So you have Gigabit Internet ...

dvsman

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So I'm running 155-180Mb internet service at the moment but my ISP has options up to a "Gigabit" and that got me wondering.

For those of you that are already running really fast / absurdly fast internet, what exactly are you using it for / doing with it?

At 155Mb / 30 up downloading from Steam / Origin / Gog or watching 4K without issue already. What's the hot app / use case for such high speeds? Besides being [H]?
 
Downloading stuff faster. You seem satisfied with you download speeds, but it's always nice to install a game library that is 500gb in size quickly. I only have the 300/300mb plan from fios. Personally, I have it to access my Nas from outside networks, and 75mbit just was not enough for that.
 
So I'm running 155-180Mb internet service at the moment but my ISP has options up to a "Gigabit" and that got me wondering.

For those of you that are already running really fast / absurdly fast internet, what exactly are you using it for / doing with it?

At 155Mb / 30 up downloading from Steam / Origin / Gog or watching 4K without issue already. What's the hot app / use case for such high speeds? Besides being [H]?


Day Trading and Gaming.... of course normal streaming etc...
 
There isn't really a need for it for most people. Some advantages would be downloading a bunch of things in parallel at faster speeds. I would imagine serving various streams a la Plex. Other than that, you aren't really getting faster downloads because your download is only going to go as fast as the other side will allow. Most streaming doesn't stream at full 1G, nor do most downloads.
 
Gaming is nice, downloading anything is nice, downloading games is nice.

I no longer need to have all my games i want to play on steam installed. I can simply download when I want to play, and it only take around 30-45seconds.
 
Serving big files from home (and Plex), got it.
Parallel downloading, I can dig it.
Not keeping bloaty files local but rather on demand, sure.
Day trading - wouldn't day trading really depend on latency more than bandwidth? But I dig where you're coming from.

I just figured I'd ask, in case there was some hot app or service that was going on that I just didn't think of.
 
Gaming is nice, downloading anything is nice, downloading games is nice.

I no longer need to have all my games i want to play on steam installed. I can simply download when I want to play, and it only take around 30-45seconds.

Just to be clear, often times you are not using the full 1G for this. It usually tops out around 300-400Mbps, if you even get that much.
 
Is there any speedup in browsing? Downloading a page in .00000001 seconds instead of .01 seconds?
 
Just to be clear, often times you are not using the full 1G for this. It usually tops out around 300-400Mbps, if you even get that much.

My steam downloads at around 104MB/sec.

So just to be clear, your steam servers it is set to use suck noodles. I get line rate gig from mine. :D
 
Steam/Torrents, mostly. TBH I got it because I called FiOS to cancel my TV portion that i never used. I was paying $115/m for 50/50 internet and basic TV. I went down to $79/m with Gigabit and no TV.

Coudln't really turn that down.

Its stupid fun to start a "download" thats 13-15GB and have it be done in 3 minutes. Steam also makes good use of the bandwidth too.
 
Just to be clear, often times you are not using the full 1G for this. It usually tops out around 300-400Mbps, if you even get that much.

Latency, and more yet max packets per second can come into play - with gig its doc 3.1 modem for example which does have latency and packets per second advantage - and yes, as gig customer myself, good solid (not full of buffer-bloat) service seems to top out at 300Mbps (since I day trade I notice it, also if do lots of streaming or have problems with buffering).

Great low cost product for fellow traders or even gamers:

http://evenroute.com/
 
Think of it like adding more lanes to a freeway, without changing the speed limit. It won't help individual cars go faster, but you can have more cars going the same speed before you start to see traffic slow down. Same with upgrading your internet speed. It's not going to make your calls to individual services faster (broker/streaming/games), but it will be much harder to saturate the line and cause degraded speed to those services.
 
Think of it like adding more lanes to a freeway, without changing the speed limit. It won't help individual cars go faster, but you can have more cars going the same speed before you start to see traffic slow down. Same with upgrading your internet speed. It's not going to make your calls to individual services faster (broker/streaming/games), but it will be much harder to saturate the line and cause degraded speed to those services.

This is very true for most people and most services, but not all.

I specifically upgraded because I know individual services and applications I use can take advantage of the full 1Gb/s link and routinely do in practice.
 
