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Comment by andrewaylett | Hacker News Reader

IMNSHO, latency is more important than raw bandwidth, and raw bandwidth for consumer Internet is more useful as a latency improvement (because the high speed drains the buffers that much faster) than for actually using the bandwidth.

If you've got actually decent Internet, or you actually do use the bandwidth, great! My experience is that only a few applications will max out my 115Mbit/s connection, and given I have semi-decent kit and a decent ISP using the full bandwidth doesn't have a big impact on latency so I can be streaming, downloading, and have multiple people video-calling and that's fine.

Looking at my stats, there's only been a five minute period in the past 24h with sustained speeds used of over 20Mbit/s.

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> My experience is that only a few applications will max out my 115Mbit/s connection, and given I have semi-decent kit and a decent ISP using the full bandwidth doesn't have a big impact on latency so I can be streaming, downloading, and have multiple people video-calling and that's fine.

My experience is that people rarely feel constrained by bandwidth because everyone is fighting to optimize every last bit, often using varying techniques that sacrifice quality. Not a single video calling app that I’ve used recently feels like it’s actually delivering good video to me. They're all bitcrushed. They work for some meetings at work, but I would really love a much higher bandwidth connection for screen sharing on Discord and practically every streaming app.

Latency is also important: don’t get me wrong about that. But the fact that I have 1Gbps and I can’t get high bitrate video down kills me.

> Not a single video calling app that I’ve used recently feels like it’s actually delivering good video to me. They're all bitcrushed.

I suspect this is largely done for the sake of latency, due to buffer bloat.

Well, that and as a result of typical upload speeds being much lower than download speeds.

Can’t forget low bit rate “4k” saves them tons of money on storage and bandwidth costs as well.

I think you're emphasising my point?

If higher bitrates lead to higher latency, most tooling will try to keep latency low enough even if that means sacrificing quality. I've got 1/10 of your total bandwidth, but still seem to maybe get better video quality? I'd attribute that to better active traffic management.

The only thing personally I want is the same upload speed as download. So I can connect to my home server and download/upload stuff from it.

How are we supposed to have middlemen SAAS services making you subscribe to basic things if you can just do it yourself?

It's not just upload speeds though, don't forget also needing a static IP address (or two...) and unblocked ports, and a decent router and other networking gear. And when residential Internet goes IPv6-only (...eventually) you'll likely still need dual-stack IPv4 to avoid problems with connections from IPv4-only endpoints.

Oh, and an SLA too...

UPnP was meant to help alleviate some of those requirements but I don't think there's been any progress on that front since the spec came out in 2001...

I can see the desire for higher upload (because I have the same desire), but I don't care at all if they're the same.

I'd rather have 200/20 than 15/15 or 20/20 (obviously), but I would also rather have 200/20 than 25/25.

By the same, I mean to match what we already get in most places as download speeds, at least 100-200mbps.

Every household use google or apple photos app that upload backups to cloud services.

This is not at all accurate when considering that internet access for one home is on average for 3 people, not 1, and internet is now used for work which requires video streaming and large file downloads.

That would be the situation I find myself in, and I can indeed have multiple people in the house on high quality, low latency video calls at the same time as large downloads from Steam and folk watching YouTube.

Maybe I'd get a faster download with a faster connection, but it's the low latency applications that are of top importance.

Have you set up bufferbloat prevention on your router? You would restrict your router to only say 100mbps, to avoid saturating the connection.

Even better: my ISP does that for me on their side, and prioritises smaller packets too.

I've got a 115Mbit/s connection for my last mile, and AAISP limit what they'll try to send down it to 95% of the line rate, so BT should never need to buffer anything.

I'd rather not have my ISP decide which packets are "higher" priority and do this myself.

This is a core tenant of Net Neutrality.

And latency under load is an even more important measure.

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