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There's still no point in gigabit broadband

shkspr.mobi

51–60 of 90 posts

Re: There's still no point in gigabit broadband

#51
post #37

The author is talking about using one device at a time. And if you’re living along then gigabit might be surplus to your needs. However many of us have families. I work from home and since getting gigabit, my video conferences have stopped degrading in quality right around the time the kids get home from school.

The author (who I understand to be incredibly handsome) has a family, multiple devices, servers, VR headset, and too many smarthome gadgets.

Even when I was on 500Mbps, I never noticed a slowdown while things were accessing the net simultaneously.

Re: There's still no point in gigabit broadband

#52
post #24

Think this underestimates quality of life benefits. Recently went from a 500mbps line + wifi bridge (~ +2ms, 1.5gbps throughput on wifi) to a 1.6gig line with wired 2.5gig and was surprised that it made a noticeable difference in casual browsing. The numbers say it shouldn't but it did If 30 bucks more saves me time on downloads AND every single click on browsing a bit snappier...that makes sense to me even if I don'…

[deleted]

Re: There's still no point in gigabit broadband

#53
post #22

I'd take guaranteed 100Mbps without outages over best effort 1Gpbs any time. Unfortunately, it's hard to get this service at reasonable consumer prices, at least in Germany

To improve reliability, you can use multiple services from different vendors and implement automatic roll-over with Mikrotik and the likes. This is something I have been doing back in the day for the enterprise I am still working at.

I did it at home as well. At least 2x more money to pay, but it was worth it because my bread and butter depended on having stable internet connectivity.

Re: There's still no point in gigabit broadband

#54
Video production. Gigabit is 125MB/s. If you’re shooting a day in 10bit 4k (pretty standard today) you have like ~1TB of data. If you need to get that footage to an editor or a post house it would take over 2h at max speed. That’s why many still ship hard drives with courier.

I’ve spent way too much time trying to solve the large file transfer problem using hybrid p2p. Check out https://payload.app/. It’s tested in controlled env for 10Gbps+ but have not been able to test that over WAN just yet. I have 10Gbit residential if someone wants to help benchmark.

Re: There's still no point in gigabit broadband

#57
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the Sony servers can barely saturate a 500Mbps pipe.

That's due to your ISP's peering, not the server.

Exactly this. ISPs are tricky players when it comes to peering. A typical symptom: servers in local region/country can easily saturate the connection, when anything external gets cropped down to 20-50% of a declared full speed.

Re: There's still no point in gigabit broadband

#58
Recently upgraded my WAN to 10/10 Gbit/s P2P Fiber. The router is a UCG-Fiber, connected via a DAC/SFP+ cable to a USW-Flex-2.5G-8-PoE switch. My APs were already Wi-Fi 7 with 2.5GbE PoE, so no change there.

Total cost was around USD 400. The result: effectively unlimited bandwidth, and, best of all, an average latency of 1ms to the internet. Do I need it? No. Do I love it? Absolutely.

Re: There's still no point in gigabit broadband

#59
post #51
post #37

The author is talking about using one device at a time. And if you’re living along then gigabit might be surplus to your needs. However many of us have families. I work from home and since getting gigabit, my video conferences have stopped degrading in quality right around the time the kids get home from school.

The author (who I understand to be incredibly handsome) has a family, multiple devices, servers, VR headset, and too many smarthome gadgets. Even when I was on 500Mbps, I never noticed a slowdown while things were accessing the net simultaneously.

QoS is designed to minimise these issues by prioritising real time protocols and other latency-sensitive traffic over other traffic. But that doesn’t mean that slowdown isn’t happening.

With 500Mb you’ll be fine 99% of the time. But you don’t have a whole lot of spare head room. And I’ve found that I have dipped into that headroom a surprising amount (eg when I’d need to pull large docker images as part of a new build process I’m testing locally)

The point of Gigabit isn’t that IPTV is better quality, because it isn’t going to be. It’s so that you can get more done concurrently without depending on QoS to save your arse.

Also you made a comment elsewhere that WiFi speed would be less than gigabit but that’s not true. WiFi 6 (which was released 5 years ago) supports up to 10Gb/s. And WiFi 5 (802.11ac) can do up to 1300Mb/s and was released in 2013 (more than a decade ago!).

The Oculus Quest (original) supports 5GHz 802.11ac and in fact requires it for wireless streaming. I have noticed that games will download very fast on my Quest 2 over Gigabit internet too.

Re: There's still no point in gigabit broadband

#60
post #17
post #10

If the author ever talked to a gamer, they would have learned how ignorant they are. edit: in case it's not clear, when every other new game from major publisher starts at 50GB or 100GB and can sometimes be 300+GB, waiting 2hrs to download it is terrible and horrible for energy use.

Edit to recognise your edit, as you’ve clarified that were talking about downloads - a once a month experience. That sounds more like a time management problem - buy your game, go to bed, and it’ll be there when you wake at 2:30 for your next gaming session. ;) ~You appear to be confusing latency and bandwidth. While they are to an extent two dimensions of the same problem, it’s latency that affects gaming regardless…

The time management problem is having a job, family, and other commitments. Some of us only get a couple of hours a week to play games. Your solution would mean we’d have to wait a whole week after buying a game before we can play it. And I’m sure you can appreciate that’s not a particularly constructive recommendation.

And that’s before you take into account how large some updates are. Fortnight updates, for example, are large enough to be entirely new games in their own right.

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