What’s the Point of Gigabit Broadband? | Hacker News Reader

What’s the Point of Gigabit Broadband?

shkspr.mobi

21 pointsedent88 comments

The last place I lived at had Google Fiber. Now I live in an area where I am stuck on 200 Mbps.

Telecommuting, it's a whole different animal. Upload speeds are more like 6 Mbps, which bottlenecks when my wife and I have meetings at the same time.

It's a first world problem for sure, but coaxial cable is a 'deprecated technology' imo. Glass fiber cable is the way to go. I understand why a typical consumer might not care.

It's unbelievable that upload bandwidth isn't even communicated in marketing these days.

People have been uploading video and photos for a decade now.

actually copper is at least not dead, since in short ranges it might have a better latency.

I also moved from near gigabit to ~200 Mbps. Can't tell any difference at all for download.

But going to 20 Mpbs upload is somewhat annoying. I think something like 50/50 or 100/100 Mbps is much more important than gigabit.

Especially since, what, 2% of households are probably networked to actually use gigabit.

> 2% of households are probably networked to actually use gigabit

A decent wireless router will do a gigabit, right?

According to the label on the box? Sure. In practice WiFi in a noisy RF environment with their router tucked into a cabinet on the far side of their house? Doubt they'll usually see more than a few hundred Mbit.

Gigabit up/down fiber here, with the most recent Orbi WiFi6 mesh (ax6000). WiFi speeds one room away are about 360Mbps.

Is that for one device? If 2+ people are doing stuff would that double+ the bandwidth used?

I didn't spend a lot of time analyzing - at some point I'll go room to room. But at the time I measured I was the only person in the house.

Depends what you mean by decent. I've got a 200 dollar router that can get 800 with essentially line of sight. 600 in the new room.

But I have to rely on wireline to connect the other half of my apartment.

And I'm probably still in the top 10% of networked homes.

It's not the medium that's the problem. DOCSIS 3.1 and 4 are capable of 10 gigs down. DOCSIS 3.1 is good for 2 gigs up and DOCSIS4 capable of 6 gigs up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Comparison

The reason you're getting 6 megs up is because of your ISP. And that's the reason your connection sucks, not the 200 down. For anything but large downloads, the difference between 200 down and 1000 down would probably not even be noticeable.

I have gigabit up/down and it's honestly amazing to be able to push files into YouTube so quickly. I _mainly_ use it for download, but I'm considering hosting some services locally given how much extra bandwidth I have kicking around.

Host a PeerTube instance on this connection to be able to own your content :-)

(unless your content is watched by too many people at the same time for this, of course)

I want to kill Comcast every time I upload something. Why, in this day and age, does my phone time out and fall asleep before I am able to upload a single photo? Oh right, it's my 5mpbs upstream that I get.

It’s because Comcast wants to keep using their pipes’ capacity to sell TV channels rather than bandwidth.

I get symmetric gigabit in HK and it’s really handy for quick access to my NAS from anywhere.

There’s no “killer app” for a gigabit connection but it does speed up some things you already do:

- Backups

- System updates

- Game patches

- Torrents

Having all those things be 10x faster than a 100mbit connection is nice. It’s a luxury, but it’s a nice luxury.

For me it had the secondary effect of making me buy a decent home router and access point since my old Time Capsule couldn’t handle more than ~500mbit/s. As a result my connection is much better overall now.

+1 to all of these, with a special "My God, game patches" comment. 40GB day 1 patches are barely newsworthy these days. Keeping a library of games on your computer (or console) patched can easily run you hundreds of gigs a month.

I sold my PS4 because of this. I don’t have much time to play, maybe once or twice a month, but it felt like every time I turned the damn thing on I needed to first do a system upgrade (which takes forever) and then update the game itself (which again takes forever). All to play 30 minutes of Rocket League.

Slightly off-topic since the PS4 couldn’t max out a gigabit connection anyways so not really a reason to upgrade. Maybe PS5 owners will feel the need.

This is a good point - PSN seems to have poor download speeds.