If you ask here for possible uses then you don't need it.
I have gig internet since 2016 (more like 900/900 mbit up/down in real world) just because it was cheap for its time (and still is) and I wanted to test it. I can live with 100/100mbit just fine if I had to.
Well, maybe something like 200-300 mbit is more like it... More and more sites allow 20-25MB/s downloading, updates etc. It depends where are the servers you intend to use. 1Gig is not 1gig to/from everywhere. More cloud services allow 200 mbit. Still, my way of storing data has not changed much, I don't put more things online. Torrents are the thin where I felt the gig speed the most. I don't torrent much though. But more and more things/sites are "giving away" more than 100mbit.
As to browsing speeds, virtually no difference, there is more to latency and web hosting limitations than your Gig net. My ISP's gig plan costs almost the same as others' 100mbit or so. I'm FTTH as well, so for now no reason not to be gig :) .
If your work or way of using internet doesn't need very high speeds, it depends more on the cost and what you're ready to cash up for it. And what pipe "others" you comunicate with have on their end etc so you could benefit from your gig. Many people use high speeds to move gigantic backups/archives between offices etc..
Another consideration - my ISP has just one plan - 1G. It seems it's more effective for them to have just this plan and not shaping different customers which I guess involves many resources and surplus hardware. Most users don't saturate 24/7 their links and all this is calculated/aggregated.
My 2 cents.
 
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If you get one gig you can post your network speed test in the screenshot thread and try to grow your e-peen a little bit

The only places I see benefit from having higher speeds are a) newsgroups and b) steam
 
I always wonder what the use-case is for high retail/consumer Internet bandwidth for a single user. I can get 25 Mbps download speeds via Speedtest with my home fixed wireless connection. But I still only get 2 or 3 Mbps of bandwidth from Steam, or Netflix, or other commercial sites. If I'm doing work stuff on VPNs, I might be able to make use of that bandwidth. Or if I have access to private or dedicated servers. Otherwise, as a retail user, the additional network speed doesn't really get utilized. I guess if you have multiple users in your household, that would be the main retail use-case. Am I wrong on that?
 
I'm OK with 200 Mb/s or so down for now. Just a couple of us here and not much streaming/OMGHUGE downloads/etc. What I'd really like to see increased is the upload bandwidth, which Comcast caps at 5-10 Mb/s for all but the most expensive plans.
 
Someone wondered what the use case for high consumer bandwidth could be. It's always good they look over their smaller world.
We use IPTV (after our router, not a VLAN IPS's TV), double IPTV plan for more users to use, 13Mb/s per HD channel. This is steady 25Mbit TV only. Put another one streaming some Youtube video on their PC, browsing... some download in the background... or uploading a 2-3-5GB archive to some cloud backup service...
Sure, 50 Mbit or 100 mbit internet would be sufficient to maintain the critical TV+youtube +light browsing... But we come to the point where I can say we all used 64 or 128kbit/s speeds back in the 2000's and we outlived :) . It's not Ok anymore if I waited 2 days to upload an archive to a backup server. With time, needs grow too, filesizes, display resolutions, movies etc. all grow in size. Businesses use IT more, data grows. For the right price, a gigabit internet connection brings new possibilities to the table, that's all.
 
It is really nice to have much speed as possible.. never know when u need it.. i have 750/60 connection and there is reserves for many things.. :) Nice to have 500hp car even u cant always use full potential.. right? ;)
 
Basically, when I work from home, I don't have to worry about slow uploads or downloads.
It's worth the monthly cost to be able to push and pull files as quickly as the other end can feed them to me.
Not that I'd say "no" to 2GB service, but at this point I can't justify the price increase.
 
If you get one gig you can post your network speed test in the screenshot thread and try to grow your e-peen a little bit

The only places I see benefit from having higher speeds are a) newsgroups and b) steam


If change router/settings, my cable will hit 978/52 (down/up) almost all the time, however buffer-bloat is bad, even Roku buffers many times in 30min stream. Symmetrical speeds with fiber don't have much in the way of these problems (why 300mb or even 100mb fiber can feel faster) - Gigabit Cable will in fact be lower latency if your provider fully supports docsis 3.1 standard though (in my area when I bumped up, my latency dropped 8ms down to 7ms).
 
