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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

> 4K video is 16Mbps, which is less than 2% of a 1Gbps fiber connection capacity.

OK, so you have two of those going and a twitch stream, someone's downloading a new game as well (and wants it now not in two hours), plus a bunch of other things going on... it adds up and it's good to have the burst capacity for large downloads when you want it.

> I never could for the life of me convince steam/epic/whatever to give me more than roughly 50MBps.

Did you mean bits or bytes there? 50 MBps == 400Mbps.

I regularly get several hundred Mbps out of the game services like steam here in the UK... wonder what's different?

FYI Amazon/netflix give a minimum of 25Mbps for a 4K stream and it seems to be recommended that you have at least 25% over that for a "good" experience. The streams are HDR as well as 4K which might explain why that's so high. If 8K gets established, we're likely talking about 100Mbps just for one stream.

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>someone's downloading a new game as well (and wants it now not in two hours

That isn't a very compelling need case. I can obviously see why some would pay more for that. But my mom won't.

The average person doesn't spend much time waiting for large downloads to finish.

> That isn't a very compelling need case.

There are a lot of things we don't need, but which can change the way we use tech. My mother didn't need 20Mbit, but later when she had it anyway she discovered Netflix was quite good. Being able to get a game almost instantly rather than later changes your actions around that as well.

> I can obviously see why some would pay more for that.

Who wants to pay more? 900/900 is available for £25 per month in my street now. We should be demanding good service (i.e. overprovisioned for our needs) at a reasonable price.

Even governments, who get cheap access to capital, don't pay taxes, don't have to take profits, can't do gigabit in the USA for under 50 bucks. Upgrades cost money.

OK, but other places can do it.

They may have more dense populations but it does seem the US often gets left behind on these metrics, and usually some or other de-facto monopoly is behind the scenes being obstructive.

I think that’s why we see slow increases of bandwidth. Jumping from 10M to 1G is really expensive and services to make use of it will take a decade to adjust/appear, especially if everyone else is still on 10 or 20M. So the investment might not be immediately useful for a ISP.

What we’re seeing however is companies who’d rather keep charging $50 and offer zero upgrades because there’s zero incentive to.

In Italy we went from an average of 2GB of mobile data to 50GB because a new player entered the market and existing companies had to adapt because they were obviously bleeding customers. I’m sure it cost them money, but it happened, and now people can use more internet for less money.

Now you can argue that my mom doesn’t use more than 2GB/month, but now she can, and so can I, without having to pay $100/month like you do in the US — I pay €8 for 50GB

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