The problem seems to be at Sony's end for their CDN or perhaps the peering connections are being throttled/bottlenecked.

On PS4, I believe the motivation for game updates recopying all the game data is to defragment/optimize placement on disk to minimize seek time (particularly important for hard drives) and to maximize sequential reads. It may also do so for data integrity reasons. I don't think PS5 needs to do the same sort of block placement optimization, but it will still do the copying for PS4 games (just faster if you use its internal flash storage.)

With digital game downloads and those 35GB patch updates (Overwatch, ugh) you appreciate every bit of bandwidth you can get.

Torrents is the big one (for symmetrical connection). It has a bad reputation because it's used to distribute copywritten material, but I could see things like game updates being done via peer to peer.

If I ran a game distribution platform I would even go further and offer a rebate on subscriptions for users willing to share their connection. After all, they would be saving me quite a bit in server costs and would help for places that are far from my CDN.

My band haven't really been able to get into a room together since about March, mostly it's not even been legal but even during the time when it was legal we figured it was probably inadvisable.

So we've been trying to do it online.

And then decided it might be worth trying to perform online, with each of us in different rooms around the city.

I'm taking a video-feed from four different people, and audio feeds from six different audio-sources, mixing them and then pushing that out as a member of a video-chat with dozens of other people.

So I was kinda glad of my half gig symmetric.

I think I'd have needed the full gig if we were a twelve-piece band, say.

Interesting - are you using something like jacktrip for low-latency audio?

We are using Jamulus, and I won't try and pretend that it's great, but it's just about workable.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/llcon/

I think people tend to overestimate how much bandwidth they use. Pandora and other services stream audio at something like 256kbps. And for most people who aren't audiophiles, that's a high-quality stream. Uncompressed CD Audio is something like 1.5mbps.

Netflix serves up 1080p video at around 4-6mbps. Just for fun, lets round that up to 10mbps per stream, you're talking about being able to handle 50 simultaneous streams at 500mbps.

And really, you're only serving one stream outbound to your video chat service, assuming something like Twitch or whatever. And that always gets compressed to hell. Not to mention, most webcams aren't going to serve up Netflix-quality video, so there's not even a point to trying to use that much bandwidth from the incoming feeds.

Latency probably matters more than bandwidth in a case like this.

Gotta pay for the direct-fibre for the ping as much as the volume.

Congestion is gonna mean you always need slack. There must be unused bandwidth or the occasional packet-loss just cascades.

the simple reality is that the real uses for gigabit, beyond speeding up downloads or servicing many tenants, won't be seen until there's higher adoption.

youtube couldn't have existed in a pre-broadband era, even if a few were rocking T3 connections.

the question is what doesn't exist now? we gotta build it.

Perhaps I'm being naive, but I don't think there are any application that ubiquitous gigabit to the home (or even to the phone) will enable alone.

Imagine for example streamed, 8K VR - meaning two individual 8k streams. Even that would only take 100-200mbps download speed, latency would be the real bottleneck and that's limited by the speed of light.

What things can a human experience that can be digitized but require continuous 1gbps to stream? I can't think of any.

> youtube couldn't have existed in a pre-broadband era, even if a few were rocking T3 connections.

You're right, but people were trying really hard to make shitty video experiences over dialup in the 90s. Really hard. Broadcast.com did audio (barely), RealPlayer tried to do streaming video, etc.

The only applications I'm seeing right now that need more bandwidth are 4k video (but honestly, 1080p isn't that bad) and upstream for VC. Looking around, I don't see anything where a 5x bandwidth jump would make something suddenly viable.

> youtube couldn’t have existed in a pre-broadband era

It could have existed, and, in fact, did, when broadband penetration was much lower than now, and “broadband” typically referred to DSL/cable/etc. connections of 256kbps down or better, not the 25M down/3M up it has been defined as in the US since 2015, or the 4M down/1M up it was immediately prior to that.