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How's that a modem (even docsis 3.1) will be lower latency than a direct link with fiber? I (we here) ditched modems loong ago as an antique technology. Even for TV coaxial is no more used and IPTV is current for most. With fiber now I have 2ms latency, before I had FTP, I had 2-3 ms, virtually the same. Modems just can add to latency, be it microseconds or so (but much more than that). Not to mention the absurd down/up asymmetry inherent to modems.
I guess it's about the area and what coverage you can expect from different technologies.
 
Having had broadband since 1997 with DirectPC by Hughes and now Google Fiber for the past 6 years nearly, faster internet is nice regardless. Take my advice and do not listen to the gallery of people especially if they try and sway you one way or another. It's a basic common sense question that only you can answer. Do you have the money and do you want to go faster. If the answer is yes, then pull the trigger.

Faster internet improves every aspect of your online experience. Email, Video, Gaming, Music and Web, plus, potentially other things.

The absolute worse usage scenario is that spend $70 to $120 a month and only occasionally update a few drivers and watch a few YouTube Videos of which I am sure there are many many people that do this. A lot of those people have 3K to 5K a month incomes and it's nothing to them.

If you watch 10 - 60 mins of YouTube content daily. If you game, if you download content fairly often then it's worth it.

If you do get Gigabit internet, go here and grab this - https://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php This will allow you to optimize your Windows for better speeds.

There is a lot you can do with faster internet. Depending on how proficient you are at networking you can leverage this speed to do a lot of cool things. Such as bonding, concurrent connections, along with some other cool tricks via hardware and software.

I won't speak on piracy but I will say if you want to branch out on getting the most of that bandwidth then look into taking an hour or two out of your day and learning about usenet.

Here are some great resources, use them. My advice is based on 20 years of personal broadband experience.

Newshosting, SABnzbd. I won't go into the specifics other than to say, these are the best case scenario options based on price and performance, ease of use and headache free.

For mass storage, I strongly recommend nothing else other than the $169 8TB WD Hard-drive that goes on-sale occasionally at Best Buy. There are several threads in the Hot Deals section here on HardOCP.

This advice will steer you in the right direction and help you to avoid the least amount of issues.

BTW, your speed is useful all over the internet. Lot of kids talk about the internet is only only as fast as the server your connected to. It's kind of a BS response, statement. I'm also a web developer, hosting, SEO, you name it. The internet has tons of bandwidth and then some. You will be fine. There is benefit to you with 99% of what you will do with Gigabit internet. Again, lot of kids are sour and salty so their advice is tainted. They don't have it, and if they don't have it, then others don't need it and they will go out of their way to tell you why you don't need faster internet. Lot of those clowns out there.

Just get it and decide along the way if it's worth the money.

Look, I'll put it another way. If you're single and Paris Hilton shoes up at your doorstep because her car is broke down and asks you to spend the night. You don't need anyone's advice on what to do. This also goes for the $100 bill you just found in your front yard. You should already know what to do.

Also, not a lot of people even have the Gigabit option. You're def in the 1% in this regards. If anything, get it to represent all your dead homies that died with their 5mbit internet service. GIgabit Internet would be like you pouring out a virtual 40oz over their slow-ass internet graves.

Reprezent beyotch.

There is also this rumor going around that If you tell those emo goth fake video-game girls in the anime cosplay outfits at comic-cons that you have Gigabit Internet, it can help in getting you laid.

( I think my Danish and Coffee just kicked in )

Good luck.
 
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Thanks for all the feedback fellas. Luckily, since I jumped ship from Comcast, my current ISP (RCN) is basically charging +10,+20 dollar difference /month (e.g. starbucks money) between the bottom and top plans. I think gigabit is $50 bucks or so? I'm on the 155Mb plan for the last year or 2 so the price has creeped up from $30 or so but I've been perfectly happy with the speed I already have.

Do I actually need gigabit? Nah. Though the idea of downloading Steam games superfast is appealing, is it +$120 /+$240 more per year - which I could spend on other things / hardware?

BTW: SixFootDuo quote of the day for getting faster internet " ... get it to represent all your dead homies that died with their 5mbit internet service"
 
SixFootDuo

I'm not goint to quote that monster wall of text, but you are wrong. If you have a 100Mb line, and none of the services you are using are being limited by that, there will be ZERO increase in speeds with a 1Gb line... It absolutely is limited by the server/service you are accessing. If it can't serve content to you at 100Mb/s, what makes you think upgrading your line to 1Gb will change that? *hint* It won't....

