Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

Another side of the coin is no one will ever serve you content at 1gbps. It just won’t happen. I get 500mb down on speedtests and netflix et al regularly throttle me to like 144p quality with constant buffering. I download a game on steam and it throttles to nothing for hours after making some initial good progress.

View on HN

It’s quite rare for the average website to actually hit 1Gbps, that’s certainly true. Nobody makes webpages big enough to hit that speed, or even for that top speed to matter.

But I can download games from Steam at approximately full speed, for example. I subscribe to Ziply Fiber, and they certainly don’t throttle their users or oversubscribe their bandwidth. That said, there are other factors at play as well: can you even maintain 1Gbps to your _hard drive_? Can your computer decompress the downloaded data as fast as it comes in? Steam will slow down the download to match the speed at which it can decompress the data and write it to your disk.

Fiber just came through my area. They offer up to 3Gbps for less than I was paying for Comcast ~500Mbps asymmetric and for more money I can get 5Gbps... but I just signed up for the 500Mbps symmetric and pocket the difference monthly, because what the hell am I going to do with even 1Gbps? My Wifi can't 5Gbps, and all but two network devices in my house use Wifi to get to the internet. My NVMes can nominally do it, but it takes everything firing on all cylinders to actually achieve that. I've still got some spinning rust that is pretty full up at even the 500Mbps. I do run backups to AWS, but that runs in the nighttime anyhow and could still finish a complete non-incremental backup in 4-5 hours at full speed, and I have incrementals anyhow. Sure, the game per month I download from Steam would be ready in 4 minutes instead of 8, but, seriously, how much am I willing to pay for those four minutes? It's not like I'm staring at the progress bar at that point anyhow.

500Mbps is already enough for me to tailscale my house network up and have every single member of my family accessing the house Jellyfin server remotely simultaneously, which is not a realistic amount of load.

100Mbps down is still plenty for most people. 20Mbps up is definitely making some things annoying but most people will still be fine. It's a fine definition of minimum service for "broadband".

even spinning rust should be able to handle ~700 MBit. an SSD is generally on the order of 3 gigabits - even cheap ones can manage 300megabytes per second, which is on the order of 3Gb/s.

Sure, but remember that the disk bandwidth is the _uncompressed_ data. By definition it’ll be at least 2× larger than the compressed data you downloaded, if not more. Steam downloads are commonly disk or cpu limited on 1Gbps connections.

i'll concede you're probably right. In the late 1990s i had a Promise ATA 100mbit IDE card, and i swore that someday, i would have an IDE connection to the internet. Now, my CPE is called a terminal, but it's some proprietary cable from the terminal to the router. And my upstream isn't quite 100mbit (on starlink; it's about 40-50. On at&t 4g LTE it was 30-65mbit/s upstream).

so i'm still not at IDE speeds, yet. maybe on my cellphone in the metro i get that speed, though...

It is really ridiculous how fast our connections are these days, when you stop and actually think about it. Also pretty ridiculous how slow they used to be!

Get a better ISP. People will absolutely serve you content at >1Gbps; what this sounds like is your ISP gaming the speed tests.

(What does fast.com show you? This at least used to be somewhat harder for them to game.)

I manage to download entire Steam games at 1 gbps just fine. There might be something going on with your ISP.

Interesting. Are ISPs known to throttle steam or something. I’ve noticed that steam almost never downloads at the same speed of get doing a speed test. I’ve noticed it many times through out my life, though admittedly I’ve been stuck either way the same ISP across many states.

Some ISP throttle sustained download, which explains having high test speeds and initially fast downloads that slow down with time. So it might not be Steam per se that they’re throttling, though it’s not impossible.

Steam also extracts while it's downloading and will slow download speeds if there is a healthy buffer of things to extract. If you're downloading a game with thousands of small files to an HDD or even just a cheap SSD chances are you'll be throttled by your own computer's throughput rather than your Internet connection.

Steam downloads are often heavily cpu bound at higher speeds. I usually max out my 7800x3d at <1.5Gig.

I regularly get software to download at that speed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com