Theory: each internet user should be able to host their own content and be an equal citizen of the web, so to speak. Our own web, media, email (though blocked by ISPs) etc.

More real: Cloud backups of data in quick time (uploading), realtime video streaming, and quick file downloads for things like games and whatnot.

Hah, one of the fastest residential connections in Australia is 1000/50. Certainly faster than the 8/1 I used for years, but upload is the bottleneck.

If you're interested in faster uploads in Australia, I'd recommend giving launtel a try. They have a pretty wide range of speed options (e.g. 1000/400,250/100), and charge by the day (you pay for the highest speed connection in any given day). Not sure what their national coverage is at the moment though, they're a Tassie based outfit.

Hey, many thanks for this. Turns out some friends can also recommend them. They're twice as expensive as Aussie Broadband but the faster speeds and ability to move up and down tiers might make it work.

It's incredibly beneficial to not be limited, even if downloading from multiple fast servers simultaneously. At the moment it's not something most users 'need', sure, but increased speed can also help with things like load times, latency, and congestion as long as the rest of the path can keep up. Additionally, as a power user, it sure is nice to be able to go 'oh, hey, a local copy of the latest common crawl sure would be useful for that project...' and actually be able to accomplish such insanity in a reasonable period of time. With gigabit, you can even stream like normal while downloading at 80-90 megabytes a second! Biggest problem becomes where to put it all...

The biggest gigabit fiber selling point for me is having a symmetric connection. The "gigabit" cable internet available in my area is 960/30, and as a big self-hoster, that's not close to enough upload. I run nextcloud, media streaming, backups, etc for about 10 people, and my connection is always maxed out. I'm starting to move backups to local RPi's at my parent's/in-law's to save some bandwidth, but it makes management a bigger pain. I would love to have gigabit fiber, or even 100Mbps upload...

> The "gigabit" cable internet available in my area is 960/30, and as a big self-hoster, that's not close to enough upload.

More importantly, 30Mbps is barely enough to ACK a 1Gbps stream of packets.

As noted above, DOCSIS 4 supports "full" duplex which allows 10Gb/s down and 6Gb/s up, partially by sharing the same channels for upload and download.

That really doesn't help anyone when ISPs aren't offering 6Gb up. Theory and specs are good, but the reality is that it appears Cable providers have built their networks to be heavily asymmetric.

I have AT&T gigabit fiber and it's been fantastic. 4 people in a house, streaming and doing other work at the same time, SSH sessions are still completely interactive. Nothing seems to interfere with anything else.

I write large backups to S3 using hundreds of simultaneous threads, getting close to the theoretical limit of the link.

Ive noticed that sometimes on Friday evenings, streaming from my friend's server (a few states away on a different ISP) can get slow, not clear where the congestion is.

Only Gigabit? I'm holding out for 10G!

I've got 47 devices on my network and 2 roommates.

How are you owning 15+ active devices per person?

I live with one other person but I'll exclude their stuff:

* work laptop * desktop * phone * alexa * tv * nintendo switch * roomba * raspberry pi I use for retro games * an ancient android tablet I use to play spotify * a more modern android tablet I use for web browsing in bed * a e-ink reader * 3 wemo plugs

That's 14

* support wifi that I don't use: tv, instant pot, washing machine, garage door opener, a gopro-type camera, thermostat * I don't have wifi security cameras but lots of people in my area do

I'm probably forgetting things, especially things that support wifi if I wanted them to

Do roombas and thermostats use much bandwidth?

They frequently ping home for those vital security updates, see @internetofshit.

AWS’s outage taught us Roombas download the floor plan at the start of every cleaning session.

That's insane, but does make sense. I can't relate, I live with my girlfriend and all we have is:

My laptop

Her laptop

My phone

Her phone

TV/Chromecast

Never felt the need for dedicated devices just for music/browsing

- Phone, Laptop, and iPad per person

- Work Phones, work laptops

- Smart TV, Media Players, Game Consoles

- Smart Home devices, hubs, thermostats, Amazon Echo's, etc.

