Meanwhile, we've had residential 10Gbps fiber available since 2015 here in Chattanooga, TN - $299/month (no additional fees or taxes) with no contract.
Here in Switzerland you can get it for $50 [0] and in Sweden for $46 [1].
My favourite thing about it in Switzerland is that a bunch of different ISPs share the infrastructure, so I can get that speed from ~5 providers off the top of my head (Salt, Sunrise, Swisscom, iWay and Solnet).
It's so weird that the US has most of the world's largest tech companies but its technical infrastucture is such a mess.
It's a huge mess. The ISP I'm talking about is actually our power company as well, so they have internet service everywhere they provide power service. Thanks to telecom lobbying, some folks in Congress, and the courts, if you happen to live across the street from where they provide power, you can't get internet from them, even though they have the desire and capability to provide it to you.
Same here in Singapore. The fibre infrastructure was installed by a government company. 2 fibre pairs were installed to every household, and then different ISP's can sell services over it.
I’m really struggling to imagine how I’d ever get the value for money out of that. $299 is an extraordinary amount of money compared to the monthly fees I’ve ever had to pay for internet. I moved not so long ago and had to switch providers, getting 300mbps instead of 1Gbps. I can’t think of any real difference it’s made in my life.
Oh, I definitely understand. I'm using their $70/month 1Gbps tier and haven't been hurting for bandwidth, nor do I have any devices in my house that could leverage 10 Gbps at this point.
Because we have a single regulatory body that forces every ISP to share resources and to keep even prices (ARCEP). I think most of Europe works along those lines.
Network-wise, the US is a collection of local monopolies. It's feudal. Whoever has lordship over an area can squeeze the users dry while providing piss poor customer service.
If I lived in Chattanooga, I'd undoubtedly subscribe to this, but I honestly don't even know what the actual value is of this.
Pushing my download speed up above 900Mpbs is basically a novelty. The only thing I use that actually uses that speed in practice is my Gaming PC's Steam updates, everything else takes a herculean effort. Speed testing websites are basically reporting their own bandwidth restrictions to me.
Even with that bandwidth, torrents struggle to perform at those kinds of speeds, and everything else is pretty much going to max out around 100mbps.
I have no idea what I would actually do with 10x more bandwidth. I could theoretically fill an entire 16TB hard drive with stuff in one day, but there's not a compelling need for that, at least not for more than a single day.
Well its partly a chicken / egg issue, and large pipes start becoming relevant with larger households. Ex: 4-8 simultaneous 100mbit 4k video streams or similar while doing similar stuff.
Im guessing they’re doing the 10gbit because the other option is bad cable internet for more reasonable options.
Nope, they've got 1Gbps fiber for $70/month as well (that's what I've got). The 10 gig residential option was really just something they did because they could. The ISP is actually our power company, and after stringing up a ton of fiber to build a smart grid (which has been super nice in terms of reducing time without power), they realized they had a lot of extra capacity and could easily provide internet service with it.
My uneducated guess is 10gbps already supported by the ISPs fiber equipment so why not create a premium tier option and see who pays for it. Getting a customer to pay 5x the gigabit price is great for margins.
I love fast internet and pay for 1gbps fiber but struggle to come up with scenarios where I would ever come close to saturating that connection in the next 5-10 years. 4k Netflix is 25mbps. Estimates for 8k bitrate say it'll be around 100mbps. Maybe 10 years from all my household members will be hosting their hard drives in the cloud or something and 10g will offer marginal advantages but I just don't see it right now.
1 saturate a 1 Gb/s connection when downloading things from steam. That's one of the few cases where if the speed drops below 700 or so I get annoyed.
As you suggest, 10 Gb/s would be fun, but the time saved in practice would be quite minimal. I guess being able to play a game after 2 minutes instead of 6 would be nice.
Then again, I remember back in the late 90's when I got my first broadband connection. 10 Mb/s Ethernet connector installed in the wall of my apartment, I was amazed at the speed. I remember being shocked at how I could download a CD image (a Linux distribution, most likely) in only 20 minutes. It felt like the future had arrived.
Now, those speeds would mean several seconds to download a regular web page. I guess once a capability becomes available, you'll find a way to make use of it. I suspect that's true for 10 Gb/s internet as well.
Larger households is a really big point. For the past few months I often have 5 simultaneous zoom calls (3 kids in school, my wife and I working) along with someone watching Netflix (our 2 year old). It's not like that all day every day, but there's a window of about an hour every Wednesday morning where that happens. Gigabit fiber has made that a complete non-issue.
My favourite thing about it in Switzerland is that a bunch of different ISPs share the infrastructure, so I can get that speed from ~5 providers off the top of my head (Salt, Sunrise, Swisscom, iWay and Solnet).
It's so weird that the US has most of the world's largest tech companies but its technical infrastucture is such a mess.
[0]: https://fiber.salt.ch/en
[1]: https://bahnhof.se/