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Comment by Salgat | Hacker News Reader

I have 1gbps fiber and it's extremely rare for me to come across a server that supports anything close to that bandwidth. At 10gbps you're able to upload 500GB/hour. For home use this seems extremely unlikely, even if you're using this as part of your job. Even my 4K surveillence cameras only require 20mbps each, that's 50 4k cameras to saturate a 1gbps line.

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I think of >1 GBps speeds as something that serves burst rather than streaming needs.

The use case isn't "I need it to watch youtube", but "I want to be able to restore from backup in hours rather than days", or "I want to play the latest Doom today and not tomorrow".

Eg, say you're backing up your data to a remote site. Great idea, but what if you need a restore, how long will that take? Downloading say, 100 TB on a 1 Gbps connection will take you more than a week.

That would only works if the other end can push 25gbps as well. I wonder what's the maximum throughput of various cloud storage services commonly used for off site backups (S3, B2, etc). Would they artificially limit the max bandwidth or allow you to go as fast as possible?

I've had trouble saturating my 1 Gbps connection in Sweden. I did tests with B2 and Wasabi roughly every quarter for a couple of years trying to see if it was feasible to move some data hoarding activities there, and never got more than ≈100 Mbps when downloading from them.

Don't know if it's still the case, or if my ISP was to blame (or just being in EU/Sweden).

On the other hand, I don't have a problem maxing out 1 Gbps when downloading both metaphorical and actual linux iso's. A lot of the microsoft stuff is really fast as well, wouldn't be surprised if they could saturate ≈ 10 Gbps.

Is this for a single request or concurrent? With concurrent requests I've saturated 5 gigabit symmetric with S3 and B2.

Have to think about the future though when you’re dealing with running stuff in walls. Think about what would’ve been acceptable throughput 10 years ago. If you built your home network around that, you’d probably be kicking yourself today.

Even CAT5e supports 10gbps in your typical house (you'll want CAT6 for longer distances though), and 10gbps is likely future proof for the next 25 years (which is crazy because CAT5e came out in 1999).

And ipv6 came out a year before that.

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