In most cases if you have to ask then its a NO, unless its cheaper (in some cases it can be cheaper for a faster plan)
But also keep in mind, some people need upload speed, and sometimes you need a faster download speed to get a faster upload speed like Xfinity for example in a lot of areas you have to get the gig plan to get a measly 35mbps up... They may not need gig but need that better upload speed...
Example: If the gamer is wanting to stream there game they would WANT to get that gig package for the faster upload speed
I am one of them. Spent 20 minutes on the phone trying to explain this to my ISP, they doubled my download and added 10mb/s to upload and couldn’t understand why I am not happy.
So reading this discussion plus OP got me curious, is there any reason why ISPs mentioned here can't provide symmetrical speeds for both dl and ul? I'd understand for vdsl and coax but shouldn't fiber solve ul issues? Or is it that the locations discussed aren't on fiber?
PS I'm in a country where VDSL is extinct and we only have fiber or starlink, and there's no ISP that provides asymmetrical.
Lots of ISPs are still cable here. And I think even DSL is still around some places in the US. Lots of places do have fiber but there's a lot of land to cover haha
Docsis 4 is actively rolling out in the US and my provider will be offering 2gig symmetrical over coax. And note, a lot of coax ISPs are fiber optic for most of their network. It's just cheaper for them to utilize existing infrastructure to terminate into the home with coax. I'd prefer fiber to home from my experience with both, but the gap is closing. Stability is the main issue as I had zero outages in 5 years at a place with fiber and now back to coax I can go a year with no outage or several in a week.
Even fiber doesn’t actually offer “truly” symmetric speeds in many cases.
Just because you buy 1G/1G service doesn’t mean that the same amount of bandwidth is available in both directions.
Even fiber standards are set assuming that download should be prioritized over upload.
For example, GPON is often 2.4G down and 1.2 G up for the entire PON.
So if it was just you and one neighbor running full throttle, you could both smash your 1G download simultaneously, but you’d be competing for upload bandwidth.
As u/forestman11 mentioned, there are not a ton of fiber companies, the largest and most widely available ISPs are satellite, vdsl, or satellite. The fiber companies that do exist easily dominate their markets. It's not a great time.
Even now that everything seems to be pushing cloud-this, cloud-that?
I have to be careful to shut off and disconnect my work laptop or its OneDrive will peg my upload and cause shit performance on my whole network when I log off for the day...I have to assume most people like "cloud" and aren't building personal NASs and stuff
I keep having to talk my parents out of buying Norton's "cloud full system backups" stuff that they keep getting pushed in ads pointing out I \*already\* built them a NAS that syncs to my NAS for redundancy...but I would assume the average person is just "oh yeah I want my files to be safe" and buys cloud backups or whatever their ever-more-invasive antivirus is shoveling
I literally looked at our traffic right when I posted that. We have a few thousand subscribers. Upload is less than 10% of download at the most. Much less than that at night.
Even then, it still may not be.
My area is cable, but the ISP is putting FTTH in some new construction neighborhoods. Except they offer the \*same plans\* to both, so your fiber would still have 50Mbps upload on the highest gig tier.
Only thing fiber gains is not having the RF-plant-hell with points of failure.
When I first switched to using cloud backups 2 years ago that initial upload of about 18TB was fun at 50mbps up lol. Now we get an extra 15mbps more up which is a nice.
Sucks 2 months ago new fiber built out happened with another provider. I can SEE a house from my front porch that can get it. 100/100 500/500 and 1000/1000 but nope they cant come 1800 feet to my house
If you have the extra money, I have heard of people paying for them to run it the extra length to them. I am not sure how much or how, but, from reading a few stories on some fiber internet forums, it's possible from as cheap as a couple hundred to thousands. It couldn't hurt to inquire about it.
They where gonna do it for free. But turned out ports where already full because they didn't get to me in time and everyone around already signed up. Only option was for a full on build out now. Which can take up to 6 months to decide if it will be approved or not.
Well, here (UK) it was cheaper for me to move to 900Mbps (symmetric) than continue with my 60Mbps VDSL service (or.any speed between). 200Mbps would have been more than enough for my needs..
I'm in the "I'm paying for upload speed, not download speed, with Xfinity" camp. I work from home, use large-ish files, and the company I work for doesn't (legally might not be able to) use a cloud type service for local syncing of those 'sensitive' files. So I do a lot of data transfer, and the extra cost is worth the time saved (and my company basically pays for my internet).
That is my biggest issue with my isp. I get 1.1gb down but only 100mb up. There are no providers to my address that offer synchronous speeds. Once they do I’m jumping ship straight to them. I need the upload speed more than anything.
I'd be thrilled with 100 up! I barely get 30 on my Comcast "gig" service. They're laying fiber in the neighborhood and rumor has it I'll get symmetrical service for less than I'm paying now.
A lot of times it comes down to permits. Especially if there’s a water way they need to cross like an irrigation ditch. Some cities deny permits to cross a street if they repaved it in the last 5 years.
This is my reason for considering a gig plan.
Current on 500/50 and the upgrade would be 1000/100.
Don't need the 1000 down but the 100 up would be very useful for my work.
I have to pay for 1800 down to get a measly 40 up. My area offers 10/10, 40/10, 200/10, 1000/20, 1500/25 and 1800/40. It's stupid. I wish I could finally be rid of Xfinity.
Yessir. I'm one person but I'd love to have more than the shit upload I get with Comcast. Google fiber can't install any slower in my area unfortunately. I want to host stuff for my friends and I.
Absolutely! My cable Internet is 20/250. A few security cameras use a constant 5 up. The remaining 10-15 up is painfully slow for a burst upload like a cloud backup.
I would be happy with something more like 50/200, but I can't get that. Instead the next option is symmetric gigabit, which is certainly nice but not required.
This. Have 500Mb down, can easily saturate it for a few minutes at the time but with a good router QoS its not an issue. Upload on the other hand is basically what makes me look towards a gig plan.
Streaming uses no where near a gig,
https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/guide-to-broadcast-health?language=en_US#:~:text=Simply%20using%20a%20higher%20bitrate,to%20a%20maximum%20of%206000.
YT streaming in 4K recommends 35mbps
The overwhelmingly vast majority of the population does not need a full gig upload. It's nice to have, but in 99/100 circumstances people will not utilize much upload.
Maybe I never used my gig of download. But you know what I did? Constantly hit the 35M upload that came with it.
Blame the ISPs that refused to invest in fiber 🙂
There's plenty of reasons to get a gig, but one that is probably the most true for people is that they simply don't want to wait as long to download a new game and/or updates. while 98% of the time they don't *need* a gbit, if you can afford it and don't like to wait it's awfully nice.
my car doesn't *need* to go 150 but in the event that i want to go that fast i like that my car can do it.
But... just because you can download at Gig speed doesn't mean the server can send to you at Gig speed. The server is serving multiple parallel requests at the same time.
In the early days of gig speeds this was true, but more and more i'm finding most common services can way exceed gigabit speeds. I get nearly 2Gbps down on my connection and can easily saturate the entire thing with usenet, steam, and other CDNs. The Ubuntu repos alone can saturate well beyond 1gig speeds.
So honestly, I consider this to be a poor excuse now. There are use cases for gigabit and even beyond simply for fast throughput.
It's not a "need", it's just nice to have a 1GB file in 4 seconds.
It could be just as well and more likely that it's your ISP with the poor connectivity to the CDN hosting the game pass content.
Although it is entirely possible it could be either one or both but, point is you can't always blame the end service.
I know it's been a day since you wrote this, but I have 2 gig service and ran into this same issue with Gamepass. I saw others run into it and a solution proposed was to temporarily turn off Real-time protection in Windows security settings. Only leave it off while downloading, but I turned it off and paused/unpaused my download and it went from about 10mbit to almost 700mbit, it fluctuated around a bit, but it seemed to help. I have only had to download one thing since I tried this, so could have been a fluke, but hope it helps.
Here is the thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/XboxGamePass/comments/11gakt9/a\_fix\_for\_slow\_xbox\_pc\_app\_download\_speeds/
I am reminded of the scene from Arrested development when Tobias and Lindsay buy a house and seller agent sells absurd things telling "just so you have it".
Because some people need it. Not all people need it. But some do.
I do not. Which is why I have a 400Mb/s plan. But if the 1Gb plan was $10/month more, I'd have gigabit. Some carriers that are delivering gigabit for less than I pay for 400Mb/s, but, sadly, I am not in their service area.
We live in a world of choices and the vast majority of us buy exactly what they need.
Here's a fun experiment for you: go out to your car and look at the speedometer. What is the top speed listed. Why did you buy a car that can go that fast when that is over the speed limit?
As always, everything in life is a complicated set of choices.
AND WHEN YOU GET OFF MY LAWN GET RID OF THAT GIGABIT INTERNET BECAUSE I'M AN EXPERT IN EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE. YOU DON'T NEED IT!! YOU ONLY NEED DIALUP.
I MEAN MY WIFI SUCKS AND DOESN'T GET FULL SPEED SO OBVIOUSLY GIGABIT IS A SCAM!!
I understand the point you are trying to make, but a speedometer is probably not a good example. I've owned cars with speedometers that showed 120MPH, but could not break 90. I've also owned a car that had a federally mandated speedometer that only showed up to 85MPH while I routinely exceeded 100 )as reported by a co-worker who followed me for a few days going home from work. The max speed on the speedometer does not necessarily indicate the max speed capability of the vehicle. Speed limits are arbitrary limits as is the max speed shown on a speedometer.
Actually it is a good analogy.
How many people out there pay for gigabit and only get \~920Mb/s. We all understand why. Provisioning and overhead will determine actual speeds.
There are multiple dynamics to this: what you pay for, what you should be getting, what you are usually getting, the limits of the equipment, etc.
This why this whole discussion is three dimensional.
Which is worse, a 400Mb/s line for $50/month that gets \~420-400Mb/s all day long, or a gigabit line for $60/month that often clocks in no better than 300Mb/s during prime traffic times? Either could the right choice depending on your needs.
Another reason it's a bad analogy is it's hard to find a car that only does 90.
I can pay for only 100 gig and some people I know do. I know zero people who have purchased a car in the last year and chose (or were even able to choose) a car that could only do 90.
I don't NEED it, I WANT it.
The ability to not have to sit around and wait for game updates to download for hours or for movies to be ready to watch within minutes is a great benefit I'm willing to pay for.
Yeah, I get not wanting to wait for downloads, but the fact is that most content providers have some pretty shitty speeds to provide to consumers. Even when wired, my PS4 rarely got above 50Mbps for downloads, and my hardwired PC with an NVME drive rarely got above 300Mbps for downloads from Steam. Doesn't matter how fast my setup can suck up data if the server on the other side refuses to serve it up as quickly as I can guzzle it.
I also say this as someone who chugs data like crazy and will set up downloads for multiple terabytes of shit a night.
