The download arms race is legitimately absurd. Especially since ISPs tell customers that it has to do with number of devices.
It doesn’t matter if I have 1 device on my network at a time or 100. What matters is how impatient I am when it comes to large downloads (which for legitimate users would be a one-time thing to download a game or software since most everything else big is either streaming or a background process).
What matters is what’s happening simultaneously. A 4k Netflix stream takes about 15Mbps of download. YouTube needs 20. League of Legends and Minecraft recommend about 3, and GTA5 recommends 7.5.
Using these numbers and considering simultaneous usage patterns, it’s unlikely most households would notice much of a difference in day to day use between 100Mbps and 1Gbps. Webpages will load a little faster (latency is still a significant factor, at least until QUIC gets more adopted, and no amount of megabits can beat the speed of light itself). Big file downloads will be noticeably quicker, but these are rare for most legitimate (not Jolly Roger flyers) home users.
My big issue is the data cap, we have three people in our house, two of us are gamers, and one is getting into it now that she has a computer. We’ve hit our data cap of 1TB every month for the last 3 months, and then they charge is an absurd $20/100GB until you get to 500 GB and then it’s “unlimited” but throttled like fuck afterward. And that’s on top of our absurd $160/month because they forced me to bundle cable I don’t want with it because it somehow costs more if you don’t.
Gotta pay those hard working bit miners in Australia, digging them out of the ground with pickaxes and shoveling them into one end of the Internet to keep the whole thing running or however it works
I used to download a lot of satellite imagery for Remote Sensing work, and I would have killed for faster internet.
For now 300 suits my needs just fine. But I was stuck at 15 until Google Fiber moved into the a nearby area and suddenly Spectrum was able to give me 300 for the same price I’d been paying for 15.
Even if those speeds are available, there are very few residential use cases where the additional speed will be useful or worth the extra money.
I genuinely can’t think of a use case where a normal family would use more than 500Mbps
The download arms race is legitimately absurd. Especially since ISPs tell customers that it has to do with number of devices.
It doesn’t matter if I have 1 device on my network at a time or 100. What matters is how impatient I am when it comes to large downloads (which for legitimate users would be a one-time thing to download a game or software since most everything else big is either streaming or a background process).
What matters is what’s happening simultaneously. A 4k Netflix stream takes about 15Mbps of download. YouTube needs 20. League of Legends and Minecraft recommend about 3, and GTA5 recommends 7.5.
Using these numbers and considering simultaneous usage patterns, it’s unlikely most households would notice much of a difference in day to day use between 100Mbps and 1Gbps. Webpages will load a little faster (latency is still a significant factor, at least until QUIC gets more adopted, and no amount of megabits can beat the speed of light itself). Big file downloads will be noticeably quicker, but these are rare for most legitimate (not Jolly Roger flyers) home users.
My big issue is the data cap, we have three people in our house, two of us are gamers, and one is getting into it now that she has a computer. We’ve hit our data cap of 1TB every month for the last 3 months, and then they charge is an absurd $20/100GB until you get to 500 GB and then it’s “unlimited” but throttled like fuck afterward. And that’s on top of our absurd $160/month because they forced me to bundle cable I don’t want with it because it somehow costs more if you don’t.
Gotta pay those hard working bit miners in Australia, digging them out of the ground with pickaxes and shoveling them into one end of the Internet to keep the whole thing running or however it works
I used to download a lot of satellite imagery for Remote Sensing work, and I would have killed for faster internet.
For now 300 suits my needs just fine. But I was stuck at 15 until Google Fiber moved into the a nearby area and suddenly Spectrum was able to give me 300 for the same price I’d been paying for 15.