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Comment by marknutter | Hacker News Reader

I have gigabit fiber internet and it doesn't feel all that much faster than my old Comcast 20Mbs connection because the bottleneck isn't my connection, it's the servers I'm asking for content from. For some things it's blazingly fast (downloading updates, torrenting, etc) but for general web surfing the benefit is barely noticeable.

I think that's why fiber adoption is slower than broadband adoption was. There's not much that you can do over a gigabit connection that you can't do over a 20Mbs connection for the average subscriber. Until some killer app that requires a gigabit connection to work starts to become popular, people just aren't going to demand it and adoption will continue to limp along.

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One of the arguments I saw for faster internet outside of a single-user app is when you have multiple people using a connection. If you have a family of 5 people all using a Cable connection in the US today, it is very easy to overload that line. And since upstream sucks on most home connections today (1.5 to 2 Mbps upstream), a single person uploading a video to youtube (or backing up data) will kill the connection for every other person using that line.

In the current ecosystem, I see gigabit connections being useful for multi-user connections where a lot of video is being streamed. Or using cloud storage solutions like Dropbox or Google Drive.

In the future, I could see other use cases. For what we know about Google's self driving cars, the first time a road is driven on (manual driving) it gathers a ton of data about that road. When you park in the garage, it may have to upload gigabytes worth of data for Google to process to make available to other cars. Doing that over the current connections most people have would be painful. If you have a large pipe for uploading lots of data, this becomes a lot more feasible.

For your first thought; that's one of the reasons as to why we love our FIOS connection, we can have multiple streams going at the same time and doesn't disrupt normal web surfing as well. It's a must with a large family.

As for the rest, I would say that it's hard for us to imagine the might single killer app with a gigabit connection because so few have it. Once a certain level of market penetration has happened, whatever that may be, there's no telling what things will come along once bandwidth is no longer a concern.

A bit of a chicken and egg there though. Who's going to build services that use >20mbps in bandwidth if almost no one has that much?

I read some VC stories regarding Skype recently. At the time they were looking for series A (?), broadband penetration was still poor. Obviously they managed to get by until the broadband environment tipped to their advantage. The point is that you don't want to wait until it's obvious that gigabit is really coming. At that point you may already be way behind.

Does that killer app exist in Europe or Asia? Otherwise, why would they have a faster adoption rate than the US?

Agreed; the difference between downloading a movie in 10 minutes and 1 minute is rather miniscule.

Additionally, I don't think even streaming sites would generally require more than 50 mbps to watch comfortably. Not even talking about regular apps/static content.

As kyrra suggested elsewhere; you don't need the fat pipe for one stream, you need it for multiple streams. My household doesn't have cable TV so it's nice to be able to have the kids watching their stuff on Netflix in the other room while the wife and I are watching The Walking Dead in the living room. Without our FIOS that might not work out quite as nicely.

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