[space_ghost]

Google Fiber started a deployment in my city (Louisville) in 2017 before eventually giving up [0] after ~2 years.

AT&T, on the other hand, has been steadily rolling out gigabit fiber across the city since 2016ish, and I've enjoyed their service that entire time. It's consistently stable, fast, and the price is only slightly higher than Google Fiber's - I think I'm paying $90/month right now for symmetric gigabit.

The local Spectrum cable ISP guys offer ~300mbit (with a pathetic upload rate), and a Spectrum sales guy once asked me if I "really needed a full gigabit, no one actually needs that much speed." Lol.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/googl...

[pradn]

I'll bite - I've yet to see a big difference between 300mbps and 1GBps speeds. It's completely marginal.

Being able to save 8 minutes downloading Fortnite isn't a big enough deal. For video calling, you're limited by how much bitrate the provider is willing to allocate for you. For looking at photos on social media, you're stuck with Instagram compression. Internet browsing more tied to the number of requests and client-side parsing speed than total bandwidth.

Should our society be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on laying new fiber for marginal improvements?

[kingnothing]

American taxpayers already paid $400B for fiber to the home and are just now starting to receive it.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...

[jen20]

It's not remotely marginal when you have ~4 TVs at a time streaming 4K, two people working at home on video calls, constant cloud backup and so forth. I currently have 5Gbit, and will upgrade to 10 the second it becomes available. With better bandwidth _typically_ also comes better latency, and more competently managed DNS, though your own DNS setup is still likely better than whatever you privacy-invading-telemetry-hungry ISP sets up.

[nirav72]

Curious - Are you really maxing out that 5gbit connection where you would need to upgrade to 10gb? I have the 1 gbps symmetrical service from AT&T and have never maxed it out. Even with 2 adults working from home and 2 teenagers. All of us usually streaming something on different devices on weekends at max resolution, plus game downloads via steam/xbox gamepass, backup jobs pulled from friend's homelab, my own backup transfers to another offsite location, in addition to me self-hosting bunch of stuff that I share with family & friends, I've yet to max out that 1 gbps pipe.

The fastest transfers I've seen from source is from Xbox game pass downloads on a PC coming it at 150-200 mbps. Even 4K streaming is usually no more than 20-25 mbps/stream. AT&T keeps sending out flyers enticing me to upgrade to the new 2gbps or 5 gbps service. But again, even during heavy usage I have plenty of bandwidth leftover. So I'm wondering how one maxes out a 5 gbps connection.

[doubleg72]

No, he isn’t. We do that with a 400Mbps connection at home. The hospital system I admin the network for doesn’t even see that, and we move a lot of data.

[jen20]

According to my gateway, yes, I am. Not often, but often enough that the extra cost is a rounding error.

[bobdvb]

Streaming UHD is typically less than 25Mbps per device, Netflix goes as low as 15Mbps.

Video conferencing is typically about 5-15Mbps.

[manuelabeledo]

> Should our society be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on laying new fiber for marginal improvements?

FTTH is a vast improvement over cable in every metric, so yes.

[red-iron-pine]

Yeah not just in bandwidth, but maintenance, distance, resistance to environmental factors -- I've seen fiber cans caked with mud and flooded, and still pushing data just fine -- are all massive improvements.

Plus, upgrading the optics on both ends can often lead to massive improvements without changing the lines, and on a scale that far exceeds copper.

[nunez]

When you're downloading big files, the difference is definitely perceivable.

I have 5Gbit service, and it is awesome to pull down big files at 100MB/s+ while my wife is watching some 4K thing on Netflix at the same time.

[speff]

Using those numbers, you can probably do the same thing on a 1gig service. 4k Netflix seems to top out around 20Mbps.

[nunez]

Not when the source you're pulling from has no problem sending you bits at 4Gbps (accounting for overhead) like GCP or AWS (they have to be on like 1Tbps now or something insane like that)

[4ensic]

Agreed. I think lag / ping is just as important as throughput in determining subjective snappiness of a connection (unless you're doing large up/downloads.

[carstenhag]

Agree, personally I don't see any reason for more than 100 Mb/s. Teams limits screen sharing to 3-5fps, at 1080p that's 0.4 Mb/s according to their stats. Yeah, gigabit won't help my sufferings at all.

[frumper]

AT&T wasn't delivering 300mbps before rolling out fiber. They were selling 100mbps connections with data caps for more than what the cable company was offering.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

The author has never updated a game on Steam!

Jokes aside, it is very useful with videogames, those are big multiGB files

[pradn]

But Steam updates happen in the background! It's pretty rare for me to be waiting for an update.

[LouisvilleGeek]

It's unfortunate we lost Google in Louisville. Would love to have this type of offering.

[whelp_24]

At&t is part of why expansion is hard