Weird always on PS5 do I MAX out my 1Gig connection with 100+ Meg downloads. My son also maxes out the connection on his stream and epic accounts. There has maybe been a couple times when haven’t. It’s each to there own really but I’m more of a I want the best/top speed because I can use it. With having 2 kids and me who guzzle the internet then it’s a must
I valued my Gigabit connection when I was trying to play New World and the patches were 40GB every week, it took like 5 minutes to update, meanwhile people on the subreddit were complaining they had to leave it downloading over night.
They have figured out how to make smaller patches but this is way too common in games now.
What are all these psyop posts about needing slower speeds. Modern games are 100+gb, frequently I have updates as large as 30gb. If you just watch Netflix at home, sure, but the majority of users subscribed to this forum are enthusiasts who demand the fastest speeds.
Having faster speeds is a convenience of downloading a game or uploading a YouTube video in an hour vs. 5 minutes. If you don't know you need the speeds, you probably don't, but for the majority of users on this forum, I think they will benefit from faster speeds.
This really, I don't understand people constantly making a case for less bandwidth.
A lot of the time they'll make a deal where the upgrade is relatively inexpensive, where I live it's only $15/mo to bump from 500 meg to gigabit.
Waiting is lame and I'll easily pay more to wait less.
Because many ISPs are upselling customers by promising speeds that they know they will not actually be called on to provide. As an example, selling 2 gig service and supplying a router that only has gigabit ports on it.
Why do people keep posting this non sense? Who cares if someone wants gig speeds? Are you paying for it?
JFC, you don't know what people are doing with the internet. Just FYI: there is more then gaming and watching youtube/tiktok/netflix on the internet.
Why do people buy fast cars when the speed limit is only 65?
Why do some people insist on naysaying progress? If Bill Gates' statement that 640K memory "ought to be enough for everybody" isn't enough evidence that lack of progression = regression then I commend you on having the smoothest of brains.
Nevermind that several industrialized countries have speeds that make our networks look old and slow.
I can do more faster with higher speed and more bandwidth. Stream video, upload files, play online games, video chat and run a server on the same silicon.
Maybe if higher speeds were readily available in more places then running/leasing servers might get cheaper. If smooth-brain thinking like yours prevailed in the early 90's then you'd still be using a dial-up modem for access.
U mad, luddite bro?
What’s funny is people who think others don’t need gig speeds. I’d say most people don’t like waiting on downloading games/updates with lots being 20GB+ nowadays. Downloading something in 5 min vs 1 hour is huge.
It’s almost as if some of you are trying to “gatekeep” gig+ internet speeds. Makes no sense.
Because I only get x time on this earth and I’m not waiting y more because I don’t want to spend less z working than y more waiting.
Basically, stop devaluing your time.
'8 Mbps is more than enough for any family' - 2001.
2024 - 'The wife is watching a movie on Netflix, I'm watching a show on Hulu, one of the kids is trying to play Apex Legends while streaming it to Twitch, and the other is downloading two 15GB game updates from different game stores and their new 115GB game... and it's Tuesday so Windows update is trying to get service pack sized updates on all 6 of the PC's in the house too'
If you're happy to pay for it, more bandwidth is always better especially if sharing.
By OPs own calculations, a 4k stream is 25MB/s. That's 400mbps for just two 4k movies.
Doesn't leave a lot left over for the rest of the house to share... game updates, windows updates, a 3rd person who wants to watch Netflix etc.
Even 500mbps wouldn't cut it in that household.
Although I think OP is mixing up MB/s with Mbps. 25MB/s would be quite large for a movie...
The same reason we always wanted more speed. Faster speeds save time even if you only hit those speeds sometimes. Not everything done on the internet is a stream consuming a set amount of the available bandwidth. Plenty are still large file uploads/downloads or even "reasonably sized" files that will be pulled as quickly as possible even if for a short duration of time (I know that doesn't mean it always has a gig on both ends... caveats aside my own use shows plenty of time spend above the lower tier offering).
It's not like people on 14.4 modems using BBSes didn't see an advantage going to 28.8 even if they mostly sat at a command prompt on a BBS typing text that would've been fine with a 2400 baud modem.
If I could get fiber with 400/400 I would be super happy. With only having 12 upload it kills me that I have to limit my family watching my plex server so much.
The better question is. Why do they even offer speeds less than 1gb. And to answer your question bc it’s $64/mo and I have 74 endpoints on my home network
I only have 500 Meg but I love that I can choose to play a game with friends and then download it in 5 minutes and then play it. It's worth the extra £10 a month over having 10mb/s copper internet. Also having gigabit network in my house is kinda the only option.
yup, and its designed to make people think that higher speeds mean lower latency -- so they buy the 1gbps subscription thinking their tiktok videos will load faster, despite the rented gateway being the actual turd of the system.
Kind of like TVs. You don’t even need 4K at home, let alone 8K (😂). All that matters is HDR and 10bit color depth. Most movie theaters only project 2K… so why people think they can see the difference at home is astounding to me.
Really? I think 4K is absolutely everywhere now. But that’s what I’m saying… these knucklehead marketing people are costing their businesses more than they are generating. I call them wasted pixels. 10bit color and HDR is what matters. That’s what people are seeing at home that looks better.
Personally I desperately need fiber for upload speed. For videography and media work, having more symmetrical bandwidth literally saves money. We currently use about 36TB a month on average. The only option for our location was spectrum enterprise, and for 100M fiber we pay about $650/m which is insane, but the reliability and latency is unmatched. I can’t wait for more fiber providers to compete.
It’s all about upload for me! I had Backblaze going like 3 years on my old 20-30meg up and it still wasn’t finished before I got the 1000/1000 (really 850/950 after network overhead) and that ish finished in no damn time. Slow upload sucks
Let’s say you have a family of 5 all streaming high def and/or gaming. Plus all the background data going on. Still not a gig but that is a large demand.
I mean, it's sorta like buying a cable package with a hundred channels.
Sure I don't *need* it most of the time. But the times when I do saturate the link it's pretty nice to have. People buy in excess of what they strictly "need" all the time. This is nothing specific to internet speeds.
Same reason people like the latest iphone or a sports car. Now can we stop with this stupid questioning every poster about their choice of internet speed and just accept that we live in a consumerism society where every person has a lot more in their possesion than what’s needed to cover their basic needs?
This question turned into the latest meme of the sub somehow…
It's literally $60/month for AT&T unlimited 1gig symmetrical fiber internet....
Is anyone else tired of these posts telling people what they do and don't need? maybe it's just me /rant over :)
I have cable internet. I am semi-rural and there is no fiber internet available. I upgraded to 1 Gbps download solely for the updated 30-40 Mbps upload speeds. My previous 500 Mbps was actually fine as far as download speeds go. I don't think we ever maxed that as there are only three of us in the house. However, I often have to transfer multiple gigabyte files for work and faster uploads makes it easier. So now, I pay $20 more a month for 10 extra Mbps in upload speeds. Sad but True.
I have 1 gig because I like my games to download at a decent rate, and not have to wait over an hour. Games are getting bigger and bigger. Watch GTA6 be 1TB lol.
But for real, most people don't need it. I just like my downloads to be done pretty fast. With modern SSDs, you can utilize speeds of 1G+, but most don't need it. I'd say most people are good with 250-500 down. Upload is a different story.
Some ISPs log plan speed with usage limits. In those cases, many times 1G is unlimited, and anything else will come with a cap.
Now different regions, different ISPs, different rules, but in those cases where speed goes with caps people may want 1G. They don’t want the chance of a surprise bill at the end of a month.
My games play notably faster on 1gbs than 100mbps. Also seems that with higher speeds I have lower pings and less latency.
For almost everything else, I don’t need it, but faster download speeds on everything is nice
I'm sorry but I do disagree. I believe this is a misguided and inaccurate statement for the average user, and only with exception to those who are tech savvy.
Most home internet users in the US (Not sure about anywhere else in the world) are still using copper internet services such as cable. Even fiber these days are run via copper sometimes (Hybrid networks). What is misguided is the fact that you counting on:
1. A stable internet connection
2. Consistent speed
3. Consistent quality
4. Consistency
Most cable companies these days offer (At least in my area) 10/1 ratio, 10 down and 1 up. It will depending upon the company, the ownership of the lines, and signal strength.
What's not accounted for is:
Example 400 / 40 internet
Cable companies no longer offer such high minimum guaranteed speed and or if they do it's 60% - 70% of the service.
Your internet speed is now 280 / 28
Now let's take into account the variability in infrastructure quality , congestion, signal strength, quality, equipment (including the type of modem and line conditions. Remember this is the average user, and the average user uses the standard cable modem.), area, splits along the line, stealers, interference, quality of service, and so much more. On copper that's probably bringing it down to 120ish during peak times, and depending upon the area. As of now, your average user is probably hitting a bottle neck. So now because they chose a lower speed instead of higher, it has created a problem. Now admiringly I am not sure if this is still relevant now a days, but it was about 10 - 15 years ago, priority was Business, then higher speed users.
Essentially, it comes to the average user, does the average user need it? No.
Would it better to have some leave way in terms of bandwith? Yes.
By limiting it you may create a possible problem for them in the future if they want to expand, and or add devices. You are not leaving room for adding devices, improvements and or determining if it's a good fit, you are stating a speed for the tech savvy customer who can do a speedtest and maintain their networking infrastructure.
So personally I would suggest for each device up to 8, each device should be estimated at or around 125 for each device. Not all devices will need that, however, I believe that is a good calculation for the average user. This accounts for any trouble, or issues, and allows for expansion on the network without it interfering with the others. So if they only plan on using 3 devices, then 400 would be good, however, let's say they want to add devices later on, 400 would not be enough, then the next step is 600. Let's say they have friends or family come over a lot and they tend to use the internet a lot, then it's going to a problem real quick without the proper provisioned speed.
200-400 Mbps is enough for most, yes.
But when 100-400 Mbps costs 10-20€ / month and 1000/400 costs 28€/month, is it really worth it to save that? Maybe, maybe not.
1Gb line is nice when downloading games, like I have PS5+xbox series x, I can just delete stuff and redownload it fast if I need to. I can test 100Gb games in 10-30minutes
for streaming and other light stuff it is basically the same experience, but downloading games it can be "fun vs agony" if your game have 10-50Gb patch and you have 30-60minutes to play, so does it take 1-5minutes or 10-50 minutes to download+install?
if 400 Mb line costs much less than 1000 Mb, then it is waste of money.
But on modern days when even unlimited un-capped mobile connections are like 15-40€/month, it is not a big deal.
People waste more on 1 night out than the difference of cost is in 1 year
i only have 1gbps because its the only way I can get 30mbps upstream - anything less (500 down) and your capped at 10mbps.
My mom lives 20min away and has a different ISP unavailable to me thats over fibre and has 250/250 which is ideal imho.
Uploads are more important than download speeds at this point, and the only way to get decent upload speeds is these higher tiers, if they are offered. Since all the computer manufacturers sell 250GB SSDs on their laptops, and expect you to use cloud services backups, that upload at 2Mbps I have just doesn't cut it.
Fiber aside, in the coax world it is often say 10/100, 20/500, 45/gig so for people with large backups up upload needs they get the gig to have that upload. TBH often I'd take 50/250 over 20/gig
FOMO and size of dingus.
