This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I don't know who this is, but he clearly made some people here upset. :D
The whole post is about him not finding any sensible use for a 1 Gbit Internet connection for himself. He never ever mention any one else.
I really don't understand how this can be offensive for anyone else. Why is he not allowed to have an option about himself?
PS. I do believe that the title is somewhat click-bait though.
While I agree that there is no real use for gigabit for the average person, I disagree that rolling out gigabit everywhere is pointless.
For anyone who wants to use the internet for more than the consumption of content, the old upload speeds were a significant barrier. Gigabit, and especially gigabit upload speeds largely removed those barriers.
Symmetric gigabit in every home has taken away a bottleneck for people who want to, for example, run a bandwidth intensive internet business from their home. It provides people with opportunities they might otherwise not get.
Symmetric gigabit is this a thing, tho? Usually consumer level broadband can be huge download, but meekly upload no matter the tech used because they'd like to sell you more expensive options. That said I'd benefit greatly with it. And agree with you (and partially OP) that it's not for everybody. But those of us who need it, it'd be awesome.
I have 2 gig symmetric fiber and it costs $70 a month.
Speed tests confirmed that I'm actually getting 2 up 1.8 down consistently.
I have my whole house wired with cat 5e and it's pretty nice.
Same, my ISP offers 8gb symmetrical but it's basically their business plan for like $500 a month. I was able to max out my NVME drive downloading games though on the 2gb plan.
It is, in locations with consumer fiber. Had it at the last place I lived, and hands down it was the hardest thing to give up when we moved.
I have fiber in my basement and could book gbit. Upstream is still nerfed, currently I have 250mbits down, 50 up
Edit: disregard that, just checked with my ISP and apparently I have an old plan, and could book 1 gig symmetric. For thrice the cost, though
Yes, it is, but with fiber. I have 1 gig up and down through my county's public fiber network, with a future option to expand up to 2.5 gig symmetric.
In the Netherlands symmetric fiber is the standard. I don't think any company that offers fiber offers less than symmetric speeds
I have 1000 down / 1000 up personally.
They offer plans ranging from 100 / 100 to 8000 / 8000 at my address.
The only company that doesn't offer symmetric is Ziggo, because they made the (wrong) bet that they didn't need to invest in fiber. They only offer up to 1000 / 50 over coax.
That's as it should be. Lucky you. I'm with A1 (Vodaphone, 2nd biggest Slovene operator) which offers 1000/100 by default without an option to upgrade. Perhaps one can get faster speeds, but then it should get it as company at company price. The biggest one (just checked) offers 1000/300 with an option to upgrade. Perhaps I should check it out...
On my previous coax connection upload was severely limited, even if download went up to gigabit. Now that we have fibre we can get 1 gig up and down.
This whole blog post is moronic, if you don't need it, buy a smaller package.
For me the extra price is peanuts, and it's absolutely amazing to be able to play a new game minutes after I bought it instead of hours.
Before we moved we didn't have fiber, and downloading a game could take so long that I would have to wait until the next day to play it after starting to install it.
This also means that I can uninstall games I don't use without worrying if I might want to play it later, this spares me from needing massive storage.
I also prefer to preload media to watch on our media center/TV, and it's nice to be able to have a movie ready in a matter of a couple of minutes.
Tbh, I don't think the post is bad at all. If you have special high-bandwidth use cases that require massive speed you know that already and then the article isn't for you.
If you say you "didn't have fiber" I'm guessing you were on 50MBit VDSL? Then, of course, switching to gigabit makes sense.
In the blog post the author explicitly doesn't say "Go get VDSL", but they compare Gigabit with 500MBit. That's not nearly that much of a difference, you'll still be able to play a new game minutes after you bought it, but just twice as many minutes. If that at all, because if you have wifi in your home, it will likely limit your bandwidth to less than 500MBit in real use anyway.
The main point of the post is to show whether a regular user really benefits from Gigabit, and no, they don't. Their netflix stream will not improve when going from a few hundred MBit to a Gigabit. Neither will most of their experience.
If you are lucky enough to live in a place where Gigabit costs nothing, sure, might as well. The only provider who serves Gigabit to my home wants €65 per month for that, €780 per year. That's a lot of money for something that maybe saves me a few minutes once or twice a month.
Where I am, I can pay for gigabit duplex or 500Mbps cable. The issue is that the upload speed on the cable circuit is only 30Mbps and I have multiple people streaming from my Plex server, playing games on servers I run, or I might be checking my security cameras while I'm out and about. The only time 300Mbps isn't enough for me is on big files from beefy CDNs like Steam, but 30Mbps gets constraining pretty quick.
Yeah, OK.
Who does this guy work for? Comcast?
I've just reinstalled Bazzite and about 10 games between Steam, GOG and Epic Store.
There absolutely is a point.
Also, if there are several people in the house using the internet at the same time (streaming, downloading, etc) the point becomes even clearer.
And thanks to DIGI, I pay €20/month for a 1 gigabit connection and 2 cellphones with unlimited data.
It's not gigabit if you've got 110 Mbit/s upstream.
I want gigabyte internet
I have to move very large (5 GB or larger) files around over the internet quite often. I am thankful to the 99% of people who are buying gigabit broadband despite absolutely not needing it for making it cheap and convenient for me.
