Hacker News Reader

Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

Do people actually have multiple 4k montiors and multiple streaming services to serve content to those devices?

I pay about $40 for 50Mb/15Mb and there is barely anything I can do to max this out.

Please remember that not everyone lives in a household of one. A household hosting say, six independent people can easily cap a 100Mbps connection.

I was living in a household of ten heavy internet users on a 18Mbit/s line. The only times we had trouble was due to our service provider (outages, severe packet loss). This included mostly games and streaming.

I live with 3 people and unless someone is downloading a torrent there is no way netflix/hulu/youtube playing at once is going to cap 50Mb or 100Mb.

How about a group of 4 friends who buy a game on steam together and want to download it and try it out together? That can easily be 30 gigabytes that has to be downloaded by 4 people, capping the connection over a sustained amount of time.

Sure, but does any public policy need to be directed towards this use case, or the six simultaneous Netflix streams? I would think that increasing Internet adoption by 1% would have more tangible gains than increasing speed by tenfold, once you are at figures like 5 or 10 Mbps.

Yes, because there are many use cases which will crop up once internet speeds aren't so constrained in so many places. If you could download very large files very quickly in almost every location, I'm fairly sure that computing would change rather dramatically.

Think of it this way.

What do you think would have more effect on the world: Increasing processing power 100-fold, or increasing desktop usage by 1% of the entire world population? How about 10-fold and 5%? I can guarantee you it's the former.

download it once and copy over the files locally

You don't probably do torrent or just ignoring the fact that the vast majority of internet traffic globally is peer to peer traffic between dynamic IP addresses, so clearly torrent.

It's more true in case of Hungary where the minimum wage is around 250 EUR and people have a relatively luxury broadband speed, need (and addict) for car and historically good in pirating content since the world invented the VCR.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com