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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

>But most people just don't have any use for upload speeds anywhere near as fast as download. Or at least certainly not until we start doing 8K 3D video calls in front of massive 3D displays, which isn't anytime soon...

Most people don't have any use for upload speeds because very few have upload speeds that can be used in an interesting way.

If lots of people had lots of upload, you might start to see widespread commercial products for home-hosting what currently goes in cloud providers and social media sites.

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Hard to imagine what in the home would need 1 GBPS of bandwidth. What could possibly generate that much data?

The world isn't constrained by your imagination :)

A self hosted website with high traffic? Maybe you’re hosting high quality video, or a high tick multiplayer game server? Perhaps those specific examples are niche use cases, but the idea is that they‘ll stop being so niche if symmetrical upload/download becomes more commonplace.

People have 1 GBPS connections today and hardly any of them do those things.

Full-resolution VR immersion telepresence with haptic data.

I have a gigabit home connection. No I don’t need it, but having to wait less to move data around is nice.

A week ago I downloaded a 4.5 gigabyte photo from the ESA to print and put on my wall, yes all of those pixels mattered. It took closer to 30 seconds than the ten minutes it would have otherwise on a more reasonable “fast” home internet connection. So there’s several minutes of my life I probably would have just sat around waiting for otherwise.

It’s not about big constant needs but making the delay shorter on many smaller things. (i.e. latency over throughput, but latency not in ms for computer networking but seconds and minutes for tasks on a human level)

I have symmetric 1gbps. It's not about what generates that much data. It's about things that become feasible.

I remember when a decade ago I occasionally needed to share large VM images with a customer. I'd set up my notebook to upload it over the weekend and hope the upload wouldn't abort. Occasionally remoting in from home to check it was still uploading.

Now a 50Gb VM image is absolutely nothing to me. I can let people pull that from me during a coffee break, instead of scheduling it around a weekend.

It's not that sharing a 50Gb image was impossible before. It's that I can do it so quickly now, that I can do things like these much more liberally and don't have to plan around them as much.

This is a relatively niche use.

It’s unrealistic to expect mass-market household products to be engineered to support a small number of users with bespoke requirements.

mass market is engineered this way with fiber and its great.

All households benefit if you think about video uploads, backups, etc

1 GBPS is a lot of video though. Something like 10 streams of the highest quality and like 40-100 of really good quality.

It means really fast docker push, VM uploads, backups, etc.

It also means I can keep a ubuntu mirror, private docker repo, possibly IPFS node in the future, backup server, all at home.

I also never have to worry about my work/uploads saturating connection and interfering with wife/kids connections.

Growing up with 20KB/s I'd take the fastest connection I can, if I could update to 10Gb/s and more I would :)

My father routinely had to transfer multiple gigabytes of CAD model data to colleagues and clients back when he was was working in aerospace as a private contractor. He lived in a rural area and had to get by with satellite internet at the time. The real killer for him was the data caps and throttling that the satellite provider would impose after transmitting some ridiculously small amount like 25GB.

Not every worker in the world goes to work in a shared office space with enterprise class Comcast or fiber accounts. Modern businesses of many types can benefit or even must have fast uploads.

I remember when even most IT people were utterly baffled by the idea that individual households could want a 1 megabit line.

I really doubt that. Video phones were a sci fi thing for a century.

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