[chrsig]

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.

[johnwalkr]

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.

[zbrozek]

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.

[mlyle]

Yup, about the same for me (maybe slightly faster).

Sometimes games have assets that compress really well, and then I end up downloading at 400mbps and maxing out my SSD writing.

[zbrozek]

Haha, yeah I bet most people who play games these days have a faster CPU than I do. My machine is eight years old.

[Salgat]

In my experience you hit those speeds if you happen to be few short hops from the server/CDN.