Ask HN: Is 10mbps good enough in today's world? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is 10mbps good enough in today's world?

#21

Post by cimmanom » Sat, Mar 10, 2018, 10:41 PM UTC

rammy1234 wrote: post #19

SwellJoe wrote: post #16

I have much less than that. I use 4G mobile for my internet access. Right now a speed test shows I'm getting 2.8Mbps down and 3.3Mbps up. I'm kinda out in the country, so my speed is slower than it could be in a city, but I don't think it's ever reliably over 10Mbps; sometimes I might see 12 or 13, but it is not reliably that fast anywhere I can recall. I don't love my network being this slow, but I'm able to do most…

so 50mbps and 100 mbps are really overkill for home purposes

If you've got a couple kids and a parent each separately streaming 4K video, you can max out that 50mbps connection, but for general purpose browsing it won't make any obvious difference.

Re: Ask HN: Is 10mbps good enough in today's world?

#22

Post by tzs » Sat, Mar 10, 2018, 11:24 PM UTC

brownbat wrote: post #17

rammy1234 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the need for 25mbps and 100 mbps connection for a home purpose ? is that an overkill ?

Streaming 4k basically. It's definitely optional. But if you look at what most bandwidth goes to, it's streaming video. For games, latency now matters more. Bandwidth has just outstripped most use cases. Streaming HD music is trivial. Applications maybe, but how many days do you download something new? Eventually you have your setup. I was hoping the hacker homes in gigabit areas would come up with some way to exploi…

For games, don't forget downloading the game. More and more, people are buying their games online for download instead of getting then on DVD or Blu-ray.

Some games are over 50 GB nowadays. That would be something like a 12 hour download on 10 mbps.

Rationally, that shouldn't be a problem, for a couple of reasons.

First, downloading a game should be a relatively rare event, because between game downloads you presumably are playing the games which should take a lot longer than downloading the games.

Second, even 12 hours to download a game is a lot quicker than buying it on DVD or Blu-Ray online and having it shipped to you. It's quite a bit slower than buying it in person at a local store (travel time plus an hour or so to copy from the discs to your computer depending on the speed of your disc drive), but buying in store has its own annoyances (especially if it is a hot new release that is hard to find in stock).

But people aren't rational. They don't see waiting 12 hours to start playing the hot new game they just bought and happily think "Wow...this is way better than how it worked before I got this 10 mbps internet connection!".

They see a 12 hour wait to get their game and think that their internet sucks.

Re: Ask HN: Is 10mbps good enough in today's world?

#23

Post by qplex » Sat, Mar 10, 2018, 11:33 PM UTC

I'd prefer a reliable 1Mbit link (or even slower) instead of the whims of 3G/LTE/4G any day.

I'm a bit far from the nearest tower. On a lucky day I can get 3-4Mbps down with 100-200ms round trips, low packet loss.

Unlucky days: complete link drops, timeouts, crawling speeds at few kb/s at most.

Re: Ask HN: Is 10mbps good enough in today's world?

#24

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 12:08 AM UTC

tjoff wrote: post #12

A counter point: not really. Well of course you get by, but streaming a youtube video alone is pushing it so browsing simultaneously will suffer. And if you want to download something it gets even worse and takes quite some time. This obviously only gets worse and worse if the connection is shared. Yes, it works - but for a power user it is quite limiting. But why not try it and upgrade if need be?

It depends™ on your usecases. Personally, I stream YouTube at 360p most of the time because the extra pixels just don't matter (this is for entertainment; screencasts and the like need more for legible text). Most of my downloads run async (OS updates, packages to install, etc). I'm on a shared connection but we don't seem to have issues.

Of course, you're right; all other things held fixed I'd rather have a faster connection. But in practice the cost is such that I'd want a compelling reason, and I just don't care that much.

Re: Ask HN: Is 10mbps good enough in today's world?

#25

Post by zie » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 1:50 AM UTC

frfl wrote: post #20

SwellJoe wrote: post #16

I have much less than that. I use 4G mobile for my internet access. Right now a speed test shows I'm getting 2.8Mbps down and 3.3Mbps up. I'm kinda out in the country, so my speed is slower than it could be in a city, but I don't think it's ever reliably over 10Mbps; sometimes I might see 12 or 13, but it is not reliably that fast anywhere I can recall. I don't love my network being this slow, but I'm able to do most…

You may be interested in https://mosh.org/ as an alternative to ssh

I'm in the same boat as the OP, except I rarely peak 1Mbps. mosh makes life bearable.

Re: Ask HN: Is 10mbps good enough in today's world?

#26

Post by scarface74 » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 3:22 AM UTC

It depends. If it were just me by myself maybe. I was working from home and my wife and my two sons were home. Both of my sons were playing online on their PlayStations (my older son bought his own) and my wife was streaming Netflix. 50/10 was unusable for work over a VPN.

We have since moved and now have gigabit internet up and down and usually get 930+ u/d wired and 250 u/d wireless. Our whole house is wired for gig-e. It's overkill.

The closest I ever get to using it is connecting to my job. In the middle of the night, I can get 80Mbps.

Even if we did stream 4K content at 15K - 50K we would be fine with 200Mbos.

Re: Ask HN: Is 10mbps good enough in today's world?

#27

Post by tintar » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 1:42 PM UTC

bartread wrote: post #11

Yes, it's enough. Poor performance will come from things like poorly constructed websites (too much JS, very chatty sites and apps loading resources across many domains, or calling home a lot, especially with limited upstream bandwidth), contention with other users of the connection, and latency (not often a big issue with wired connections). On latency, this piece from 1996 is still worth a read: http://www.stuartch…

hilarious, it was literally only a couple days ago I was digging into seeing what the current state of Bolo was. I miss Bolo so much, I want it on my xbox or on Steam or anything. if Target can sell a single-purpose Oregon Trail handheld, why can't we have Bolo?

and that's a great article, I remember it quite well. at the time it was written, I was working for Lotus/IBM in Cambridge (no not that one, the other one) and the company had offered us all experimental free ISDN so, yes, please - and, yeah, speed good latency bad. go fig.

Re: Ask HN: Is 10mbps good enough in today's world?

#28

Post by brownbat » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 3:51 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #22

brownbat wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Streaming 4k basically. It's definitely optional. But if you look at what most bandwidth goes to, it's streaming video. For games, latency now matters more. Bandwidth has just outstripped most use cases. Streaming HD music is trivial. Applications maybe, but how many days do you download something new? Eventually you have your setup. I was hoping the hacker homes in gigabit areas would come up with some way to exploi…

For games, don't forget downloading the game. More and more, people are buying their games online for download instead of getting then on DVD or Blu-ray. Some games are over 50 GB nowadays. That would be something like a 12 hour download on 10 mbps. Rationally, that shouldn't be a problem, for a couple of reasons. First, downloading a game should be a relatively rare event, because between game downloads you presumab…

I wish more ISPs found ways to offer temporary unthrottled pipes.

Maybe off-peak speed increases, or a button where you can give them an extra dollar for a faster hour.