The only time it would help to increase from 100Mb to 1Gb is if you have multiple people saturating the line, or you are using a service that is actually being limited by your current internet speed. Outside of that, you are filling the pockets of the greedy ISPs for no benefit to yourself other than a lighter wallet.

- devops engineer, previously sys/network admin
 
SixFootDuo

I'm not goint to quote that monster wall of text, but you are wrong. If you have a 100Mb line, and none of the services you are using are being limited by that, there will be ZERO increase in speeds with a 1Gb line... It absolutely is limited by the server/service you are accessing. If it can't serve content to you at 100Mb/s, what makes you think upgrading your line to 1Gb will change that? *hint* It won't....

The only time it would help to increase from 100Mb to 1Gb is if you have multiple people saturating the line, or you are using a service that is actually being limited by your current internet speed. Outside of that, you are filling the pockets of the greedy ISPs for no benefit to yourself other than a lighter wallet.

- devops engineer, previously sys/network admin

"The only time" ... ok, let's just stop you right there. Let's keep assumptions and generalizations out of it. I absolutely forbid you from ever giving advice again and I mean that. Check with me first next time.

Also, you sound sour and broke. People like you have tainted biased motives. You're advice comes from hate ... don't do that to people that ask for help. Greedy ISP's? "Filling the pockets of the greedy ISPs for no benefit to yourself." Google Fiber 1gbit service for $70. You really want me to feel hurt and taken advantage of by my Internet provider ... ok, not gonna happen.

No, no and no.

So when I downloaded Black Ops 4 in a handful of minutes at 120MB/s ... and get to play it after 6 or 7 minutes ... that's of no benefit to me? Ok ... wow, that sounds weird. So you're suggesting I NOT spend the additional $20 for 1gbit service and instead spend $50 on terrible slow internet. OK ... I think I get it .. but ... why? Oh .. right, none of this is of any benefit to me. OK. I remember now. BTW, my friend across town has slow horrible internet that he pays $60 for and it took him 2.5 hours to download.

I can serve you another wall of text telling how silly you sound but I have Black Ops 4 to play so I can't right now. Trust me, I can tear your logic completely and utterly apart.
 
If you have a 100Mb line, and none of the services you are using are being limited by that, there will be ZERO increase in speeds with a 1Gb line

...but what if you do?

How do you know that the services that the OP uses, or anyone uses, are limited to 100Mbps?
 
I have 1000 / 60 on a docis 3.1 cabel for 30 USD /mo, it is nice but the little UL speed do annoy me ( coming from a house with fiber )
So i am looking for a new apartment where i can get the fiber again and get true 1000 / 1000 internet.

When you for so long have been locked down at 5 / 1 mbit which was all the phone in my house could handle, then when fiber coming to town, then you jump at the chance.
And also here the cobber ( phone and cable ) are ruled by one monopoly that are a sick company i do not want to support, then fiber are my only chance to be free of those clowns.
Actually my new cable provider was not them, but they just picked up my provider, so again my money go to a company that should not exist, and i dont like that.
 
One thing that is often overlooked is if there are monthly download limits associated with a particular internet plan. Limits where if you download and/or upload more than a certain amount of data per month, you usually get charged extra money on top of your normal monthly bill (or have your speed significantly throttled, depending on ISP). In most cases I would rather have a slower connection with no monthly cap than a gigabit internet connection with a monthly cap. Downloading faster is convenient but ultimately everything will always finish downloading eventually. Of course fast with no cap is the best, but not all "gigabit" internet plans are the same just like not all "unlimited" cell phone plans are the same.

My current ISP only offers gigabit on their residential plans - but those plans all have monthly caps. I'm at 300Mbps download because i'm on a business plan, with no monthly cap. I transferred over 5 times what the residential plan would have allowed last month.
 
Other than the usual emails and things, the only big downloads I have are when I put a new box together and have to run Windows update, load Steam / Origin / Gog / XYZ apps onto a blank drive along with MS OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox.

On a day to day basis, it's just streaming Youtube videos, YouTube TV, Netflix kinda things. I'm not sure how much I use, but it can't be that much per month I wouldn't think.
 
Lot of upset people here.

This is a dumb argument.

1Gb/s internet connections are cheap and getting cheaper. Gatekeeping what others could or could not benefit from, especially if they don't want to educate themselves is such a useless exercise.

