[alexkiritz]

Verizon sold most of its landline business to Frontier over the past decade. While the few remaining Verizon FiOS customers got upgraded to gigabit, the Frontier FiOS customers were left with the old technology. Our Frontier contract just expired and we’re upgrading from 150 mbps to 500 mbps for about $5 more tomorrow. But I’m not optimistic about the speed. I tried paying $150/mo for the Frontier 500 mbps package two years ago and downloads never came close to that speed, the only thing that did were speed tests. Hopefully they’ve optimized more.

The saddest part is that the sales rep insisted that we’d need a modem, I’m sure because the majority of their service areas have been left on DSL.

[kgwxd]

Don't most servers throttle how much bandwidth outbound traffic gets? I never expect to get full speed downloading a random file. Even a super popular torrent might not have enough peers to reach full potential before it's done downloading.

[alexkiritz]

I remember never getting more than a fraction of the speed. Like maybe 200 mbps max on a 500 mbps connection when downloading a file. I assumed with the number of people with gigabit connections two years ago I’d have at least run into a few servers that didn’t throttle that low.

[lonelappde]

Those servers have more than one user, perhaps.

[manigandham]

Very few websites are going to serve anything with that much bandwidth for a single connection. You’re limited by their upload.

Try a few 4K YouTube videos and see what happens.

[lonelappde]

What are the uses for downloads beyond 150mbs? 4k video and stadia? Sharing one connection between multiple users for pricing arbitrage?

[alexkiritz]

Downloading and uploading large files more quickly.

[jotm]

If Speedtests come close, what are you downloading? You could be limited by the servers. Try a few torrents maybe? But then the modem they provide might not be able to handle that many connections. I can only get full speed with my own router running Openwrt.