so long that I would have to wait until the next day to play it after starting to install it.
This also means that I can uninstall games I don’t use without worrying if I might want to play it later, this spares me from needing massive storage.
I also prefer to preload media to watch on our media center/TV, and it’s nice to be able to have a movie ready in a matter of a couple of minutes.
if you don’t need it, buy a smaller package.
if that were only possible here. i’d love to pay 10 percent of my bill for 10 percent of the speed. that’d be $10 for 50mbps. the cable company ‘discontinues’ slower speeds, calls it a ‘free’ upgrade (but you don’t actually get it unless you know about it and call in and navigate their bullshit in order to actually get it ‘free’), then raises rates anyway (even on those that did not ‘upgrade’). every. single. year. the only other provider is the telephone company. needless to say, they’re even worse.
i’d love to pay 10 percent of my bill for 10 percent
That’s not how it works, you generally pay 20% less for half the speed. Because speed is not the main price factor anymore. The logistics and cabling are.
I we didn’t have 500 Mbit and above, you’d probably have to pay the same for 100 Mbit as we do for 1 Gbit today.The price is in the cabling, maintenance and support. And none of those change much from having higher speeds.
city power here charges households $10 a month for that, the infrastructure and ‘account servicing’; and bill usage at cost. electric distribution costs a hell of a lot more than coax. so make that hypothetical bill $20, then. better paying $20 for what you’ll use and need than $100 for wasted service. it costs the big providers a few pennies per mbps to provide unthrottled, uncapped wireline broadband in the u.s., your bill is almost entirely profit for them.
No that’s not true, there is actually competition here and a very transparent market.
30 years ago when 2 Mbit/s was relatively new here, ADSL on existing phone lines had a price of 69,- €. (cheapest provider at the time)
Even without accounting for inflation, the price now is cheaper for 1 Gigabit, despite the old ADSL was based on existing cables! And 1 Gbit obviously is on fibre optic cables made specifically for internet connection.The cost of establishing fiber networks was expensive, and it is only recently that some of the companies are turning decent profits, and I think most of the profit is on selling TV packs and extra services like cloud storage and virus protection. My internet bill has about 5 points of extra services that all have a nice round zero on them. 😋
I have made the measurements, and at 500 Mbit/s I actually got a bit more than 5x what I had at 100 Mbit/s. Actually my 500 Mbit connection ran as 550, because the rated speed here is the guaranteed speed of the connection. So the only limitation is the server at the other end.
It is true however that 1 Gbit/s didn’t quite double the 500 Mbit/s speed, Actual measured facts beat speculation.
But your examples of steeply diminishing returns are not true.
Tbh, I don’t think the post is bad at all. If you have special high-bandwidth use cases that require massive speed you know that already and then the article isn’t for you.
If you say you “didn’t have fiber” I’m guessing you were on 50MBit VDSL? Then, of course, switching to gigabit makes sense.
In the blog post the author explicitly doesn’t say “Go get VDSL”, but they compare Gigabit with 500MBit. That’s not nearly that much of a difference, you’ll still be able to play a new game minutes after you bought it, but just twice as many minutes. If that at all, because if you have wifi in your home, it will likely limit your bandwidth to less than 500MBit in real use anyway.
The main point of the post is to show whether a regular user really benefits from Gigabit, and no, they don’t. Their netflix stream will not improve when going from a few hundred MBit to a Gigabit. Neither will most of their experience.
If you are lucky enough to live in a place where Gigabit costs nothing, sure, might as well. The only provider who serves Gigabit to my home wants €65 per month for that, €780 per year. That’s a lot of money for something that maybe saves me a few minutes once or twice a month.
Where I am, I can pay for gigabit duplex or 500Mbps cable. The issue is that the upload speed on the cable circuit is only 30Mbps and I have multiple people streaming from my Plex server, playing games on servers I run, or I might be checking my security cameras while I’m out and about. The only time 300Mbps isn’t enough for me is on big files from beefy CDNs like Steam, but 30Mbps gets constraining pretty quick.
they compare Gigabit with 500MBit. That’s not nearly that much of a difference
Not much of a difference in price either in most places. usually it’s like 10-20% extra to double the speed.
