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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

I remember ~20 years ago upgrading my house line to get something crazy like 0.5mbs and the sales guy telling me that I didn't really need it and was wasting money upgrading from my current ~0.2mbs.

Those numbers are fudged of course, I don't remember exactly how long ago or from what to what I was upgrading. My point is that we've always been having people say you don't need faster internet. And yet, I still want, and use, faster internet. 200mbs I would consider fine. But I'd still feel the difference at 500mbs or 1gbs.

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I doubt you are the average consumer though. Now days I think the biggest average consumer use case is streaming and game downloading, with game downloading being the biggest “I want it now!” impulse. But do you need 1gb service to download that call of duty game every year? I even think most people could get by with 50mb/s and not even know as long as the latency keeps up. If it’s fast enough to stream Bluey the masses are content.

what you do to fill difference between 200, 500 and 1gb?..

Uploading large files is probably the biggest thing, 4k video streaming (out) while others in my house are streaming in or playing games with no slowdown.

I remember watching hours pass uploading files on my 200 mbit. Still take time but much faster with gigabit (measured at 940 bmit, so not the full 1gbit)

It's sort of amazing that people still say these sorts of things today.

I don't think it's at all inconceivable where people in the future are streaming high resolution multi modal personal sensor arrays to AI that is running in a data center...and ditto we are streaming ever more content back.

That's just the in vogue answer of 2026. There are undoubtedly endless innovations that I can't envision that will require ever more resources.

My point is just that every single "X ought to be good enough" has been proven false. And the only times where we see consumption really plateau are due to other reasons than desire (like cost).

its sort of amazing how people dump so much far fetching speculations in response for such simple and specific questions.

We are quite literally talking about launching 100k satellites into space.

This is necessarily a question that requires thought and speculation about the future.

You can't just flip a switch and do it overnight if it turns out there is demand.

And if there isn't demand, you are going to lose a lot of money.

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