[basilgohar]

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.

[agilob]

>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.

[mrweasel]

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.

[omegalulw]

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.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

> 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, ...).

[ac29]

> even 4k Netflix seems to be 25 Mbit/s

Netflix's help page says 4K uses "up to" 7GB/hour, or a little less than 16Mbps:

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87

[basilgohar]

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.

[CommanderData]

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.

[Thaxll]

1Gb connection is 120MB/sec, there is no way to saturate that for a regular family.