The main point of the post is to show whether a regular user really benefits from Gigabit, and no, they don’t.
This is true, but to claim there is no point is false, saying that for most 500 Mbit/s is better value would be a way better headline IMO, heck most people will do fine with 100 Mbit/s.
We pay €58 for 1 Gigabit, and I think 500 Mbit is €49 if I recall correctly, so the difference is not a lot.
Of course it also matters if you are just a single person or a family of more people.PS:
There was a use I forgot to mention, and that is when upgrading my OS, I use a rolling release distro of Linux, and I have quite frequent updates, most are small and finish in a matter of seconds, and even the biggest updates can usually finish within a couple of minutes. This is quite nice too.Anyways of course lower speeds can be better value depending on the use case, but for us the cost of higher speed is negligible, and it’s nice for families not to be slowed down just because someone is using a bit of bandwidth.
A relevant part is that double the speed doesn’t save the same time.
So e.g. if a download takes 100 minutes on 10MBit, you save 50 minutes by doubling the speed.
The same download would take 10 minutes on 100MBit, doubling the bandwidth would only save 5 minutes.
And on 500MBit it’s two minutes, so doubling the bandwidth only saves one minute.
We are deep into diminishing returns here.
€58 vs €49 means an extra €108 per year. That’s quite a sum.
In my case going from the 150Mbit/s I have to gigabit would cost me €35 extra per month, €420 a year, yeah, that’s not worth it to speed up some background downloads.
I’m on Fedora, updates are frequent as well, but since they download in the background I hardly care about the speed. I see there’s a new update, so I start the download in the beginning of the day. It finishes within half an hour or an hour or so, while I continue doing my stuff, and in the evening when I’m done I run the actual update if it requires a reboot.
And on 500MBit it’s two minutes, so doubling the bandwidth only saves one minute.
This is simply not true, of course it isn’t entirely linear, but for big downloads you actually get pretty close to the full benefit of the speed, when the servers can handle it.
When the speed goes up, latency also goes down, making response times faster too.Sounds a lot like your Fedora update is single threaded, which is a huge limitation. I start updates manually and monitor the whole process, and the whole process is finished in a couple of minutes for a big update. A single package can be literally less than 5 seconds for download, integrity check and installation. Firefox is among the most frequent single package updates, and that generally takes 5-6 seconds.
What is not true?
Do the math yourself, it’s only grade school level:
A download takes 100 minutes at 10Mbit. How long does it take at 20Mbit and how many minutes are saved?
The same download takes 2 minutes at 500Mbit. How long does it take at 1000Mbit and how many minutes are saved?
This calculation doesn’t even take into consideration that most servers don’t allow for gigabit downloads and that most wifi connections also don’t allow for gigabit.
and, not to forget, just because you have 1gbps or faster download available, doesn’t mean the other end and the pipes in between can deliver at that rate.
For me, the jump from 8 megabit (yes, 8) to 1000 megabit is a huge difference, and has become vital to my work flow.
So, ruling it out entirely is out of the question for me. It might be overkill to some, but definitely not for me.
I’ve just reinstalled Bazzite and about 10 games between Steam, GOG and Epic Store.
There absolutely is a point.
Also, if there are several people in the house using the internet at the same time (streaming, downloading, etc) the point becomes even clearer.
And thanks to DIGI, I pay €20/month for a 1 gigabit connection and 2 cellphones with unlimited data.
But how often do you do that? And do you need all 10 games instantly available on your PC?
I recently setup a new laptop on Fedora on a 150MBit connection. That was around 10min for downloading Fedora, 20min for installing it, another 20min or so for setting up Steam and Heroic launcher (for GOG, Epic and Amazon Games). I started the first game download on Steam while I was setting up Heroic and it was done downloading before I was done with Heroic.