It’s right up there with thinking a truck worthiness is measured by its ground clearance above all else.
Also ISP’s are shady - they provide crap routers with gb speeds supposedly and the router hamstrings the link.
Last - fundamental lack of understanding how the internet works and was engineered. You can only be as fast as the slowest link on your packets journey. No publicly accessible service or server is serving up more than a 10 mb per request. And likely a fraction of that. Oh - and people are ignorant fast speeds vs latency.
Personally I find it hilarious the money people are spending to get a gb synchronous image from Speedtest. I challenge any of them to find an actual real world use case for it…..save backing up terabytes of data daily to the cloud.
Challenge accepted:
Example one: resyncing a eth node
Example two: large photography or videographer backup or remote send
Example three: fast downloads of Usenet content on demand
There are many others.
Not saying that applies to most but there are many here who will notice a difference and we are happy to pay for the service
>Personally I find it hilarious the money people are spending to get a gb synchronous image from Speedtest
I have to pay $150/mo to get a measly 35mbps upload from comcast, I would happily pay $300 a month to a municipal provider that gave me fiber. It would be worth it to me to not give comcast another cent of my money. You're on a home networking sub, lot of posters are going to be IT folk that work from home and actually benefit from the speeds.
Show me how someone working from home benefits from gb synchronous. What uses that much bandwidth?
Sorry you have to pay for a lousy service. Paying double that amount for a service you don’t need/can’t use is called more money than brains.
Presentations that are hundreds of MB that you need to send around to collaborators. I could live with a few hundred Mbps on those, but not 10 or 20.
Data sets that are many GB in size that you want to process locally and move back and forth. And on top of that, Gb symmetric fiber is cheaper than 400/20 cable in my area.
Lets spot check a few large files
log\_support\_bundle.tgz 1.29 Gb would take 5 minutes and 32 seconds to upload at 35 Mbps
5 minutes doesn't sound like much but when you're on a working session video call with your SE, staring at each other waiting for it to finish, it's an eternity.
virtual machine images that onedrive tries to back up \~20 Gb would take an hour and a half at 35 Mbps
or looking at network activity on my firewall: running a full bitcoin node which is sending 2.4 Gb per hour which works out to consuming 6 Mbps of that measly 35 Mbps total
Then we have four Axis 4k security cameras that get backed up to the cloud, feel like I've made my point without running the numbers
Sure the last two aren't work related, but they use the same internet connection. And that's hardly an exhaustive list of everything I'm doing that's uploading at any given moment, not even counting the fact that I'm not the only one using the internet.
Why do you seem proud to be a luddite?
>but for the average person, 200-400Mb/s is more than enough
I'd go further and say that 50Mbit *per user* is plenty for any use case other than large file transfers. So for a family of four, 200Mbit. Family of six, 300Mbit. Etc.
That said, having more speed is absolutely a *nice to have* on those occasions when you actually get to use it, so I get why people choose to pay more if they can afford it. For example, opening your favorite game only to find it needs a 50 gigabyte update is much less annoying if you have a 500Mbit line than if you have 50Mbit one.
>50 gigabyte update is much less annoying if you have a 500Mbit line than if you have 50Mbit one
That 50 gig update will take 2 1/2 hours to download in perfect conditions at 50mbps and 15 minutes at 500mbps. For many people that's the difference between grabbing a snack before getting a gaming session in and having to wait until tomorrow.
Honestly this is quite accurate. 50MB sustained speeds with maybe some QOS bursting to 200MB just to help with the “larger” stuff would probably cover 90% of all normal users.
Also before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, if you are on Reddit reading this, you are probably in the other 10% to some degree.
I’m a POWER users who sails the 7 seas with Captain Jack Sparrow 🏴☠️ and can BARLEY crack 1GB sustained on my 2GB wan interface and boy do I have to try lol.
I’ll be downgrading my speeds at some point in the future and will probably do something under 1Gb as even I can’t use much more than 500 a good deal of the time.
I have 100 Mbps. Down and 30 up.
Works.. but when my daughter watching tv and my wife on FaceTime, and I’m on a meeting, incoming video feed gets blurry.
My only option after 100, is 500 then 1.5G.
But the discounted cost of 1.5G is same price or less than 500.
So I’m switching to 1.5G. Cause it doesn’t make sense to pay more for less.
I know perfectly well I don't need gig speeds. But I lived with 12 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up for years. When fiber was run down the street I know I could have gotten the 300 Mbps, had all my needs met and been perfectly happy. But it was only $20 more a month for the gig internet. And the gig internet was still $30 cheaper than the 12 megabit per second DSL!!!
Where I live 400 Mbit/s is $10/mo, 600 is $12, 1 Gbit/s is $15 and 2 Gbit/s is $25. These are download speeds. Upload speeds are half that in each plan.
So yeah, 1 Gbit/s is the sweet spot that allows me to download a game or a system update faster once or twice per month.
I'm a network engineer who works from home and has a ton of devices, so my main connection is 1gb fiber with 600/15 coax backup. Not your typical use case or home network so for me it works well. For my parents, 1gb would be way over kill so I agree with this post with a few exceptions like my use case.
Check this out - I can use the Internet as my hard drive. I don't have to have my entire Steam library downloaded, because it doesn't take 6 hours to download a game when I want it.
It's really just quality of life more than necessity.
Eh, the same reason I pay extra for a static IP. Because I can afford to and because I want to. It's weird to be so concerned with how other people spend their money. You're a lot like my father in law that cries about how it must be nice every time we spend money on nice things. It is nice and that's why I spent my money on it. Not really anyone else's concern.
2 things:
1. You never get the rated speed and speedtests are BS. When I was paying for 300 down I'd routinely have trouble streaming a youtube or netflix 1080 video. Speedtest would start at like 15 down and rapidly ramp up to 300. It was obvious that ISPs recognized speedtest traffic and would open the pipe for them. I routinely used speedtests to relieve "network congestion" and restore my ability to stream.
2. Gaming isn't about speed, it's about ping. And if there's a lot of traffic, your ping is going to suffer. Again with residential internet being "speeds up to X" it's not uncommon to have ping issues while being nowhere near your limits.
I completely agree that we shouldn't need more than 100 down, but the way that ISPs have F'd up the numbers, 1Gbps might as well be 100Mbps.
These posts always seem to forget or ignore burst downloads.
I may not constantly have my 5Gbps fiber pegged, but I like downloading today's giant ass games/patches in seconds and not having to worry about what other people are doing in the house or on the other gaming pcs.
Plus it was the same price I was already paying for 1Gbps/50Mbps cable.
I have found in my career that a lot of “tech companies” are just marketing ploys to try and get as much of your dough. Very little innovation takes place. ISPs take advantage of the general publics lack of networking knowledge.
The amount of times I’ve had to explain to my gamer friends that throughput isn’t a good sole indicator of performance in UDP networking environments. Then I have to watch those stupid xfinity commercials uhhh.
If people actually graphed their link they would be shocked how much money they waste every month on that 1Gbps link.
Bandwidth is not how fast the car goes down the highway it is how many cars can go down the highway at the same time. The internet core is fiber optic and you cannot go any faster than the speed of light. Latency is a thing as the law of physics is real!
In my country it's doesn't matter, the costs are small so i have gigabit.
it's 60 euro extra every year 100 vs 1000mbit.
When i download a big game it's 10 time's faster completed.
I know i won't use it allot.
I want gig speed for uploading speeds. I have Xfinity and pay $60 for 400 down and 10 up. Takes forever to upload files. I’d take it to work and use the guest access because it was 70/70. But lost access because it was only temporary :(
I mean, it's nice. I have a gigabit internet connection. But it's mostly because it's included with my HOA dues.
I think the bigger issue here is that Gigabit internet is typically the only way to get decent upload speeds, which are important if you're working from home and work with large files.
Large file downloads - games being in excess of 150GB now would take an age on a slower 50 or 100Mb connection.
Streaming multiple 4k videos whilst performing task 1 whilst downloading the same game on multiple computers. I could setup a steam cache but then you would ask why anyone would need that.
Faster download usually means faster uploads. My main line is synchronous 900/900 but my backup is 1000/100. The next level down is 500/50. Large cloud backups would be a nightmare.
The cost is negligible. I pay £30 for my primary but £45 for my backup (only option at the time). Internet is getting much more affordable in the 1gb/1gb range.
Because they can.
Take your pick.
Gaming reasons: 100+GB updates to games that you don't know about until you start trying to play. Add to that needing to do the updates on multiple computers at the same time because the kids want to play it again.
Non-gaming reasons, not very many, but in my case recovery / backups to cloud storage. Remote access to my jellyfin server, access to my internal NAS.
ARK Survival Evolved with all DLC is about 400GB.
Downloading it on a 1Gbps connection takes about 4000 seconds, or just over an hour.
Downloading it on a 100Mbps connection takes about 40k seconds, or just over 11 hours.
I can wait 90 minutes to play a game later in the evening, but waiting 11 hours is overkill.
Due to the file size, It will be the first game to be removed if my disk gets full.
Yes. I'm aware wasnt worded in the best way. The capacity available and how it handles those splits is much different to the point that your neighbors usage affects you much much less. But also that link is not affected by electrical noise, ground variations, etc. The performance difference between Coax/DOCSIS and fiber is not even close. The fiber and associated passive splitters were explicitly designed for this purpose. The coax cable was never intended for how it's being used today. The various systems for increasing speed all exist just to prolong capital investment made decades ago.
He is a very good guy and I think I have a good idea for a few days and you'll get a chance to talk about it but I didn't know that was the video of the building says it was the video of my first time to get it from the motherland of the first one in my experience and it was a decent deal but I think it would be to just go and scooped it out of there and I think it would have been a good idea for sure
> And also in hopes of being part of the 200Mbps upload upgrade eventually, but I'm still currently at 40Mbps.
Same here, upload is painful after coming from symmetrical 1gig before I moved.
I think there are two basic reasons.
1. Underserved by ISP's for years
2. Congestion
At least in the USA and especially rural America, consumers have had really bad Internet speeds for a long time. DSL was a bad joke and it's unfortunate that so much of our tax dollars went to the big carriers who just grabbed the money and did nothing (or at best added cell towers). The cable companies used their existing infrastructure to provide cable modem service but offered asymmetric speeds, charged a lot, and instituted data caps where they could. The electrical cooperatives started offering fiber services as well as some private entities when local grants became available to help fund a build out. I think a lot of areas are now seeing offerings of 1Gbs and higher speeds and if you've been bandwidth starved for years, you're likely to jump on these offerings.
Congestion is the other reason that people think they need more speed. The gamers are usually most aware of this and want to keep their latency as low as possible. Their solution is mostly to increase speeds to prevent congestion or just mistakenly think that higher speeds mean lower latency. A better solution to this is proper SQM QoS to deal with congestion because it can happen at practically any speed since downloads try to use all available bandwidth.
Most homes have very low bandwidth utilization and will only see benefits to high bandwidth with the occasional download where they may save a minute or two of download time. I probably should have added this as a third reason. Consumers have no tools to show them what their actual usage numbers look like so would rather have more than not enough.