I’d love 10G just for nerd points but even if they built it out where I live the equipment is still too loud (!) and expensive. You’re basically running a small data enter at that point.

The UBNT UDM Pro is $380 and virtually silent, does 8Gbps routing w/o security features. My 10G switch also basically silent.

> Only Gigabit? I'm holding out for 10G!

10G is for newbs. IEEE Std 802.3ca-2020 does 25Gbps (50G if two lambdas are used):

* https://blog.siemon.com/standards/ieee-p802-3ca-25-gb-s-and-...

* https://www.cablelabs.com/25g-50g-epon-standard-crosses-the-...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_in_the_first_mile

Though most PON fibre deployments seem to use the ITU GPON standards, and not the IEEE's EPON. An ITU group seems to have been formed for 25G:

* https://www.lightwaveonline.com/fttx/pon-systems/article/141...

* https://www.csimagazine.com/csi/25GS-PON-MSA-group.php

AFAICT, both technologies use the same underlying Layer 1 fibre and laser power budgets.

Besides ISPs, a lot of this PON infrastructure is also used by telcos for mobile tower backhaul.

Yep, NG-PON2 or any other higher speed standard would be just fine as well :)

The problem with gigabit cable internet is that the upstream sucks. Sure, you can download a gigabit per second, but your connection chokes when uploading a file like a video to YouTube or trying to share large documents over a private network (such as a remote-work VPN to your office LAN).

The slow upstream also makes it really hard for people to set up private networks between themselves, and the cable companies ALWAYS block port 80 and port 443.

Why? Because, for some reason, they don't want people hosting web servers on their own computers. That just can't be allowed, for some reason.

But why? Why can't I have gigabit upstream on my connection, and why the fuck shouldn't I be able to host a public web site from my own computer, on my own internet connection?

These policies and restrictions really hurt the idea of a free and decentralized internet. Just imagine how different things could be and what all people would use their internet connections for if this wasn't the case...

Port blocking on home connections is done in large part for security. Most people can barely use an iPhone, let alone be trusted with a PC full of malware being served on port 80. Most ISPs that I’ve seen blocking those ports also have an admin page on your account where you can open them up if you want to.

> Why? Because, for some reason, they don't want people hosting web servers on their own computers. That just can't be allowed, for some reason.

> But why? Why can't I have gigabit upstream on my connection, and why the fuck shouldn't I be able to host a public web site from my own computer, on my own internet connection?

Dear t0mbstone,

We are sorry to learn that your residential package doesn't meet your current needs. As a valued customer of $LOCAL_MONOPOLY_ISP we would be glad to upgrade your connection with no additional hardware install to our enterprise and small business tier for only $X_LOCAL_CURRENCY a month. Please get in touch with one of our customer rep to assist you.

Sincerely, $LOCAL_MONOPOLY_ISP

That's why.

In Canada, it’s an excuse for incumbents to drop the speed tiers that they’re still required to let 3rd party providers re-sell.

That's why I prefer to use the term "incompetents". Incumbents are always incompetent. We need to merge these two words.

I've been asking the same questions for a long time. 100mbps was fine for me, and I upgraded to 200mbps last week (speed tests at 240/240 or so). I occasionally download games, and I run a webserver in my basement. My computing hasn't gotten meaningfully better, and I doubt it would with gigabit.

It's a bit like asking why anybody would want 100x the amount of any computing resource they have right now: jumping up more than an order of magnitude typically enables completely new use cases. For every step up those use cases have to be discovered, and it might just be that we haven't discovered too many compelling common use cases for gigabit networking. Maybe they don't exist, but I would think it's more likely they just haven't been discovered. At this point it seems a lot of use cases like remote work, collaborative editing, games are more obviously limited by the (often physically unavoidable) latency. Another limiting factor is that it doesn't help much to have gigabit networking if either side limits the actual bandwidth used.

Our house has two adults and three kids working/schooling from home. Lots of videoconferencing, plus streaming Netflix, Disney+ etc. to entertain the goobers when the adults are still trying to get some work done. Very thankful for gigabit FIOS!

