There's more to Internet than downloading data straight to disk.
Families can have multiple kids taking online classes while both parents are also working remotely. Many families have multiple devices per person that can be streaming, downloading, OR UPLOADING (commonly the aspect shortchanged in residential Internet) which, at times, can easily saturate a 1Gb connection.
We always need to advance because others are too, and services demand greater speeds in returb. It's a bit of a race, but no need to claim it's useless. We can do things now that were unthinkable before due to such advances.
>Families can have multiple kids taking online classes while both parents are also working remotely. Many families have multiple devices per person that can be streaming, downloading, OR UPLOADING (commonly the aspect shortchanged in residential Internet) which, at times, can easily saturate a 1Gb connection.
My 37mbps can do that for 2 people constantly working from home and most of the time on meetings.
My guess is that most people will just use whatever router is supplied by the ISP, and those are going the be the cheapest China has to offer. Even if it is Wifi6, that will max out at around 1Gbps. Some might run Ethernet to their office or consoles, but I'd guess that most will just use wifi. There's also the issue of the networking gear. Home users will just buy 1Gbps equipment, or slower, if that's what fits their price point.
For future use, and businesses it is nice to see speeds above 1Gbps being rolled out. For now though, promising 25Gbps to residential is easy marketing. The ISPs knows that it will barely be used.
20 kids x 25mbps streams each is still only half a gig. You are way off here. The only way you saturate a gig is if you download big games from Steam, etc. If each of your kid is doing that you would probably run into fair use limits and have to set up a central PC for catching downloads and stuff but that's still a niche use case.
> which, at times, can easily saturate a 1Gb connection.
The only thing that can saturate 1 Gb in practice in my experience are large downloads.
Video conferencing, streaming etc. uses well below 100 Mbps (even 4k Netflix seems to be 25 Mbit/s). You'd need dozens of such applications running at the same time to come even close to saturating Gbit.
This may change over time, but right now, there is very little need for going beyond 1 Gbps for households. And honestly, I think the change will take a long while, because 4k is still not ubiquitous, anything higher than that isn't much of a thing, and even the next step after 4k (assuming it needs 4x the bandwidth) will still be easily handled by a Gbit line even for large households.
A 100 GB game download taking 14 minutes with a saturated line is not going to be a reason for most people to pay for faster hardware all along the path (router, cabling, NICs, ...).
Replying to my own comment. My examples weren't the greatest as I was traveling while composing it.. I agree that my examples would not push a symmetric 1Gb connection to its limits.
I was trying more to make the point that folks were giving arbitrary examples like SSD speeds when there are other kinds of usage that have other limits or could potentially change with time.
If residential speeds only target the "average" case, that'll artificially slow advancement. Many places outside the US have much faster speeds than are available here and we should not invent reasons to slow the shift to faster access. At least it shifts the needle a little and puts additional pressure on the lazy ISPs that still offer 90s-era ADSL speeds.
My family of 6 would stream Netflix, game and I'd be pretty heavy handed myself all on my router tethered to my 4G connection while we were switching providers. We didn't notice anything surprisingly. Three was the provider at the time.
You may be off a bit. A gigabit is only around 125 megabytes a second. A low end consumer SSD is closer to a 550 megabytes second, or ~4 gigabits. A high-end NVMe SSD will get you 3 or 4 gigabytes a second. 30 to 40x a gigabit!
Grandma running pirated Word 2007 on an ancient dust-clogged Dell laptop that her grandson upgraded with a cheap 256GB Lite-On mSATA SSD stolen from a throwaway work computer is probably only getting 125MByte/sec and certainly lower than that due to the plethora of IE addons constantly writing to it.
I'm now imagining this ancient grandma writing 125 MB/s into her pirated text editor, just cranking out volume after volume of cheap detective and romance novels. Later, after her death, it is discovered that this lady was the ghostwriter behind all of the top 50 bestsellers of the last 30 years. She would write faster too, if it weren't for that crappy SSD her grandchildren set her up with.
Under ideal circumstances, yes. When say, torrenting, or anything else with non-ideal file access patterns real world speeds are not going to be nearly that high, especially on a consumer-grade drive.
Stress tests on consumer SSD's consistently show 300-500megabytes/s.
The whole point of an SSD is that it has ridiculously high available iops, so what you are saying literally does not make sense.
a consumer SSD will have about 50k iops at that 300-500megabyte/s . The access pattern will not practically matter at all until you saturate that or get close. The drive is effectively constant time until you hit the limits of the interface, or at least get somewhere near it. A consumer will never get near it.