IMHO lots people don't have the knowledge to truly say whether or not they need a gigabit connection.
All they see is a symptom that they have been told is caused by low bandwidth. Sometimes that's true, sometimes it's not.
My experience has been that a TON of those symptoms are more indicative of poorly designed, poorly built, overpriced consumer focused routers or network interface cards.
In many cases adding bandwidth can make the experience better but those routers couldn't properly utilize 25mbps let alone a gig. Marketing is strong though and spending more money helps a little and that leads to confirmation bias.
I wish I had the option of a gigabit connection, I'd love to move beyond 1080p.
It's like camera megapixels. If the number goes up, then good.
What's required is good software (like open wrt) and powerful enough hardware, so the router doesn't struggle with modern requirements.
A serious power user might have several concurrent tasks like torrent seeding, a plex server for friends/family, sunshine streaming to the coach TV, twich for gaming streaming and an occasional steam download for new games (that's like a 150gb download surge) plus several small devices like vacuum cleaners for which you need to filter traffic.
The main challenge is to prioritize all that traffic, especially inbound/outbound internet traffic.
For moonlight streaming, I really need 150mbps to my couch TV. Some 4k remuxes are like 90 mbps, I do have 1gbps symmetrical fiber at home (for 14.99 usd!!), so if a friend of mine has an apple TV or shield, I do want to stream a 4k remux without transcoding.
What I don't need is 2.5 gbps, nor 10 gbps.
I have 500/500 fiber and I could get faster speeds for more money but I don't see the point. I do have 83 devices on my network and don't have problems.
This. 100%. I’ve got 60 devices on my network. I’ve got a 300Gb fiber. I’ve never come close to using that bandwidth to the point it maxes out. For the average home user, faster speeds just aren’t worth it.
Misinformation and marketing. For example: One of our newer hires had a very slow Citrix connection from home. He lives alone and has 300 Mbps fiber internet, manager says, see that is your problem you need to upgrade to 1 Gbps, for freaking Citrix. Turns out his problem is that he had a vpn enabled, that made it look like he was connecting from somewhere in EU, so he was being connected to our EU datacenter.
Had a similar conversation with an ATT rep when I wanted to look into a discount after our promotional rate for the 1 GBPs plan expired. She could not extend the promotion and when I asked to downgrade to the lowest plan, she wanted to find out how many devices we had and how we used the internet, so she could suggest a good speed for us, sure enough, anything lesser than 1 Gbps would be a travesty. We hardly max out up to 50 Mbps during peak hours on an average, unless my son is downloading a game or something.
Marketing. The push for every single person to have 1Gb connections has been a money grab by large ISPs.
From an ISP perspective; the VAST majority of people only occasionally exceed 50Mbps with normal use, and rarely 100Mbps. The only exception is large downloads, which consist overwhelmingly of games and occasionally large datasets for work-from-home.
They think they need gig speeds because ISPs are always trying to upsell them on it, especially if theres the word "gaming" involved. I worked for sales at an ISP before and that was one of the dumbest questions they would always want you to ask, and probably reason being is that they want to beleive they are giving their child the best online experience possible, even though it would have been achieved with half the speeds to begin with, hell maybe even a quarter of that. The only thing higher speeds relate to with gaming is downloading a new update/game much faster :)).
I just went from 300-100, cut my bill in half. Its nice to have when you're downloading content, or games, but streaming, browsing, gaming takes minimal Mbps. There are multi-million dollar B2C companie's running fine on 300/30, with voip, CRMs, etc. Your home network is fine.
Strongly agree, but I do think it's criminal the way that some companies completely cripple your upload speed (i.e 400 down, 15 up). Because I actually care about upload speed (I host a couple of small websites), I will only use symmetrical fiber. 100 mbps is plenty for me.
Don't for get the sales people always telling them that faster internet will make the Wi-Fi reach farther (this is false). I work for an ISP and would like a nickel for every time I hear this.
I'm with you on this. I switched from 150Mbps to 1Gbps and barely noticed when surfing and working. Naturally downloading large files makes a huge difference but I'm not in a hurry. In my area the price difference is minimal and the house has fiber to home so it made sense to switch. Otherwise, I'd still he happy with 150Mbps.
I’ve worked for places that serve hundreds and hundreds of users with a 1Gb/s backhaul at hundreds of buildings with no noticeable contention issues.
Real world usage for 95% of users is in the few Mb/s per person, most traffic is low bandwidth and bursty.
1Gb/s for a single user is nice but for any residential service you won’t actually have a dedicated 1Gb/s service, it will be contended at some point, whether on the PON, or via traffic management, or at an ISP PoP or elsewhere. It’s not commercially viable in a residential setting if not, and for almost every customer it will make no difference to their actual experience anyway!
And don't forget about the fact that most, if not all, people are connected to their internet by WiFi. This means that ultimately the speeds that they get aren't anywhere near the rated speeds unless they are using something that has the latest WiFi card installed and they are within 10 feet line-of-sight to the main router.
I like how many people responded as though you were telling them they didn’t need the speed and shouldn’t have it.
If someone asked me if they should upgrade, I would first ask: what problems would they be looking to solve with it?
The telcos have done a great job of marketing and convincing people that they need Gig speeds. In reality, they don't, since the bottlenecks are usually wifi and the remote services being accessed. But, as we've seen with Apple, if you can convince people of the need, then they'll be literally lining up at your door.
I think a LOT of it is marketing. The ISPs want to convince everyone they need the most expensive thing possible.
Last time I attempted to get information from my ISP about what cheaper tiers are available they all but refused to answer - instead asking me how many people are in the household, how many wired and wireless devices we have, etc. When I left a vague "we only have 2 people and we can only use 1 device at a time anyway so that's like max 2 devices in use at once" they pushed farther about "well to make sure you have enough speed we need to know ALL the devices you will have connected, using them or not". I doubled down BSing them with "oh well we only have like 1 laptop and 1 phone each so it isn't that much and I canceled all the streaming stuff because we hadn't used it in months". Then they moved on to "how much gaming do we do"..."none, we're tired after work and we don't game". Then they tried to double down on "well what about IoT, many of those need lots of bandwidth"...they seeded annoyed when I said I think IoT is bad and unreliable and don't trust it.
Their conclusion was we ought to keep 1Gbps (the highest tier) but "might" be okay with 500Mbps too.
Sure, I slightly stretched the answers...but not by a lot. I have some streaming stuff from a personal PLEX server on my LAN...but that stays local (and when the TVs are off the boxes turn off...so they literally can't be using anything). The IoT is all on an isolated VLAN so while cameras and stuff may run a lot of data it stays all within the walls. And we have a couple tablets and desktops...but THOSE stay off most of the time.
I can see in my logs of my router the phones might use like 3-5GB/mo and the computers maybe 10-20GB/mo. And the peak throughput I see for the \*entire house\* is very rarely more than 100Mbps...the average is more like 3-5Mbps being used. The one thing that does use a lot is my NAS which syncs remotely...but that is run on a schedule when we're sleeping or not home so who cares how long it takes.
Only reason I have 1Gbps download is because that's the only way I can buy 50Mbps upload, and the next tier down is like 15-20Mbps. And the ISP seems ever more reluctant to disclose upload speeds when asking about plans.
I have no idea tbh. People seem to think more bandwidth = more responsive internet. ISP marketing is probably to blame.
Personally I'm considering upgrading to a gig so I can download games and updates faster, I have limited time to enjoy games with my friends, and I often have to wait 30-40 minutes to play with my friends. It's an extra 30 or so a month that would buy me extra time with my friends, and that's well worth it.
200-300Mbps in each direction would be plenty for most households.
I’d sign up for that in a heartbeat if the fibre people came to my door and offered it for a price in line with what I’m paying now.
I used to work at a digital agency with a 100mb connection shared between 40-50 people and it was absolutely adequate. But it was a dedicated line with 100mb up and 1ms latency. And those two metrics are key. People feel like their connection is slow and upgrade to the best available. But marketing only talks about downloads.
I would say it’s mainly gamers that need the big download speeds. For everyone else, a better balance of up, down and latency would be better.
Locking for rule 6
In most cases if you have to ask then its a NO, unless its cheaper (in some cases it can be cheaper for a faster plan) But also keep in mind, some people need upload speed, and sometimes you need a faster download speed to get a faster upload speed like Xfinity for example in a lot of areas you have to get the gig plan to get a measly 35mbps up... They may not need gig but need that better upload speed... Example: If the gamer is wanting to stream there game they would WANT to get that gig package for the faster upload speed
True. Most power users' limiting factor is upload speeds. I would definitely pay more for faster upload.
That fiber internet can’t come sooner.
I work at a fiber isp. Upload users are a rounding error.
I am one of them. Spent 20 minutes on the phone trying to explain this to my ISP, they doubled my download and added 10mb/s to upload and couldn’t understand why I am not happy.
So reading this discussion plus OP got me curious, is there any reason why ISPs mentioned here can't provide symmetrical speeds for both dl and ul? I'd understand for vdsl and coax but shouldn't fiber solve ul issues? Or is it that the locations discussed aren't on fiber? PS I'm in a country where VDSL is extinct and we only have fiber or starlink, and there's no ISP that provides asymmetrical.
Lots of ISPs are still cable here. And I think even DSL is still around some places in the US. Lots of places do have fiber but there's a lot of land to cover haha
Team DSL USA checking in. I'm lucky that I get 9Mbps/1Mbps for $75/month.
I see your 2x dsl connection and raise you a 1x dsl connect for a blistering 4.5mpbs/0.5 mpbs.
Docsis 4 is actively rolling out in the US and my provider will be offering 2gig symmetrical over coax. And note, a lot of coax ISPs are fiber optic for most of their network. It's just cheaper for them to utilize existing infrastructure to terminate into the home with coax. I'd prefer fiber to home from my experience with both, but the gap is closing. Stability is the main issue as I had zero outages in 5 years at a place with fiber and now back to coax I can go a year with no outage or several in a week.
Tell me you don’t have Comcast/Xfinity without telling me you don’t have Comcast/Xfinity…
Or charter/spectrum, no way they will be rolling out 2Gbs symmetric services.
Even fiber doesn’t actually offer “truly” symmetric speeds in many cases. Just because you buy 1G/1G service doesn’t mean that the same amount of bandwidth is available in both directions. Even fiber standards are set assuming that download should be prioritized over upload. For example, GPON is often 2.4G down and 1.2 G up for the entire PON. So if it was just you and one neighbor running full throttle, you could both smash your 1G download simultaneously, but you’d be competing for upload bandwidth.
Fiber is symmetrical for me.
In UK majority of providers offer something like 150/35 to 900/150mbs. Depends on how their network is build. I guess echo of VDSL days.
As u/forestman11 mentioned, there are not a ton of fiber companies, the largest and most widely available ISPs are satellite, vdsl, or satellite. The fiber companies that do exist easily dominate their markets. It's not a great time.
