dslreports logo
 story category
Thursday Morning Links

Most recommended from 195 comments



maartena
Elmo
Premium Member
join:2002-05-10
Orange, CA

12 recommendations

maartena

Premium Member

Gigabit internet

Having had Gigabit internet for 2+ years now, I can tell you from experience that 99% of my traffic is on the sub-100 Mbps level. Webpages don't load fast because of the way a browser uses HTML and downloads its components. Even if 5 people in the same household would be browsing the web, its pretty unlikely any of them will breach 10 Mbps in just browsing the web - even with embedded video. Video streaming is anywhere from 2-3 Mbps on 720p stuff (typical youtube or embedded) to 20-25 Mbps on 4k stuff (Netflix, Amazon, etc).

Basically, if me and my wife are watching 4k on our TV, so happen to also be browsing the internet on our laptops (something we typically don't do during TV watching), I would still barely breach 50 Mbps in traffic.

Even the few torrents I download don't reach gigabit speeds. They are simply done, downloaded and dusted by the time it has connected to enough peers to go beyond maybe 200-ish Mbps. I've never really seeded anything beyond those speeds either.

Now, where do I do use the speed? Large downloads, mostly.... Steam games downloading can get as fast as 800 Mbps, but I don't download games every day. Not even every week. Patches for the games I do have installed come in faster, but typically a PATCH doesn't go beyond 1 Gigabyte, so the real advantage of Gigabit internet remains to be seen.

So, why do I have Gigabit internet you ask? Four reasons:

1) Its cool to be geeky and say you have blazing fast internet. Is that a true reason? Maybe not, but don't deny that hasn't played a part in YOUR decision.

2) At the time of purchase, the 300 Mbps option was not available, it was 100 or 1000. As I am now locked into $80 for Gigabit, it doesn't make sense to downgrade to 300 now, I wouldn't be saving any money.

3) The upload.I back everything up to the cloud. And although my backup provider doesn't reach gigabit speeds, I can upload data (and do) at around 200-300 Mbps. That alone makes it worth it to have symmetrical fiber of any kind, but a faster variety will mean your daily backups of more stuff (my wife has been on a photography kick lately, comes in daily with 100s of hummingbird photos from the yard) isn't going to affect any downstream. Cable wouldn't cut it there with its 35 Mbps upload, and even going down to 300/300 would probably saturate the upload on a photo-happy day.

4) Comfort. Knowing that whatever you do on the internet, whether it will take 200, 300 or 500 Mbps in speed..... you have the comfort of knowing no one else is going to complain why their 4k stream is buffering or why their webpages load slow. There simply is so much bandwidth to go around, your activities will not be affecting others.
Ostracus
join:2011-09-05
Henderson, KY

8 recommendations

Ostracus

Member

Few US households attracted to gigabit service

Oh boy, you just know that headline is going to be controversial around here especially since some posters have been saying essentially the same thing and have the down votes to prove it. And now the fears will start, if "A" happens then bad thing "B" will happen?

camper
just visiting this planet
Premium Member
join:2010-03-21
Bethel, CT

2 recommendations

camper

Premium Member

Robo-call tool

 

Why isn't this an inherent part of our phone system's protocols?