I know many people where grandparents live with the kids and grandkids, and each person may be streaming HD video, and each person has their laptop and mobile devices being synced and backed up constantly.

There could easily be 10 to 20 concurrent HD video and data backup streams happening. Plus the security cameras are uploading.

I pay $38/mo for 50mbps in Redmond, WA. I've never felt like I needed more, wife and I stream netflix, I download stuff occasionally. it's reliability and latency that matter more to me for sure.

I think the game changer will come with IPv6 and faster upload speeds. This would make p2p sharing much more realistic without going through a big company.

Currently, pictures and videos of my daughter are locked away on my devices. To share it with my mom, we have to go through a service. My mom should be able to browse these photos any time without Facebook and Google getting a copy of the data.

> This would make p2p sharing much more realistic without going through a big company.

There's no reason we can't have faster upload speeds now. They don't want us going P2P and using the network the way it was designed. They want to sell to people who buy 10x the bandwidth that they need and only consume contnet. People who find innovative and new uses for tech are exactly what the ISPs don't want. They don't want to upgrade their networks. That's why we have data caps, blocks on self-hosting, and shitty upload speeds.

It really does feel like this is happening, even if there isn't an active conspiracy to limit the growth of self hosting it sure well feels like it.

Say you wanted to publish/livestream video and decent cd-quality audio, like live-streaming your band rehearsals. Does that even get you close to needing gigabit? I can't think of a setup that wouldn't mix it down to one stereo stream before hitting the net.

Although that'd be pretty cool to be able to publish/livestream your stems and multiple video angles.

CD-quality audio is only 1.411Kbps

And that's totally uncompressed PCM audio! FLAC will at least compress it somewhat without quality loss.

I got caught off guard by your notation here. For those using commas at home, that's one thousand four hundred eleven kilobits per second, or 1.411Mbps. At first I thought you were saying it was one and a half kilobits a second.

I have Google Fiber at my house which when hardwired can get around 930Mbps up and down (server rack). Wifi on the other hand, while my setup is highly tuned and multiple Ubiquiti UniFi nanoHD access points, clients max out around 350-500Mbps on WiFi. My biggest use is downloading xBox games, steam games, and Microsoft Flight Simulator (a massive 127 GB).

Funny right now I'm trying to decide between 60Mbps for $29 or 100Mbps for $38 here in Ecuador. I live alone. I'll probably go with 100Mbps not because I need that 40Mbps but because I believe it'll more reliably be >= than the 20Mbps I need to live and work.

My ATT wireless connection caps out at 30Mbps. I don't know what to do with THAT even. We don't do 4K on netflix or anything but we can both stream shows at the same time and be on a zoom call. Thats using like what, half of my total?

As someone who works with big data, having gigabit at my home is phenomenal. With a full gig tunnel between the datacenter I connect to for work and my home (and only 1ms latency) it's pretty much like I'm plugged into the rack.

Simple: to make your ISP money off of easier to hit bandwidth cap overage charges.

No data caps on gigabit fibre here.

Downloading video games legally on steam, ps5, gog, etc. For example Cyberpunk 2077 was released today at ~100GB and this trend of triple A titles having massive file sizes isn't going away anytime soon.

Torrents!

Backups that complete in minutes rather than tens of minutes.

Why do you wait for backups? Do you not have a multi-tasking OS?

I wait for backups because I do an incremental backup before I go to bed every night and I want it to be done quick so I can shut things down.

Might not seem critical for today’s needs... but it’s more about enabling future use cases which may not even exist yet. Think super high res VR streaming, etc

"No one will ever need more than 640k"

No one ever said that.

OneDrive shares + tons of image-heavy PowerPoint decks sometimes exceeding 500MB -> gratitude for fast internet :)

Don't forget that getting even 300Mbps half duplex on your wifi connection takes some doing.

I just do it for the low latency. It's incredible how quick requests are made and answered.

More than one person and one 4K TV in the same house?

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