What a dumb take.
I make full use of my gigabit broadband (in both the places I have it - Bucharest and Bangkok), so there very much is a "point". I'm not going to bother enumerating all the ways I use it though, because the response will just be "ohhhh, but normal users don't do that". But exceptions are normal - the mistake being made here is assuming that you represent the whole human race just because you don't have a need for something.
Personally I think sanitary towels are useless, because I've never needed one and indeed the majority^* of the population don't need them...
This is just a cope post; "gigabit broadband is so fucking expensive in the UK I'm trying to justify it not being necessary". My gigabit fibre in Bucharest costs about 8eur/month, in Bangkok 15eur/month. I suspect if broadband in the UK were reasonably priced, this blog post would never have been conceived...
^* before you argue, remember (pre-)puberty and menopause are things.
A gigabit connection means you can torrent your Linux ISOs in seconds. If it's a symmetric connection, you can also backup your files up to the cloud without having to ship hard drives.
I get that there's a relatively distilled Linux user base here in the Fediverse, but what percentage of that group really needs ISOs that quickly, and presumably, often?
Is this to suggest that we'd try more distros if we didn't have to weigh the time needed to download them?
The cloud idea is better. It would be nice to be able to essentially quicksave to off-site before logging off for an extended period, or even periodically.
On the other hand, how many gigabytes does the average person need to back up on a regular basis? Even power users don't generate that much data, and I'd expect that they'd have some kind of rolling backup that does files at a time.
We're talking about "Linux ISOs" here. They often use the same distributed delivery networks as Linux ISOs to reduce the need for expensive file servers and prevent single points of failure.
I actually agree with this. The lowest speed my fiber ISP offers is symmetrical 300 by 300 unless you qualify as a low-income individual and then you can get a 100 by 100 plan for cheaper than that.
Personally, I think that's bullshit, and that anybody who wants to have the 100x100 plan should be able to have it without having to go through any kind of qualification step.
what are you agreeing with? this is an entirely different thing.
100x100 would honestly be an upgrade for me at 400x40. I'm so tired of my shitty upload speeds.
I work from home and sometimes have large file transfers, and the rest of the house is also using it at the same time. 1gig wasn't necessary but it is appreciated.
There are many houses that don't need it and don't even come close to justifing the purchase, but faster internet and utility infrastructure upgrades are always a good thing.
Where I live, 1Gbps symmetric is usually the standatd package around 40$/month, with 2.5, 10 and up to 25 available. Maybe ypu can find 100 or 500Mbps, but it's only marginally cheaper (or even more expensive).
Do most people need it? Probably not though.
Symmetric gigabit is great for DDoS botnet operators.
The aggregate bandwidth capacity of these networks exceeds 100 Tbps — more than most national internet backbones can absorb. And symmetric gigabit fiber rollouts keep making the math worse: average upstream bandwidth per compromised endpoint increased 75% year-over-year in North America.
I'm on 500/500 because my firewall throughput is about 700Mbps. I could go up to 3Gbps symmetrical. However, I have not been able to find any non-enterprise level hardware that supports above 2.5Gbps.
I'm curious if anyone here has hardware recommendations that isn't the provider provided stuff that can make use of >1Gbps
An SFP-capable router (like Mikrotiks) and fs.com transceivers
https://firewalla.com/products/firewalla-gold-pro
It's not cheap. I've been using firewall for a couple years and it's been a really good experience.
I didn't read the article but I like to point out to people that ads are coming in at a whopping 4k, sometimes shitty sites even deliver several resolutions of the same ad. They even send over ridiculously high quality audio that has not been compressed. Some sites even jam pack hundreds of these ads per minute on each page you scroll to. It's even worse on sites that have infinite scroll.
My point being... the internet is broken, block as many ads as you can, fuck Google and fuck Comcast.
Nice
And all sites should do that choice thing via radio buttons (works without js). CSS has @layer (and also @supports) for a reason.
Glad you like it!
For me, the jump from 8 megabit (yes, 8) to 1000 megabit is a huge difference, and has become vital to my work flow.
So, ruling it out entirely is out of the question for me. It might be overkill to some, but definitely not for me.
I kind-of agree, however there's absolutely a lot of benefits in having low-latency Internet. Given the choice between, say, 500Mb/s cable and 50Mb/s FTTP I'd go for the latter any day, but the reality is that most people who are on FTTP will just go for the faster options because they're cheap and readily available.
My tinfoil senses project a not so distant future, where most computing happens in the cloud, and consumers only having a low-powered terminal to the essential mainframe. I know from Genetec customer stories, organizations (including public authorities) love using fiber-optics for surveillance systems (to be able to scale said systems, and/or reduce the compression-ratio of the feeds), and similarly the increased bandwidth provided by 5G (convenient for live-streaming the increasing numbers of cameras inside busses for example; but also other modern vehicles like cars, which increasingly share sensory data to update a map in real time: used as the primary means of navigating autonomous vehicles, instead of solely relying on machine vision.
I've been saying this for years. For 95% of the population, 100Mbps is overkill. The same goes for flagship mobile devices, the entry level model is more than most people need.