Why would anyone else care?
 
...but what if you do?

How do you know that the services that the OP uses, or anyone uses, are limited to 100Mbps?

I have zero knowledge of what services others use and never claimed to. I used arbitrary numbers to explain why the other user saying *paraphrasing* "Faster is always better, and isn't limited by the server your connecting to" is completely false.


"The only time" ... ok, let's just stop you right there. Let's keep assumptions and generalizations out of it. I absolutely forbid you from ever giving advice again and I mean that. Check with me first next time.

Also, you sound sour and broke. People like you have tainted biased motives. You're advice comes from hate ... don't do that to people that ask for help. Greedy ISP's? "Filling the pockets of the greedy ISPs for no benefit to yourself." Google Fiber 1gbit service for $70. You really want me to feel hurt and taken advantage of by my Internet provider ... ok, not gonna happen.

No, no and no.

So when I downloaded Black Ops 4 in a handful of minutes at 120MB/s ... and get to play it after 6 or 7 minutes ... that's of no benefit to me? Ok ... wow, that sounds weird. So you're suggesting I NOT spend the additional $20 for 1gbit service and instead spend $50 on terrible slow internet. OK ... I think I get it .. but ... why? Oh .. right, none of this is of any benefit to me. OK. I remember now. BTW, my friend across town has slow horrible internet that he pays $60 for and it took him 2.5 hours to download.

I can serve you another wall of text telling how silly you sound but I have Black Ops 4 to play so I can't right now. Trust me, I can tear your logic completely and utterly apart.


Sounds like some heavy deflection going on here. I'm not sour, and make far more than the 3-5k/mo you mentioned in your first post. Your post I replied to was wrong. Faster is not always better, and I gave examples of why. You benefit from the 1Gb/s line because EA is most likely using a CDN for their game updates, which will absolutely saturate your bandwidth. This is exactly one of the reasons I said would benefit from the faster internet speed, so thanks for confirming that. Now if they were throttling their software updates to say 50Mb/s, then having a 1Gb/s connection will do absolutely nothing.

So enjoy BlackOps reskin 4, but please stay in web development and far away from any network administration.


Oh, and only a very small percentage of the population has access to cheap 1Gb/s google fiber. So your example of 70$/mo doesn't apply to most people, myself included. In reality, the jump to 1Gb/s will be a huge price increase for most areas. I'm in LA and my bill would be 4x as much if not more to get 1Gb. If you have google fiber, then that's obviously the best choice for the price. But that doesn't mean you go telling everyone they all need a 1Gb connection because it's will make everything faster, because that's false.

*edit* I just looked it up. I pay 60$/mo for 100/5 cable (dsl is the only other option, and I'm in LA). To get 400Mb/s it doubles. To get to 940Mb/s it jumps to 250$/mo.
 
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I have zero knowledge of what services others use and never claimed to. I used arbitrary numbers to explain why the other user saying *paraphrasing* "Faster is always better, and isn't limited by the server your connecting to" is completely false.

But that's not what was said...?

I'm not sour

You may believe that as you type it, but I don't think you're going to convince anyone ;)

[that said, if the argument was literally that 1Gbps 'makes everything better', then you'd be right to criticize, but since it isn't, you're kind of off base]
 
But that's not what was said...?



You may believe that as you type it, but I don't think you're going to convince anyone ;)

[that said, if the argument was literally that 1Gbps 'makes everything better', then you'd be right to criticize, but since it isn't, you're kind of off base]

Direct quotes:
"Faster internet improves every aspect of your online experience. Email, Video, Gaming, Music and Web, plus, potentially other things."

"BTW, your speed is useful all over the internet. Lot of kids talk about the internet is only only as fast as the server your connected to. It's kind of a BS response, statement."


Is there any other way to read that?
 
I wasn't able to see what some (remote) services were able to provide until I got my 1G connection. Sure, not full Gig but something like 200 or 300Mbit.
Two of the web hostings I use provide more than 100 mbit, one is full gig (96MB/s upload/download), the other is 30-35MB/s. Two clouds are 200 Mbit, including what seems to be almost local CDN to me - Google Drive.
How often and to what extent I can benefit long-term from that, is another story.
There is no use to argue. Everyone can share what they use their connection for but the other factor is the price, but this is something everyone decides for themselves based on what they can pay for 100+ Mbit.
 
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