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Comment by iancarroll | Hacker News Reader

Went through this recently as AT&T Fiber began offering 5Gbps service to my apartment in San Francisco. Luckily, the apartment building (seemingly) ran CAT 6 through the walls, but the AT&T modem only has one 5GbE port, so a switch is required to distribute it (plus in any room that needs multiple ports).

I ended up ordering two TP-Link TL-SX105 10GbE switches and one TRENDnet TEG-S350 2.5GbE switch for my TV/gaming consoles. The TP-Link switches have been great and I get 4-5Gbps consistently, but they only have five ports, which is expensive for the price. I assume the TRENDnet one is fine, but it's not connected to anything that I can test with.

I also got a Sonnet SOLO10G-TB3 to connect my laptop to 10GbE.

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Sincere question, what are you doing with 5 gbps to the home? Part of me thinks "hell yeah why not", but realistically I have 1 gbps service and it's probably overkill even with me being an abnormally heavy user. My internal network is 10 gig, which I find extremely useful, but I'm not sure what I'd even do with 5 gig WAN with the current state of the internet.

I upgraded from 1gbe to 2.5gbe and kept the same price. I think offsite backups and even faster downloads/uploads (when I do download) are the biggest wins. Going from 1->2.5 is a roughly ~2.2 speedup for me. I doubt most servers support 5-10gbe yet though. I'm seeing fastly.com and some out-of-isp (but local to my country) speed tests not reaching max speeds yet (but close). Plus more headroom for multiplexing users.

Going to gigabit fibre was like upgrading from hdd->ssd. Going to multi-gigabit is like ssd->nvme. Most use cases really don't need it, but when you do disk (network) intensive stuff it pays off.

It sucks that 10gbe is more widely adopted though than 2.5/5gbe, probally since the latter is a more recent technology.

It's diminishing returns for sure. I can't see how my life would change going from 1gbps to 5gbps, but it sure would be cool to set up as a hobby.

Aside from that, it does let you self-host bandwidth intense applications, like a home media server, or you could use it to seed torrents for your favorite linux distribution.

I guess my point is, those bandwidth intensive applications are currently more than well covered on 1 gbps unless you have a lot of people in your house all using them simultaneously. A raw triple layer UHD Bluray absolutely tops out at 128 mbps, and are usually well under that. Seeding Linux ISOs also rarely comes anywhere close to using my 1 gbps and certainly not sustained.

Emphasis on "currently." Eventually sure. And that doesn't mean I don't want 5 gbps, half the reason I asked was to see if there was some cool use I hadn't thought of.

I was able up upgrade from 1Gbs to 10Gbs while also paying about half as much. It was an easy decision.

Where do you live/who is your ISP? Do you live in Chattanooga, Tennessee or in certain Salt Lake City Suburbs? Residential 10 gig just isn’t super common yet and I’ve only seen a few community/coop fiber networks offer it.

Silicon Valley. My ISP is Sonic. To be fair it’s one of those “up to” situations. But I do consistently get 3+ Gb/s.

Sonic has, shall we say, "spotty" coverage. If you live in a spot they cover, good for you. Otherwise you're SOL.

These spots can be as small as individual buildings.

I don’t think there’s a single compelling reason. I personally did it because the price increase was relatively modest ($90->$180/mo), my access points already supported 5GbE, and I do a lot of security research that high bandwidth may eventually be useful for. Also, it is fun to look at the speed test!

> Sincere question, what are you doing with 5 gbps to the home?

Download "Linux ISOs"?

Downloading "Linux ISOs" is one thing you definitely don't need massive peak speeds for.

To put some numbers on that, let's imagine you buy a brand new 16TB hard drive. If you use half of a gigabit connection to fill it, it'll be full in 3 days.

If you have multiple people with multiple devices updating operating systems/software or downloading/streaming videos having the headroom so that everyone can go as fast as possible at the same time is rather nice.

How many people are in your household? I really can't see a use case for >1gbps symmetrical, at least not with the internet today.

It is very, very rare that I can take full advantage of my 1gbps connection when downloading software, updates, or video games.

Streaming videos rounds down to zero -- Netflix uses <20mbps at its highest quality setting, Apple TV Plus uses ~40mbps.

So, unless a normal day is five people are downloading the latest 150gb Call of Duty, while three people download Windows 11, and another 10 are watching Netflix, it's really going to be hard to saturate your bandwidth.

I have KVM disks sitting in network mounted drives. when I use those kvms the disk read/write happens over the network, and the 1gbps limit can be easily reached as you can imagine.

Over the internet, though? I use 10 gig inside my network for storage too, but not over the 'net. Doing big offsite backups is the only thing that really comes to mind for me, but even then apart from an initial push 1 gig is more than enough for routine incremental backups for my uses.

The best pitch I can think of is "if you build it, they will come." We won't see widespread uses for > 1 gig until people have it, I suppose.

No it's not over the internet by I still need it :D I have many devices connected over Ethernet to my router, a couple of those wire up my land disks as described above. it is a legit use case and tbh, anyone buying a switch most likely has an internal networking use case that goes beyond just using the internet.

Yeah, but we're specifically talking about 5 gig WAN. Like I said I use 10 gig internally too and see the use. It's a 5 gig connection to the wider internet that I am struggling to rationalize.

FYI AT&T is going it offer 25gbit to the home in a couple years

Do you have any links with more information about this?

All I could find is:

https://about.att.com/innovationblog/2022/20-gbps-symmetric-...

Somewhat of a self-congratulatory piece, but it does support your claim!

Interesting image covering the "Today 1Gb tech" versus what's coming next in the future: the aptly named "XGS-PON".

https://about.att.com/ecms/dam/snr/2022/June2022/InStory/20-...

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