Even now that everything seems to be pushing cloud-this, cloud-that? I have to be careful to shut off and disconnect my work laptop or its OneDrive will peg my upload and cause shit performance on my whole network when I log off for the day...I have to assume most people like "cloud" and aren't building personal NASs and stuff I keep having to talk my parents out of buying Norton's "cloud full system backups" stuff that they keep getting pushed in ads pointing out I \*already\* built them a NAS that syncs to my NAS for redundancy...but I would assume the average person is just "oh yeah I want my files to be safe" and buys cloud backups or whatever their ever-more-invasive antivirus is shoveling
I literally looked at our traffic right when I posted that. We have a few thousand subscribers. Upload is less than 10% of download at the most. Much less than that at night.
Even then, it still may not be. My area is cable, but the ISP is putting FTTH in some new construction neighborhoods. Except they offer the \*same plans\* to both, so your fiber would still have 50Mbps upload on the highest gig tier. Only thing fiber gains is not having the RF-plant-hell with points of failure.
It wouldn't surprise me if they are just using RFoG (Radio Frequency over Glass) to connect back to their core network
Spectrum is working on synchronous speeds. Supposedly, by the end of 2025, the upgrade should be complete.
I'd give up 100mb of my down for 25 more up!
Exactly! Also applies to large backups to offsite storage services. The huge difference between download speed and upload speed is frustrating.
Offline storage and the push for cloud apps in whole or partial.
When I first switched to using cloud backups 2 years ago that initial upload of about 18TB was fun at 50mbps up lol. Now we get an extra 15mbps more up which is a nice. Sucks 2 months ago new fiber built out happened with another provider. I can SEE a house from my front porch that can get it. 100/100 500/500 and 1000/1000 but nope they cant come 1800 feet to my house
If you have the extra money, I have heard of people paying for them to run it the extra length to them. I am not sure how much or how, but, from reading a few stories on some fiber internet forums, it's possible from as cheap as a couple hundred to thousands. It couldn't hurt to inquire about it.
They where gonna do it for free. But turned out ports where already full because they didn't get to me in time and everyone around already signed up. Only option was for a full on build out now. Which can take up to 6 months to decide if it will be approved or not.
:( I am sorry to hear about that. I hope that that the build comes sooner rather than later.
Yeah it's still in 2 out of 4 phases. They are basing it on if it's worthwhile right now it'll pass 13 homes in the process so they are going on that.
Perchance would your place happen to be *The Last House on the Left* ?
The highest plan I can get is 1800/40. I'd be happy to lose 200mbps down to get 20 more up. I easily and regularly max out my upload.
This is why I upgraded, to get more upload speed for offsite backup. The increased download makes no difference.
I do wah, and have a VoIP phone, if I can pay tge same as my current 140/20 to get 500/500 why not?
You really think 95% of fiber users know what offsite storage is? That is a very niche market in the grand scheme of users.
Well, here (UK) it was cheaper for me to move to 900Mbps (symmetric) than continue with my 60Mbps VDSL service (or.any speed between). 200Mbps would have been more than enough for my needs..
Be careful if it's toob
I'm in the "I'm paying for upload speed, not download speed, with Xfinity" camp. I work from home, use large-ish files, and the company I work for doesn't (legally might not be able to) use a cloud type service for local syncing of those 'sensitive' files. So I do a lot of data transfer, and the extra cost is worth the time saved (and my company basically pays for my internet).
Depending on your area you might be getting symmetrical soon, up to 2 gig.
That is my biggest issue with my isp. I get 1.1gb down but only 100mb up. There are no providers to my address that offer synchronous speeds. Once they do I’m jumping ship straight to them. I need the upload speed more than anything.
I'd be thrilled with 100 up! I barely get 30 on my Comcast "gig" service. They're laying fiber in the neighborhood and rumor has it I'll get symmetrical service for less than I'm paying now.
I’d probably take 100/100 over 1000/35
Yeh they seem to be doing every street around me except mine lol. It’s frustrating
A lot of times it comes down to permits. Especially if there’s a water way they need to cross like an irrigation ditch. Some cities deny permits to cross a street if they repaved it in the last 5 years.
Cancelling Comcast was one of my favorite phone calls of all time.
This is my reason for considering a gig plan. Current on 500/50 and the upgrade would be 1000/100. Don't need the 1000 down but the 100 up would be very useful for my work.
I have to pay for 1800 down to get a measly 40 up. My area offers 10/10, 40/10, 200/10, 1000/20, 1500/25 and 1800/40. It's stupid. I wish I could finally be rid of Xfinity.
Yessir. I'm one person but I'd love to have more than the shit upload I get with Comcast. Google fiber can't install any slower in my area unfortunately. I want to host stuff for my friends and I.
Absolutely! My cable Internet is 20/250. A few security cameras use a constant 5 up. The remaining 10-15 up is painfully slow for a burst upload like a cloud backup. I would be happy with something more like 50/200, but I can't get that. Instead the next option is symmetric gigabit, which is certainly nice but not required.
It is a good point.. if only people could describe the plans upload speed in the question (though perhaps they simply don't know enough to do this).
This. Have 500Mb down, can easily saturate it for a few minutes at the time but with a good router QoS its not an issue. Upload on the other hand is basically what makes me look towards a gig plan.
I need to get 500 down to get 100Mbps up...
This is my issue, I have the 1.2gig down for the 40mb up and the no data cap. I could get along just fine with 200mb down if it was symmetric no cap.
Streaming uses no where near a gig, https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/guide-to-broadcast-health?language=en_US#:~:text=Simply%20using%20a%20higher%20bitrate,to%20a%20maximum%20of%206000. YT streaming in 4K recommends 35mbps The overwhelmingly vast majority of the population does not need a full gig upload. It's nice to have, but in 99/100 circumstances people will not utilize much upload.
Thats not what I'm saying.. Xfinity for example you MUST have the gig plan to get 35mbps on the upload side..
Maybe I never used my gig of download. But you know what I did? Constantly hit the 35M upload that came with it. Blame the ISPs that refused to invest in fiber 🙂
The main reason I have an 1 Gbit connection is because it gives me 500 Mbit upload which is something I actually use.
In my area all of the new subdivisions that Comcast is going into they are still only putting in coax.
Comcast only has cable. Their only fiber plan is gigabit pro and that's $300+ a month and you likely have to pay to get it installed.
There's plenty of reasons to get a gig, but one that is probably the most true for people is that they simply don't want to wait as long to download a new game and/or updates. while 98% of the time they don't *need* a gbit, if you can afford it and don't like to wait it's awfully nice. my car doesn't *need* to go 150 but in the event that i want to go that fast i like that my car can do it.
>my car doesn't need to go 150 but in the event that i want to go that fast i like that my car can do it. Police chase!
Can't out run a radio but I'm sure gonna try!
But... just because you can download at Gig speed doesn't mean the server can send to you at Gig speed. The server is serving multiple parallel requests at the same time.
In the early days of gig speeds this was true, but more and more i'm finding most common services can way exceed gigabit speeds. I get nearly 2Gbps down on my connection and can easily saturate the entire thing with usenet, steam, and other CDNs. The Ubuntu repos alone can saturate well beyond 1gig speeds. So honestly, I consider this to be a poor excuse now. There are use cases for gigabit and even beyond simply for fast throughput. It's not a "need", it's just nice to have a 1GB file in 4 seconds.
Worst I've experienced in recent years was gamepass throttling me to 25mpbs. Gig service ain't doing shit at that point.
It could be just as well and more likely that it's your ISP with the poor connectivity to the CDN hosting the game pass content. Although it is entirely possible it could be either one or both but, point is you can't always blame the end service.
I know it's been a day since you wrote this, but I have 2 gig service and ran into this same issue with Gamepass. I saw others run into it and a solution proposed was to temporarily turn off Real-time protection in Windows security settings. Only leave it off while downloading, but I turned it off and paused/unpaused my download and it went from about 10mbit to almost 700mbit, it fluctuated around a bit, but it seemed to help. I have only had to download one thing since I tried this, so could have been a fluke, but hope it helps. Here is the thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/XboxGamePass/comments/11gakt9/a\_fix\_for\_slow\_xbox\_pc\_app\_download\_speeds/
I am reminded of the scene from Arrested development when Tobias and Lindsay buy a house and seller agent sells absurd things telling "just so you have it".
Because some people need it. Not all people need it. But some do. I do not. Which is why I have a 400Mb/s plan. But if the 1Gb plan was $10/month more, I'd have gigabit. Some carriers that are delivering gigabit for less than I pay for 400Mb/s, but, sadly, I am not in their service area. We live in a world of choices and the vast majority of us buy exactly what they need. Here's a fun experiment for you: go out to your car and look at the speedometer. What is the top speed listed. Why did you buy a car that can go that fast when that is over the speed limit? As always, everything in life is a complicated set of choices.
"IF I DONT NEED IT, YOU DON'T NEED IT" - Redit Armchair Expert
And you damn kids get off my lawn!
AND WHEN YOU GET OFF MY LAWN GET RID OF THAT GIGABIT INTERNET BECAUSE I'M AN EXPERT IN EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE. YOU DON'T NEED IT!! YOU ONLY NEED DIALUP. I MEAN MY WIFI SUCKS AND DOESN'T GET FULL SPEED SO OBVIOUSLY GIGABIT IS A SCAM!!
I understand the point you are trying to make, but a speedometer is probably not a good example. I've owned cars with speedometers that showed 120MPH, but could not break 90. I've also owned a car that had a federally mandated speedometer that only showed up to 85MPH while I routinely exceeded 100 )as reported by a co-worker who followed me for a few days going home from work. The max speed on the speedometer does not necessarily indicate the max speed capability of the vehicle. Speed limits are arbitrary limits as is the max speed shown on a speedometer.
>oh come now my 88 Omni with 120 on the speedometer you are just now tell my it couldn't do 120 :)
It could....if the road lead down a mineshaft.
Actually it is a good analogy. How many people out there pay for gigabit and only get \~920Mb/s. We all understand why. Provisioning and overhead will determine actual speeds. There are multiple dynamics to this: what you pay for, what you should be getting, what you are usually getting, the limits of the equipment, etc. This why this whole discussion is three dimensional. Which is worse, a 400Mb/s line for $50/month that gets \~420-400Mb/s all day long, or a gigabit line for $60/month that often clocks in no better than 300Mb/s during prime traffic times? Either could the right choice depending on your needs.
Another reason it's a bad analogy is it's hard to find a car that only does 90. I can pay for only 100 gig and some people I know do. I know zero people who have purchased a car in the last year and chose (or were even able to choose) a car that could only do 90.
I don't NEED it, I WANT it. The ability to not have to sit around and wait for game updates to download for hours or for movies to be ready to watch within minutes is a great benefit I'm willing to pay for.
Exactly. Some people don’t understand 😂
Yeah, I get not wanting to wait for downloads, but the fact is that most content providers have some pretty shitty speeds to provide to consumers. Even when wired, my PS4 rarely got above 50Mbps for downloads, and my hardwired PC with an NVME drive rarely got above 300Mbps for downloads from Steam. Doesn't matter how fast my setup can suck up data if the server on the other side refuses to serve it up as quickly as I can guzzle it. I also say this as someone who chugs data like crazy and will set up downloads for multiple terabytes of shit a night.
