[idiot900]

Honest question: at what point, with real life usage, is 1 Gbps actually necessary for home users?

I find that latency rather than throughput is what determines my perceived quality of an Internet connection. But am curious how others think.

[nathanfig]

Most households with 4+ people are going to have dozens of connected devices, including multiple doing HD to 4K entertainment streams, outgoing video feeds, and (at least on PS5) the occasional unexpected 80GB updates to a video game you were just about to play. This in addition to the apps/webapps that are often in the 10s of Mb of content served per click.

[ipython]

Those households also have one poorly configured Wi-Fi access point, which is jockeying for airtime with dozens of competing access points in the same frequency range, meaning the customer is realistically going to see maybe 200Mbps aggregated across those devices (due to interference, channel congestion, that one streaming device with a -90dBm signal sucking up all the airtime at the lowest supported data rate...)

IMHO we need to address the "last meter" experience before mandated gigabit internet speeds mean anything.

[jeffbee]

Multiple simultaneous 4K streams does not describe any household I know. How much TV are you people watching? It seems like an exceptionally high level of media consumption, in my experience.

Furthermore, 4K video is < 25mbps each per stream, usually.

[kaylynb]

1 Gbps is nice when downloading games and updates. Since everything is digital it can be the difference between waiting 30 minutes or 3 hours. IE: You play a game the night it's released/updated or wait until after work the next day.

Upload speed probably makes more sense for more use cases though. I used to have symmetric 1Gbps fiber and never bothered to setup QOS as my upload was never saturated.

I moved and am stuck with "1Gbps" Comcast. Which really means 25Mbps upload. I had to setup qdiscs on my gateway and split my network into tiers to get acceptable upload speeds and latency for the workstations in my home. I maybe have more uploads than 'normal' people, as I have automated backups that store data off-site, but normal people have "backups" in the form of cloud storage I think.

Uploading videos (to YouTube, for example) is painfully slow. I'm simulating living in Australia when I upload a video.

[alerighi]

They upgraded my line from VDSL (~80Mbit/s down and 20 up) to 1Gbit/s FTTH (~800Mbit/s down and 300 up) and didn't see that big difference, on normal navigation.

Sure, if I download a torrent, it is much faster. But is not the kind of upgrade that I experienced from ADSL (7Mbit) to VDSL. Since most of the time I use the PC under Wi-Fi anyway, that doesn't go over 600Mbit/s near the AP, but really not over 100 in the location where I usually have my PC.

What I've seen instead is a much more stable connection. Giving that the network is entirely fiber and passive there weren't (so far) any interruption of service in roughly one year, while with VDSL there where time to time that the connection did not work, in one occasion for nearly a week. Also since it was copper lines in case of bad weather, or crosstalk with other users, the performance did vary a lot.

[_ea1k]

That matches my experience as well. I'll take a little slower, if its symmetric and fiber. The stability is worth it. I could stream multiple videos at 4k pretty easily with 100Mbps. They've upgraded to 300 since then, but the difference was unnoticeable.

Most complaints that I've seen in various neighborhoods are from people that were not getting anywhere near their full speed. Usually the cause is their wifi router.

[cortesoft]

I recently went from 300mbps to 2gbps, and one big difference is game update time. In the past, I would sometimes go to play a game with my friends and it would require a 10 gig update, and we would have to play a different game because it would take too long to update. Now I can update in under a minute and we can play.

[phkahler]

To me that's more about the company making too many large updates. And when they do have a large updated it should be up to the user to decide when to get it. Downloading it over night should be an option, and not required to play. I've seem games that demanded the update in order to play, which is really annoying and I don't think it should be that way.

[Night_Thastus]

The world moves ever onward. Services like 4K high-bitrate playbacks have become more common. Games with sizes of 200GB aren't unheard of now.

Most people could get away with less, but sooner or later 1Gbps will go from "excessive" to "good" to "acceptable" to "slow".

[Zigurd]

First, you are not buying a sustained 1Gb. Not at consumer pricing. Secondly, having burst capacity is very helpful. Moving big images, videos, etc., which you do only occasionally, benefits a lot from a 1Gb consumer-grade link.

[CSMastermind]

Plenty of people work from home and that connection speed can be important when you're uploading a bunch of files while on a video call for example.

Or there's three people in your house all on video calls.

[carstenhag]

With Teams using 0.3 Mbit/s (3fps) while I am sharing my screen, this is not really a concern.

[wing-_-nuts]

Latency usually explodes as connection utilization goes up. If you have a router with good QOS and limit to 80% of your max available connection you're probably going to have pretty good latency.

Then again I'm not a networking guy. Someone who knows more about this stuff than I do can give you more comprehensive advice and talk about stuff like buffer bloat, etc.

[lapphi]

Probably when VR starts popping off

[gustavus]

As long as front-end developers keep shoving more and more layers of JavaScript "libraries" and corporations shovel more and more adware into every request it's likely we'll continue to need more and more bandwidth; because most developers figure if it is working great in thier office with a dedicated fiber line on the latest MBP it obviously must be fine for everyone.

[Szpadel]

I have 1gb connection and I agree that 99% of the time this isn't utilized, but it's very helpful when you want to download anything, from new steam game, through system updated to for me work related usage. this isn't that much about you can download per month, but how fast you can do it when you need something

[gustavus]

Honestly everytime I've tried downloading a large file the bottleneck is on the serving end, where they aren't able to send that much data that fast.

[dawnerd]

When games are 100+ gigs it starts being something that can make an impact especially when updates are also massive. But this is the same thing people say over every incremental in tech. “Isn’t x enough”

[kcb]

Download a PS5 game or Steam game.that you want to play shortly.