So they can expect, and consistent testing shows, they will get 300-500 megabytes/s in real world conditions, and even harsh conditions.
I actually have no idea why you don't just say "yeah, i was wrong" and move on.
It's clear you are wrong about this - there is no data to support what you are saying.
It's also totally and completely orthogonal to a more rasonable argument - they don't care about the speed anyway.
IE arguing they don't have equipment that can saturate 1gbps is silly - they clearly do.
arguing they wouldn't care either way because the speed difference doesn't matter to them is more reasonable.
Yeah, I completely agree with you there! The average person doesn't need gigabit speeds. The only reason I even upgraded from 100 megabits to 300 is because it was literally 5 bucks more a month.
This was my experience when I had a gigabit connection. I could download games from steam as fast as my ssd would write it.
Which was pretty awesome, but I'm not often pushing that sort of bandwidth.
The counter argument being that without it being a commodity, we don't know what might be invented if it were. We could miss out on, or delay lots of really amazing innovations.
That’s not my experience at all. I had 10Gbps internet in Tokyo. In normal browsing there wasn’t much difference between using wifi which I normally did and connecting by 10Gbps Ethernet. But downloading on steam was one case where the difference was amazing, I could download a AAA game in 1-2 minutes instead of 10-20.
I find that Steam decompression pegs one core of my CPU and downloads get stuck at 550-600 mbps. It would take a lot less time if it didn't compress anything.
Even as a regular consumer I see the benefit. I buy a new game, and its typically something like 100GB. Gigabit internet is the difference between waiting 15 minutes and 1 hour to play my new game. This is not an uncommon use case and the difference is quite large.
Right - the popular sentiment on my smallish town Facebook group is people dropping their 300mbps cable since Spectrum is an awful company to deal with in favor of cell-based (T-mobile or Verizon) home service. 90%+ of people in most areas don't need internet any faster than Netflix requires, and nobody is running ethernet so WiFi speeds are going to be the limiting factor in internet speed for most everyone else.
I went from ~250Mbit to Gigabit recently. I don't notice it on my wireless clients at all, but it is really nice on my main PC, which is tied directly into the router via a good 'ole cable. I've seen actual downloads speeds flirting with 100MB/sec, which is really nice when downloading some of these massive 50GB+ games.
I'm a deep computer nerd, I play lots of games, with a family watching streaming on 2 to 4 devices regularly, I buy a decent amount of games, download terabytes per year...
I'm just fine with my 300 mbps connection. Even when it drops to 20 mbps occasionally it's not the worst experience.
I'm not sure what it is that is different about me than my peers.
I'm right there with you, as long as that 300 mbps connection is symmetrical, and the ISP is carrier neutral. I didn't know how big a deal neutrality was until I switched from Suddenlink to a small company called Vexus. Gigabytes of nightly backups went from hours to 5 minutes, and downloads from certain companies improved drastically.
Your SSD comment aside: not everyone lives alone; during the lockdown we had four people using the network simultaneously during the day, plus of course some of my other machines using the network. We have friends with three or four kids, which would have magnified that demand.
Gigabit can support ~25 simulatenous Blu-Ray streams (and that's at the full 40Mbit).
It wasn't all that long ago (~10 years) when the company I worked for had only 200Mbit to the internet, and that supported ~300 people pretty comfortably.
Since every consumer fiber plan is best effort, I'll get better speed by using faster plan even though rated speed isn't needed. I get about 700-200Mbps on my gigabit fiber for download. I'm fine with 1Gbps but 200Mbps is sometimes slower. Hopefully 2Gbps is constantly available on 10gigabit fiber.
An SSD nowdays has something like 3500 megabytes/second, a 1gbit connection can (roughly) provide at most 100 megabytes/second, so we are not even close to use SSD write speed at full capacity.
That being said, downloading from Steam is incredibly different with a gigabit bandwidth.
Families can have multiple kids taking online classes while both parents are also working remotely. Many families have multiple devices per person that can be streaming, downloading, OR UPLOADING (commonly the aspect shortchanged in residential Internet) which, at times, can easily saturate a 1Gb connection.
We always need to advance because others are too, and services demand greater speeds in returb. It's a bit of a race, but no need to claim it's useless. We can do things now that were unthinkable before due to such advances.