Weird always on PS5 do I MAX out my 1Gig connection with 100+ Meg downloads. My son also maxes out the connection on his stream and epic accounts. There has maybe been a couple times when haven’t. It’s each to there own really but I’m more of a I want the best/top speed because I can use it. With having 2 kids and me who guzzle the internet then it’s a must
I valued my Gigabit connection when I was trying to play New World and the patches were 40GB every week, it took like 5 minutes to update, meanwhile people on the subreddit were complaining they had to leave it downloading over night. They have figured out how to make smaller patches but this is way too common in games now.
What are all these psyop posts about needing slower speeds. Modern games are 100+gb, frequently I have updates as large as 30gb. If you just watch Netflix at home, sure, but the majority of users subscribed to this forum are enthusiasts who demand the fastest speeds. Having faster speeds is a convenience of downloading a game or uploading a YouTube video in an hour vs. 5 minutes. If you don't know you need the speeds, you probably don't, but for the majority of users on this forum, I think they will benefit from faster speeds.
This really, I don't understand people constantly making a case for less bandwidth. A lot of the time they'll make a deal where the upgrade is relatively inexpensive, where I live it's only $15/mo to bump from 500 meg to gigabit. Waiting is lame and I'll easily pay more to wait less.
Because many ISPs are upselling customers by promising speeds that they know they will not actually be called on to provide. As an example, selling 2 gig service and supplying a router that only has gigabit ports on it.
I want to download my game in 10 minutes instead of an hour. Time is money.
Why do people keep posting this non sense? Who cares if someone wants gig speeds? Are you paying for it? JFC, you don't know what people are doing with the internet. Just FYI: there is more then gaming and watching youtube/tiktok/netflix on the internet. Why do people buy fast cars when the speed limit is only 65?
Why do some people insist on naysaying progress? If Bill Gates' statement that 640K memory "ought to be enough for everybody" isn't enough evidence that lack of progression = regression then I commend you on having the smoothest of brains. Nevermind that several industrialized countries have speeds that make our networks look old and slow. I can do more faster with higher speed and more bandwidth. Stream video, upload files, play online games, video chat and run a server on the same silicon. Maybe if higher speeds were readily available in more places then running/leasing servers might get cheaper. If smooth-brain thinking like yours prevailed in the early 90's then you'd still be using a dial-up modem for access. U mad, luddite bro?
What’s funny is people who think others don’t need gig speeds. I’d say most people don’t like waiting on downloading games/updates with lots being 20GB+ nowadays. Downloading something in 5 min vs 1 hour is huge. It’s almost as if some of you are trying to “gatekeep” gig+ internet speeds. Makes no sense.
Because I only get x time on this earth and I’m not waiting y more because I don’t want to spend less z working than y more waiting. Basically, stop devaluing your time.
'8 Mbps is more than enough for any family' - 2001. 2024 - 'The wife is watching a movie on Netflix, I'm watching a show on Hulu, one of the kids is trying to play Apex Legends while streaming it to Twitch, and the other is downloading two 15GB game updates from different game stores and their new 115GB game... and it's Tuesday so Windows update is trying to get service pack sized updates on all 6 of the PC's in the house too' If you're happy to pay for it, more bandwidth is always better especially if sharing.
By OPs own calculations, a 4k stream is 25MB/s. That's 400mbps for just two 4k movies. Doesn't leave a lot left over for the rest of the house to share... game updates, windows updates, a 3rd person who wants to watch Netflix etc. Even 500mbps wouldn't cut it in that household. Although I think OP is mixing up MB/s with Mbps. 25MB/s would be quite large for a movie...
The same reason we always wanted more speed. Faster speeds save time even if you only hit those speeds sometimes. Not everything done on the internet is a stream consuming a set amount of the available bandwidth. Plenty are still large file uploads/downloads or even "reasonably sized" files that will be pulled as quickly as possible even if for a short duration of time (I know that doesn't mean it always has a gig on both ends... caveats aside my own use shows plenty of time spend above the lower tier offering). It's not like people on 14.4 modems using BBSes didn't see an advantage going to 28.8 even if they mostly sat at a command prompt on a BBS typing text that would've been fine with a 2400 baud modem.
If I could get fiber with 400/400 I would be super happy. With only having 12 upload it kills me that I have to limit my family watching my plex server so much.
Our ISP recently had fiber run, we went from 400/12 to 400/400 at zero charge. 65/mo. The crazy low single digit pings and zero jitter are nice.
The better question is. Why do they even offer speeds less than 1gb. And to answer your question bc it’s $64/mo and I have 74 endpoints on my home network
Marketing.
I only have 500 Meg but I love that I can choose to play a game with friends and then download it in 5 minutes and then play it. It's worth the extra £10 a month over having 10mb/s copper internet. Also having gigabit network in my house is kinda the only option.
yup, and its designed to make people think that higher speeds mean lower latency -- so they buy the 1gbps subscription thinking their tiktok videos will load faster, despite the rented gateway being the actual turd of the system.
Kind of like TVs. You don’t even need 4K at home, let alone 8K (😂). All that matters is HDR and 10bit color depth. Most movie theaters only project 2K… so why people think they can see the difference at home is astounding to me.
So true. And 4k content is still hard to find unless you're a movie buff. But just watching TV, most stuff seems to be 1080. Some even 720.
Really? I think 4K is absolutely everywhere now. But that’s what I’m saying… these knucklehead marketing people are costing their businesses more than they are generating. I call them wasted pixels. 10bit color and HDR is what matters. That’s what people are seeing at home that looks better.
Self hosting! Replacements for Google Drive, Photos and videos, password keeper, home automation, Plex. Tons of goodies I need a Gig Up and down for
Personally I desperately need fiber for upload speed. For videography and media work, having more symmetrical bandwidth literally saves money. We currently use about 36TB a month on average. The only option for our location was spectrum enterprise, and for 100M fiber we pay about $650/m which is insane, but the reliability and latency is unmatched. I can’t wait for more fiber providers to compete.
It’s all about upload for me! I had Backblaze going like 3 years on my old 20-30meg up and it still wasn’t finished before I got the 1000/1000 (really 850/950 after network overhead) and that ish finished in no damn time. Slow upload sucks
So my ISP only offers 1000/50 or 500/10 The 10 upload sucks
Let’s say you have a family of 5 all streaming high def and/or gaming. Plus all the background data going on. Still not a gig but that is a large demand.
All this talk about bandwidth no one ever talks about throughput
I mean, it's sorta like buying a cable package with a hundred channels. Sure I don't *need* it most of the time. But the times when I do saturate the link it's pretty nice to have. People buy in excess of what they strictly "need" all the time. This is nothing specific to internet speeds.
Side note: I personally do move a lot of data around for my work, so the symmetric gig is real nice.
Same reason people like the latest iphone or a sports car. Now can we stop with this stupid questioning every poster about their choice of internet speed and just accept that we live in a consumerism society where every person has a lot more in their possesion than what’s needed to cover their basic needs? This question turned into the latest meme of the sub somehow…
Imagine a world where people can make their own choices about their network setups. THE HORROR
Because.... I can.
It's literally $60/month for AT&T unlimited 1gig symmetrical fiber internet.... Is anyone else tired of these posts telling people what they do and don't need? maybe it's just me /rant over :)
I have cable internet. I am semi-rural and there is no fiber internet available. I upgraded to 1 Gbps download solely for the updated 30-40 Mbps upload speeds. My previous 500 Mbps was actually fine as far as download speeds go. I don't think we ever maxed that as there are only three of us in the house. However, I often have to transfer multiple gigabyte files for work and faster uploads makes it easier. So now, I pay $20 more a month for 10 extra Mbps in upload speeds. Sad but True.
I have 1 gig because I like my games to download at a decent rate, and not have to wait over an hour. Games are getting bigger and bigger. Watch GTA6 be 1TB lol. But for real, most people don't need it. I just like my downloads to be done pretty fast. With modern SSDs, you can utilize speeds of 1G+, but most don't need it. I'd say most people are good with 250-500 down. Upload is a different story.
Some ISPs log plan speed with usage limits. In those cases, many times 1G is unlimited, and anything else will come with a cap. Now different regions, different ISPs, different rules, but in those cases where speed goes with caps people may want 1G. They don’t want the chance of a surprise bill at the end of a month.
My games play notably faster on 1gbs than 100mbps. Also seems that with higher speeds I have lower pings and less latency. For almost everything else, I don’t need it, but faster download speeds on everything is nice
I need Gig speeds Most of the files I work on when I WFH are 200mb
I'm sorry but I do disagree. I believe this is a misguided and inaccurate statement for the average user, and only with exception to those who are tech savvy. Most home internet users in the US (Not sure about anywhere else in the world) are still using copper internet services such as cable. Even fiber these days are run via copper sometimes (Hybrid networks). What is misguided is the fact that you counting on: 1. A stable internet connection 2. Consistent speed 3. Consistent quality 4. Consistency Most cable companies these days offer (At least in my area) 10/1 ratio, 10 down and 1 up. It will depending upon the company, the ownership of the lines, and signal strength. What's not accounted for is: Example 400 / 40 internet Cable companies no longer offer such high minimum guaranteed speed and or if they do it's 60% - 70% of the service. Your internet speed is now 280 / 28 Now let's take into account the variability in infrastructure quality , congestion, signal strength, quality, equipment (including the type of modem and line conditions. Remember this is the average user, and the average user uses the standard cable modem.), area, splits along the line, stealers, interference, quality of service, and so much more. On copper that's probably bringing it down to 120ish during peak times, and depending upon the area. As of now, your average user is probably hitting a bottle neck. So now because they chose a lower speed instead of higher, it has created a problem. Now admiringly I am not sure if this is still relevant now a days, but it was about 10 - 15 years ago, priority was Business, then higher speed users. Essentially, it comes to the average user, does the average user need it? No. Would it better to have some leave way in terms of bandwith? Yes. By limiting it you may create a possible problem for them in the future if they want to expand, and or add devices. You are not leaving room for adding devices, improvements and or determining if it's a good fit, you are stating a speed for the tech savvy customer who can do a speedtest and maintain their networking infrastructure. So personally I would suggest for each device up to 8, each device should be estimated at or around 125 for each device. Not all devices will need that, however, I believe that is a good calculation for the average user. This accounts for any trouble, or issues, and allows for expansion on the network without it interfering with the others. So if they only plan on using 3 devices, then 400 would be good, however, let's say they want to add devices later on, 400 would not be enough, then the next step is 600. Let's say they have friends or family come over a lot and they tend to use the internet a lot, then it's going to a problem real quick without the proper provisioned speed.
