Google Fiber is coming to Las Vegas

Is that because all you can do is doom scroll on an internet connection, or are there higher bandwidth possibilities waiting for 10gig home internet service to arrive?

To some extent making that argument is like Bill Gates saying "All anyone will ever need is 640k."

According to the FCC, in December 2023 something like 79% of all households had at least 100Mbit fixed internet, ~24% had 940Mbit or better. The NCTA claims 91% have access to gigabit or better. I do agree they're probably overselling that number (cable companies maps are often trash), but it wouldn't surprise me if it was really something more like 80% or more have some kind of access to gigabit but might just be cost prohibitive for what they care to spend.

https://www.fcc.gov/internet-access-services-reports

https://www.ncta.com/industry-data/91-of-us-homes-have-acces...

If these households aren't even really utilizing their gigabit connections very much today, what makes you think they're just waiting for 10 gigabit connectivity? What applications would they even really do with 10gig connectivity with hardware they'll have in the next five years, something normies would really care to do?

By and large people don't even care that much about 4K or ultra-high-quality video streaming. The two most popular Netflix plans are Standard and Standard with Ads. Blu-Rays are dead. VR acceptance is still pretty slow.

Even something like cloud gaming is really only using like 40-60Mbit of throughput for even a 4K gaming stream. Quadruple it, we're at 240Mbit. And even if we did ship 10gig home internet, it's not like we're just going to stop compressing the stream; a 4K 120Hz HDR stream is going to be ~32Gbit. Average household size in the US is about 3.23, so all three and a third people could be using 240Mbit and still have another 280Mbit of throughput.

Don't get me wrong, some percentage of home users would use a multi-gig home internet connection. But even though I can subscribe to a 5gig internet package and I'm more on the enthusiast end of things with a family with multiple kids and several 6E AP's with wired backhaul, hosting multiple applications and SDRs from my home, it's just not worth it to me to bother paying for it over the gigabit plan. Even if it was only $10/mo more I probably wouldn't jump to the higher plan. It wouldn't change my access or usage at all while costing another $120/yr.

Sell me on a 10gig home internet plan over a 1gig home internet plan. How is it going to radically change my usage with the kind of hardware most consumers actually buy and use? For that matter, sell me on a 1gig plan over a 500Mbit plan for a typical US household, let's say two adults and two teenage-ish kids. Would they really even see much of a difference in their day to day lives?

Back in the 90s it was pretty obvious what could be unlocked by having an always on multi-megabit internet connection over a single dial up connection for a household. It was just very prohibitively expensive for most people. I wouldn't say its anywhere near as obvious what benefits are to be had for a household today to jump from 500Mbit to 1gig or especially 1gig to 10gig.

Video calls, sure, but still most platforms are still averaging a handful of megabits. Most people don't have high quality webcams at home, so really moving to 10Mbit+ uploads isn't really going to do much for them.

Meanwhile people will likely stream HD video for hours and hours on their TVs, averaging 15+Mbit. They'll stream music which is like a basic online game but only a single direction. They'll download 100GB game downloads, scroll social media, etc. Do you think the average user uploads more media or downloads more media to social media?

I'd agree something like 20Mbit is probably too low for even an average US household, but in the end I'd say most consumers are still going to care more about download speed than upload speed. Just look around here in the comments and notice lots of people talk about how a fast connection is great because of large game downloads and what not; few people are justifying fast connections to home users because of sending data.

I use a lot of my upload data, but I'm definitely not a normal household. I hop on my VPN and stream data from my SDRs remotely, which will use hundreds of megabits. I host media streaming servers. I do remote gaming from my gaming PC to my handheld sometimes. I have some other applications I connect to while out. But I'm definitely not normal. And yet I still on average have 5-10x down than up usage.