Since I can only play one game at the time, I could already start playing and let the rest of my library download in the background.
A faster internet connection would have just shaved off a few minutes from the initial 10min downloading time for Fedora, but I don’t know how fast the server even lets me download the image.
I mean, if you pay €20 for gigabit, sure, why not. The only network provider who serves gigabit at my home wants €65 per month for it compared to the €30 I pay right now. That’s €420 per year extra, and there’s really no point in paying that to save a few minutes every few months or so.
And do you need all 10 games instantly available on your PC?
if it takes multiple hours, streaming services and video calls could be lagging while the download is going. it becomes more meaningful when you are not living alone
That’s where traffic priorisation comes in. If your router is setup in a somewhat reasonable way it gives priority to smaller data streams to avoid just that.
most routers are way too underpowered for that. you are happy if yours has 128 MB of RAM and 64 MB storage, and then you can imagine how is it with their CPU.
Actually, no. That’s a very simple basic functionality. A router needs to identify the streams (identified by the 5-tuple of source and destination IP and port and the protocol) to work at all. It also needs to prioritise traffic to work at all.
Combining both features is trivial even on 128mb RAM, and it’s implemented in most routers.
I’ve just reinstalled Bazzite and about 10 games between Steam, GOG and Epic Store
But why do you need 10 at once? I’d download the one I want to play first and then the ones I like to play later in the background.
Because I have the storage realestate for it and I’d rather download it all now, so I don’t have to do it later.
And downloading even one, when it’s large dozens of GB, a gigabit connection makes a difference.
I actually agree with this. The lowest speed my fiber ISP offers is symmetrical 300 by 300 unless you qualify as a low-income individual and then you can get a 100 by 100 plan for cheaper than that.
Personally, I think that’s bullshit, and that anybody who wants to have the 100x100 plan should be able to have it without having to go through any kind of qualification step.
what are you agreeing with? this is an entirely different thing.
100x100 would honestly be an upgrade for me at 400x40. I’m so tired of my shitty upload speeds.
A gigabit connection means you can torrent your Linux ISOs in seconds. If it’s a symmetric connection, you can also backup your files up to the cloud without having to ship hard drives.
I get that there’s a relatively distilled Linux user base here in the Fediverse, but what percentage of that group really needs ISOs that quickly, and presumably, often?
Is this to suggest that we’d try more distros if we didn’t have to weigh the time needed to download them?
The cloud idea is better. It would be nice to be able to essentially quicksave to off-site before logging off for an extended period, or even periodically.
On the other hand, how many gigabytes does the average person need to back up on a regular basis? Even power users don’t generate that much data, and I’d expect that they’d have some kind of rolling backup that does files at a time.
We’re talking about “Linux ISOs” here. They often use the same distributed delivery networks as Linux ISOs to reduce the need for expensive file servers and prevent single points of failure.
I work from home and sometimes have large file transfers, and the rest of the house is also using it at the same time. 1gig wasn’t necessary but it is appreciated.
There are many houses that don’t need it and don’t even come close to justifing the purchase, but faster internet and utility infrastructure upgrades are always a good thing.
I’ve been saying this for years. For 95% of the population, 100Mbps is overkill. The same goes for flagship mobile devices, the entry level model is more than most people need.
Where I live, 1Gbps symmetric is usually the standatd package around 40$/month, with 2.5, 10 and up to 25 available. Maybe ypu can find 100 or 500Mbps, but it’s only marginally cheaper (or even more expensive).
Do most people need it? Probably not though.
I didn’t read the article but I like to point out to people that ads are coming in at a whopping 4k, sometimes shitty sites even deliver several resolutions of the same ad. They even send over ridiculously high quality audio that has not been compressed. Some sites even jam pack hundreds of these ads per minute on each page you scroll to. It’s even worse on sites that have infinite scroll.
My point being… the internet is broken, block as many ads as you can, fuck Google and fuck Comcast.