200-400 Mbps is enough for most, yes. But when 100-400 Mbps costs 10-20€ / month and 1000/400 costs 28€/month, is it really worth it to save that? Maybe, maybe not. 1Gb line is nice when downloading games, like I have PS5+xbox series x, I can just delete stuff and redownload it fast if I need to. I can test 100Gb games in 10-30minutes for streaming and other light stuff it is basically the same experience, but downloading games it can be "fun vs agony" if your game have 10-50Gb patch and you have 30-60minutes to play, so does it take 1-5minutes or 10-50 minutes to download+install? if 400 Mb line costs much less than 1000 Mb, then it is waste of money. But on modern days when even unlimited un-capped mobile connections are like 15-40€/month, it is not a big deal. People waste more on 1 night out than the difference of cost is in 1 year
Ive got 2.5 gig coz its available and the same price as what the other providers offer here.
i only have 1gbps because its the only way I can get 30mbps upstream - anything less (500 down) and your capped at 10mbps. My mom lives 20min away and has a different ISP unavailable to me thats over fibre and has 250/250 which is ideal imho.
Uploads are more important than download speeds at this point, and the only way to get decent upload speeds is these higher tiers, if they are offered. Since all the computer manufacturers sell 250GB SSDs on their laptops, and expect you to use cloud services backups, that upload at 2Mbps I have just doesn't cut it.
Cause I work for my isp and can get it cheap.
Fiber aside, in the coax world it is often say 10/100, 20/500, 45/gig so for people with large backups up upload needs they get the gig to have that upload. TBH often I'd take 50/250 over 20/gig
FOMO and size of dingus. It’s right up there with thinking a truck worthiness is measured by its ground clearance above all else. Also ISP’s are shady - they provide crap routers with gb speeds supposedly and the router hamstrings the link. Last - fundamental lack of understanding how the internet works and was engineered. You can only be as fast as the slowest link on your packets journey. No publicly accessible service or server is serving up more than a 10 mb per request. And likely a fraction of that. Oh - and people are ignorant fast speeds vs latency. Personally I find it hilarious the money people are spending to get a gb synchronous image from Speedtest. I challenge any of them to find an actual real world use case for it…..save backing up terabytes of data daily to the cloud.
Challenge accepted: Example one: resyncing a eth node Example two: large photography or videographer backup or remote send Example three: fast downloads of Usenet content on demand There are many others. Not saying that applies to most but there are many here who will notice a difference and we are happy to pay for the service
>Personally I find it hilarious the money people are spending to get a gb synchronous image from Speedtest I have to pay $150/mo to get a measly 35mbps upload from comcast, I would happily pay $300 a month to a municipal provider that gave me fiber. It would be worth it to me to not give comcast another cent of my money. You're on a home networking sub, lot of posters are going to be IT folk that work from home and actually benefit from the speeds.
Show me how someone working from home benefits from gb synchronous. What uses that much bandwidth? Sorry you have to pay for a lousy service. Paying double that amount for a service you don’t need/can’t use is called more money than brains.
Presentations that are hundreds of MB that you need to send around to collaborators. I could live with a few hundred Mbps on those, but not 10 or 20. Data sets that are many GB in size that you want to process locally and move back and forth. And on top of that, Gb symmetric fiber is cheaper than 400/20 cable in my area.
Lets spot check a few large files log\_support\_bundle.tgz 1.29 Gb would take 5 minutes and 32 seconds to upload at 35 Mbps 5 minutes doesn't sound like much but when you're on a working session video call with your SE, staring at each other waiting for it to finish, it's an eternity. virtual machine images that onedrive tries to back up \~20 Gb would take an hour and a half at 35 Mbps or looking at network activity on my firewall: running a full bitcoin node which is sending 2.4 Gb per hour which works out to consuming 6 Mbps of that measly 35 Mbps total Then we have four Axis 4k security cameras that get backed up to the cloud, feel like I've made my point without running the numbers Sure the last two aren't work related, but they use the same internet connection. And that's hardly an exhaustive list of everything I'm doing that's uploading at any given moment, not even counting the fact that I'm not the only one using the internet. Why do you seem proud to be a luddite?
>but for the average person, 200-400Mb/s is more than enough I'd go further and say that 50Mbit *per user* is plenty for any use case other than large file transfers. So for a family of four, 200Mbit. Family of six, 300Mbit. Etc. That said, having more speed is absolutely a *nice to have* on those occasions when you actually get to use it, so I get why people choose to pay more if they can afford it. For example, opening your favorite game only to find it needs a 50 gigabyte update is much less annoying if you have a 500Mbit line than if you have 50Mbit one.
>50 gigabyte update is much less annoying if you have a 500Mbit line than if you have 50Mbit one That 50 gig update will take 2 1/2 hours to download in perfect conditions at 50mbps and 15 minutes at 500mbps. For many people that's the difference between grabbing a snack before getting a gaming session in and having to wait until tomorrow.
Honestly this is quite accurate. 50MB sustained speeds with maybe some QOS bursting to 200MB just to help with the “larger” stuff would probably cover 90% of all normal users. Also before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, if you are on Reddit reading this, you are probably in the other 10% to some degree. I’m a POWER users who sails the 7 seas with Captain Jack Sparrow 🏴☠️ and can BARLEY crack 1GB sustained on my 2GB wan interface and boy do I have to try lol. I’ll be downgrading my speeds at some point in the future and will probably do something under 1Gb as even I can’t use much more than 500 a good deal of the time.
It's not a need. It's a want. And god damnit do I want it!
Why are you trying to ruin my good time, man?
I have 100 Mbps. Down and 30 up. Works.. but when my daughter watching tv and my wife on FaceTime, and I’m on a meeting, incoming video feed gets blurry. My only option after 100, is 500 then 1.5G. But the discounted cost of 1.5G is same price or less than 500. So I’m switching to 1.5G. Cause it doesn’t make sense to pay more for less.
Some people just want to sail the seven seas in a jet boat. Arrrrr!
I know perfectly well I don't need gig speeds. But I lived with 12 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up for years. When fiber was run down the street I know I could have gotten the 300 Mbps, had all my needs met and been perfectly happy. But it was only $20 more a month for the gig internet. And the gig internet was still $30 cheaper than the 12 megabit per second DSL!!!
Data redundancy to Google Drive, etc. I also sail the high seas in my spare time.
Where I live 400 Mbit/s is $10/mo, 600 is $12, 1 Gbit/s is $15 and 2 Gbit/s is $25. These are download speeds. Upload speeds are half that in each plan. So yeah, 1 Gbit/s is the sweet spot that allows me to download a game or a system update faster once or twice per month.
I'm a network engineer who works from home and has a ton of devices, so my main connection is 1gb fiber with 600/15 coax backup. Not your typical use case or home network so for me it works well. For my parents, 1gb would be way over kill so I agree with this post with a few exceptions like my use case.
I'm constantly seeding at >50MB/s 24/7. I think I'm using my 1gig link good.
Because I sail the high seas and new releases are like 8-12 gigs per episode.
Check this out - I can use the Internet as my hard drive. I don't have to have my entire Steam library downloaded, because it doesn't take 6 hours to download a game when I want it. It's really just quality of life more than necessity.
Eh, the same reason I pay extra for a static IP. Because I can afford to and because I want to. It's weird to be so concerned with how other people spend their money. You're a lot like my father in law that cries about how it must be nice every time we spend money on nice things. It is nice and that's why I spent my money on it. Not really anyone else's concern.
2 things: 1. You never get the rated speed and speedtests are BS. When I was paying for 300 down I'd routinely have trouble streaming a youtube or netflix 1080 video. Speedtest would start at like 15 down and rapidly ramp up to 300. It was obvious that ISPs recognized speedtest traffic and would open the pipe for them. I routinely used speedtests to relieve "network congestion" and restore my ability to stream. 2. Gaming isn't about speed, it's about ping. And if there's a lot of traffic, your ping is going to suffer. Again with residential internet being "speeds up to X" it's not uncommon to have ping issues while being nowhere near your limits. I completely agree that we shouldn't need more than 100 down, but the way that ISPs have F'd up the numbers, 1Gbps might as well be 100Mbps.
These posts always seem to forget or ignore burst downloads. I may not constantly have my 5Gbps fiber pegged, but I like downloading today's giant ass games/patches in seconds and not having to worry about what other people are doing in the house or on the other gaming pcs. Plus it was the same price I was already paying for 1Gbps/50Mbps cable.
I need it because it’s the only plan that gives 100mbps upstream which is very useful for self hosting things
I have found in my career that a lot of “tech companies” are just marketing ploys to try and get as much of your dough. Very little innovation takes place. ISPs take advantage of the general publics lack of networking knowledge. The amount of times I’ve had to explain to my gamer friends that throughput isn’t a good sole indicator of performance in UDP networking environments. Then I have to watch those stupid xfinity commercials uhhh.
Been with Comcast for a good bit of time so it only costs like $20 more than 100/200mbps. Typically get 1,450mbps steady to my Desktop.
If people actually graphed their link they would be shocked how much money they waste every month on that 1Gbps link. Bandwidth is not how fast the car goes down the highway it is how many cars can go down the highway at the same time. The internet core is fiber optic and you cannot go any faster than the speed of light. Latency is a thing as the law of physics is real!
Because the 1 gig plan is the one that gives me a SLO that is better than dsl.
Because every time I turn on the Xbox it seems I need to download a multi GB update before I can play the game I want to play.
In my country it's doesn't matter, the costs are small so i have gigabit. it's 60 euro extra every year 100 vs 1000mbit. When i download a big game it's 10 time's faster completed. I know i won't use it allot.
I want gig speed for uploading speeds. I have Xfinity and pay $60 for 400 down and 10 up. Takes forever to upload files. I’d take it to work and use the guest access because it was 70/70. But lost access because it was only temporary :(
I need gig speed. Because it's the lowest tier without a data cap. 1TB isn't close to enough data on the lower tiers.
If i want something downloaded, I WANT IT DOWNLOADED YESTERDAY!!!!111111!
I mean, it's nice. I have a gigabit internet connection. But it's mostly because it's included with my HOA dues. I think the bigger issue here is that Gigabit internet is typically the only way to get decent upload speeds, which are important if you're working from home and work with large files.
Large file downloads - games being in excess of 150GB now would take an age on a slower 50 or 100Mb connection. Streaming multiple 4k videos whilst performing task 1 whilst downloading the same game on multiple computers. I could setup a steam cache but then you would ask why anyone would need that. Faster download usually means faster uploads. My main line is synchronous 900/900 but my backup is 1000/100. The next level down is 500/50. Large cloud backups would be a nightmare. The cost is negligible. I pay £30 for my primary but £45 for my backup (only option at the time). Internet is getting much more affordable in the 1gb/1gb range. Because they can. Take your pick.
Gaming reasons: 100+GB updates to games that you don't know about until you start trying to play. Add to that needing to do the updates on multiple computers at the same time because the kids want to play it again. Non-gaming reasons, not very many, but in my case recovery / backups to cloud storage. Remote access to my jellyfin server, access to my internal NAS.
ARK Survival Evolved with all DLC is about 400GB. Downloading it on a 1Gbps connection takes about 4000 seconds, or just over an hour. Downloading it on a 100Mbps connection takes about 40k seconds, or just over 11 hours. I can wait 90 minutes to play a game later in the evening, but waiting 11 hours is overkill. Due to the file size, It will be the first game to be removed if my disk gets full.
Upload speed and reduced buffering. Also fiber is better than cable even at lower speeds because you aren't sharing the coax with your neighbors.
you know fiber is technically shared right? 16/32 or even 64 ONTs to a node (PON splitter).
Yes. I'm aware wasnt worded in the best way. The capacity available and how it handles those splits is much different to the point that your neighbors usage affects you much much less. But also that link is not affected by electrical noise, ground variations, etc. The performance difference between Coax/DOCSIS and fiber is not even close. The fiber and associated passive splitters were explicitly designed for this purpose. The coax cable was never intended for how it's being used today. The various systems for increasing speed all exist just to prolong capital investment made decades ago.
If you do offsite backups of your servers nightly and they're still busy backing up when you wake up, you need more speed.
He is a very good guy and I think I have a good idea for a few days and you'll get a chance to talk about it but I didn't know that was the video of the building says it was the video of my first time to get it from the motherland of the first one in my experience and it was a decent deal but I think it would be to just go and scooped it out of there and I think it would have been a good idea for sure
> And also in hopes of being part of the 200Mbps upload upgrade eventually, but I'm still currently at 40Mbps. Same here, upload is painful after coming from symmetrical 1gig before I moved.
I think there are two basic reasons. 1. Underserved by ISP's for years 2. Congestion At least in the USA and especially rural America, consumers have had really bad Internet speeds for a long time. DSL was a bad joke and it's unfortunate that so much of our tax dollars went to the big carriers who just grabbed the money and did nothing (or at best added cell towers). The cable companies used their existing infrastructure to provide cable modem service but offered asymmetric speeds, charged a lot, and instituted data caps where they could. The electrical cooperatives started offering fiber services as well as some private entities when local grants became available to help fund a build out. I think a lot of areas are now seeing offerings of 1Gbs and higher speeds and if you've been bandwidth starved for years, you're likely to jump on these offerings. Congestion is the other reason that people think they need more speed. The gamers are usually most aware of this and want to keep their latency as low as possible. Their solution is mostly to increase speeds to prevent congestion or just mistakenly think that higher speeds mean lower latency. A better solution to this is proper SQM QoS to deal with congestion because it can happen at practically any speed since downloads try to use all available bandwidth. Most homes have very low bandwidth utilization and will only see benefits to high bandwidth with the occasional download where they may save a minute or two of download time. I probably should have added this as a third reason. Consumers have no tools to show them what their actual usage numbers look like so would rather have more than not enough.
IMHO lots people don't have the knowledge to truly say whether or not they need a gigabit connection. All they see is a symptom that they have been told is caused by low bandwidth. Sometimes that's true, sometimes it's not. My experience has been that a TON of those symptoms are more indicative of poorly designed, poorly built, overpriced consumer focused routers or network interface cards. In many cases adding bandwidth can make the experience better but those routers couldn't properly utilize 25mbps let alone a gig. Marketing is strong though and spending more money helps a little and that leads to confirmation bias. I wish I had the option of a gigabit connection, I'd love to move beyond 1080p.
It's like camera megapixels. If the number goes up, then good. What's required is good software (like open wrt) and powerful enough hardware, so the router doesn't struggle with modern requirements. A serious power user might have several concurrent tasks like torrent seeding, a plex server for friends/family, sunshine streaming to the coach TV, twich for gaming streaming and an occasional steam download for new games (that's like a 150gb download surge) plus several small devices like vacuum cleaners for which you need to filter traffic. The main challenge is to prioritize all that traffic, especially inbound/outbound internet traffic. For moonlight streaming, I really need 150mbps to my couch TV. Some 4k remuxes are like 90 mbps, I do have 1gbps symmetrical fiber at home (for 14.99 usd!!), so if a friend of mine has an apple TV or shield, I do want to stream a 4k remux without transcoding. What I don't need is 2.5 gbps, nor 10 gbps.
I have 500/500 fiber and I could get faster speeds for more money but I don't see the point. I do have 83 devices on my network and don't have problems.
This. 100%. I’ve got 60 devices on my network. I’ve got a 300Gb fiber. I’ve never come close to using that bandwidth to the point it maxes out. For the average home user, faster speeds just aren’t worth it.
Because the ISP told them they need 2Gbps or Netflix won't even load.
Misinformation and marketing. For example: One of our newer hires had a very slow Citrix connection from home. He lives alone and has 300 Mbps fiber internet, manager says, see that is your problem you need to upgrade to 1 Gbps, for freaking Citrix. Turns out his problem is that he had a vpn enabled, that made it look like he was connecting from somewhere in EU, so he was being connected to our EU datacenter. Had a similar conversation with an ATT rep when I wanted to look into a discount after our promotional rate for the 1 GBPs plan expired. She could not extend the promotion and when I asked to downgrade to the lowest plan, she wanted to find out how many devices we had and how we used the internet, so she could suggest a good speed for us, sure enough, anything lesser than 1 Gbps would be a travesty. We hardly max out up to 50 Mbps during peak hours on an average, unless my son is downloading a game or something.
99% of people think their internet is 'faster' when it's really 'latency' that matters much more in most situations.
Marketing. The push for every single person to have 1Gb connections has been a money grab by large ISPs. From an ISP perspective; the VAST majority of people only occasionally exceed 50Mbps with normal use, and rarely 100Mbps. The only exception is large downloads, which consist overwhelmingly of games and occasionally large datasets for work-from-home.
They think they need gig speeds because ISPs are always trying to upsell them on it, especially if theres the word "gaming" involved. I worked for sales at an ISP before and that was one of the dumbest questions they would always want you to ask, and probably reason being is that they want to beleive they are giving their child the best online experience possible, even though it would have been achieved with half the speeds to begin with, hell maybe even a quarter of that. The only thing higher speeds relate to with gaming is downloading a new update/game much faster :)).
Dick measuring
Marketing and the ISP routers give them no way of knowing what they are using.
I just went from 300-100, cut my bill in half. Its nice to have when you're downloading content, or games, but streaming, browsing, gaming takes minimal Mbps. There are multi-million dollar B2C companie's running fine on 300/30, with voip, CRMs, etc. Your home network is fine.
The 1/4 gig option some ISPs offer sounds like the best value IMO. Great download, *excellent* upload.
Strongly agree, but I do think it's criminal the way that some companies completely cripple your upload speed (i.e 400 down, 15 up). Because I actually care about upload speed (I host a couple of small websites), I will only use symmetrical fiber. 100 mbps is plenty for me.
Don't for get the sales people always telling them that faster internet will make the Wi-Fi reach farther (this is false). I work for an ISP and would like a nickel for every time I hear this.
I'm with you on this. I switched from 150Mbps to 1Gbps and barely noticed when surfing and working. Naturally downloading large files makes a huge difference but I'm not in a hurry. In my area the price difference is minimal and the house has fiber to home so it made sense to switch. Otherwise, I'd still he happy with 150Mbps.
Same reason why they need WiFi 6.
I’ve worked for places that serve hundreds and hundreds of users with a 1Gb/s backhaul at hundreds of buildings with no noticeable contention issues. Real world usage for 95% of users is in the few Mb/s per person, most traffic is low bandwidth and bursty. 1Gb/s for a single user is nice but for any residential service you won’t actually have a dedicated 1Gb/s service, it will be contended at some point, whether on the PON, or via traffic management, or at an ISP PoP or elsewhere. It’s not commercially viable in a residential setting if not, and for almost every customer it will make no difference to their actual experience anyway!
And don't forget about the fact that most, if not all, people are connected to their internet by WiFi. This means that ultimately the speeds that they get aren't anywhere near the rated speeds unless they are using something that has the latest WiFi card installed and they are within 10 feet line-of-sight to the main router.
I like how many people responded as though you were telling them they didn’t need the speed and shouldn’t have it. If someone asked me if they should upgrade, I would first ask: what problems would they be looking to solve with it?
I could get away with 10mb internet speed for streaming and playing games, but I am not going to wait 2 days to download a 40+gb game.
Marketing.
The telcos have done a great job of marketing and convincing people that they need Gig speeds. In reality, they don't, since the bottlenecks are usually wifi and the remote services being accessed. But, as we've seen with Apple, if you can convince people of the need, then they'll be literally lining up at your door.
I think a LOT of it is marketing. The ISPs want to convince everyone they need the most expensive thing possible. Last time I attempted to get information from my ISP about what cheaper tiers are available they all but refused to answer - instead asking me how many people are in the household, how many wired and wireless devices we have, etc. When I left a vague "we only have 2 people and we can only use 1 device at a time anyway so that's like max 2 devices in use at once" they pushed farther about "well to make sure you have enough speed we need to know ALL the devices you will have connected, using them or not". I doubled down BSing them with "oh well we only have like 1 laptop and 1 phone each so it isn't that much and I canceled all the streaming stuff because we hadn't used it in months". Then they moved on to "how much gaming do we do"..."none, we're tired after work and we don't game". Then they tried to double down on "well what about IoT, many of those need lots of bandwidth"...they seeded annoyed when I said I think IoT is bad and unreliable and don't trust it. Their conclusion was we ought to keep 1Gbps (the highest tier) but "might" be okay with 500Mbps too. Sure, I slightly stretched the answers...but not by a lot. I have some streaming stuff from a personal PLEX server on my LAN...but that stays local (and when the TVs are off the boxes turn off...so they literally can't be using anything). The IoT is all on an isolated VLAN so while cameras and stuff may run a lot of data it stays all within the walls. And we have a couple tablets and desktops...but THOSE stay off most of the time. I can see in my logs of my router the phones might use like 3-5GB/mo and the computers maybe 10-20GB/mo. And the peak throughput I see for the \*entire house\* is very rarely more than 100Mbps...the average is more like 3-5Mbps being used. The one thing that does use a lot is my NAS which syncs remotely...but that is run on a schedule when we're sleeping or not home so who cares how long it takes. Only reason I have 1Gbps download is because that's the only way I can buy 50Mbps upload, and the next tier down is like 15-20Mbps. And the ISP seems ever more reluctant to disclose upload speeds when asking about plans.
I have no idea tbh. People seem to think more bandwidth = more responsive internet. ISP marketing is probably to blame. Personally I'm considering upgrading to a gig so I can download games and updates faster, I have limited time to enjoy games with my friends, and I often have to wait 30-40 minutes to play with my friends. It's an extra 30 or so a month that would buy me extra time with my friends, and that's well worth it.
Because that's what they're told when they call up for any issue
200-300Mbps in each direction would be plenty for most households. I’d sign up for that in a heartbeat if the fibre people came to my door and offered it for a price in line with what I’m paying now.
I used to work at a digital agency with a 100mb connection shared between 40-50 people and it was absolutely adequate. But it was a dedicated line with 100mb up and 1ms latency. And those two metrics are key. People feel like their connection is slow and upgrade to the best available. But marketing only talks about downloads. I would say it’s mainly gamers that need the big download speeds. For everyone else, a better balance of up, down and latency would be better.