Six years ago, I nearly got my ISP to upgrade our fibre connection to 1Gbps. As I said at the time: This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years. What's the point of Gigabit broadband? Well, it's a few years later and Virgin Media have just given me their Gig1 package for £30 per month. Nice! With all the inflation related price rises, it's great to …
This whole blog post is moronic, if you don’t need it, buy a smaller package.
For me the extra price is peanuts, and it’s absolutely amazing to be able to play a new game minutes after I bought it instead of hours.
Before we moved we didn’t have fiber, and downloading a game could take so long that I would have to wait until the next day to play it after starting to install it.
This also means that I can uninstall games I don’t use without worrying if I might want to play it later, this spares me from needing massive storage.
I also prefer to preload media to watch on our media center/TV, and it’s nice to be able to have a movie ready in a matter of a couple of minutes.
if that were only possible here. i’d love to pay 10 percent of my bill for 10 percent of the speed. that’d be $10 for 50mbps. the cable company ‘discontinues’ slower speeds, calls it a ‘free’ upgrade (but you don’t actually get it unless you know about it and call in and navigate their bullshit in order to actually get it ‘free’), then raises rates anyway (even on those that did not ‘upgrade’). every. single. year. the only other provider is the telephone company. needless to say, they’re even worse.
That’s not how it works, you generally pay 20% less for half the speed. Because speed is not the main price factor anymore. The logistics and cabling are.
I we didn’t have 500 Mbit and above, you’d probably have to pay the same for 100 Mbit as we do for 1 Gbit today.
The price is in the cabling, maintenance and support. And none of those change much from having higher speeds.
city power here charges households $10 a month for that, the infrastructure and ‘account servicing’; and bill usage at cost. electric distribution costs a hell of a lot more than coax. so make that hypothetical bill $20, then. better paying $20 for what you’ll use and need than $100 for wasted service. it costs the big providers a few pennies per mbps to provide unthrottled, uncapped wireline broadband in the u.s., your bill is almost entirely profit for them.
No that’s not true, there is actually competition here and a very transparent market.
30 years ago when 2 Mbit/s was relatively new here, ADSL on existing phone lines had a price of 69,- €. (cheapest provider at the time)
Even without accounting for inflation, the price now is cheaper for 1 Gigabit, despite the old ADSL was based on existing cables! And 1 Gbit obviously is on fibre optic cables made specifically for internet connection.
The cost of establishing fiber networks was expensive, and it is only recently that some of the companies are turning decent profits, and I think most of the profit is on selling TV packs and extra services like cloud storage and virus protection. My internet bill has about 5 points of extra services that all have a nice round zero on them. 😋
I have made the measurements, and at 500 Mbit/s I actually got a bit more than 5x what I had at 100 Mbit/s. Actually my 500 Mbit connection ran as 550, because the rated speed here is the guaranteed speed of the connection. So the only limitation is the server at the other end.
It is true however that 1 Gbit/s didn’t quite double the 500 Mbit/s speed, Actual measured facts beat speculation.
But your examples of steeply diminishing returns are not true.
Tbh, I don’t think the post is bad at all. If you have special high-bandwidth use cases that require massive speed you know that already and then the article isn’t for you.
If you say you “didn’t have fiber” I’m guessing you were on 50MBit VDSL? Then, of course, switching to gigabit makes sense.
In the blog post the author explicitly doesn’t say “Go get VDSL”, but they compare Gigabit with 500MBit. That’s not nearly that much of a difference, you’ll still be able to play a new game minutes after you bought it, but just twice as many minutes. If that at all, because if you have wifi in your home, it will likely limit your bandwidth to less than 500MBit in real use anyway.
The main point of the post is to show whether a regular user really benefits from Gigabit, and no, they don’t. Their netflix stream will not improve when going from a few hundred MBit to a Gigabit. Neither will most of their experience.
If you are lucky enough to live in a place where Gigabit costs nothing, sure, might as well. The only provider who serves Gigabit to my home wants €65 per month for that, €780 per year. That’s a lot of money for something that maybe saves me a few minutes once or twice a month.
Where I am, I can pay for gigabit duplex or 500Mbps cable. The issue is that the upload speed on the cable circuit is only 30Mbps and I have multiple people streaming from my Plex server, playing games on servers I run, or I might be checking my security cameras while I’m out and about. The only time 300Mbps isn’t enough for me is on big files from beefy CDNs like Steam, but 30Mbps gets constraining pretty quick.
Not much of a difference in price either in most places. usually it’s like 10-20% extra to double the speed.
This is true, but to claim there is no point is false, saying that for most 500 Mbit/s is better value would be a way better headline IMO, heck most people will do fine with 100 Mbit/s.
We pay €58 for 1 Gigabit, and I think 500 Mbit is €49 if I recall correctly, so the difference is not a lot.
Of course it also matters if you are just a single person or a family of more people.
PS:
There was a use I forgot to mention, and that is when upgrading my OS, I use a rolling release distro of Linux, and I have quite frequent updates, most are small and finish in a matter of seconds, and even the biggest updates can usually finish within a couple of minutes. This is quite nice too.
Anyways of course lower speeds can be better value depending on the use case, but for us the cost of higher speed is negligible, and it’s nice for families not to be slowed down just because someone is using a bit of bandwidth.
A relevant part is that double the speed doesn’t save the same time.
So e.g. if a download takes 100 minutes on 10MBit, you save 50 minutes by doubling the speed.
The same download would take 10 minutes on 100MBit, doubling the bandwidth would only save 5 minutes.
And on 500MBit it’s two minutes, so doubling the bandwidth only saves one minute.
We are deep into diminishing returns here.
€58 vs €49 means an extra €108 per year. That’s quite a sum.
In my case going from the 150Mbit/s I have to gigabit would cost me €35 extra per month, €420 a year, yeah, that’s not worth it to speed up some background downloads.
I’m on Fedora, updates are frequent as well, but since they download in the background I hardly care about the speed. I see there’s a new update, so I start the download in the beginning of the day. It finishes within half an hour or an hour or so, while I continue doing my stuff, and in the evening when I’m done I run the actual update if it requires a reboot.
This is simply not true, of course it isn’t entirely linear, but for big downloads you actually get pretty close to the full benefit of the speed, when the servers can handle it.
When the speed goes up, latency also goes down, making response times faster too.
Sounds a lot like your Fedora update is single threaded, which is a huge limitation. I start updates manually and monitor the whole process, and the whole process is finished in a couple of minutes for a big update. A single package can be literally less than 5 seconds for download, integrity check and installation. Firefox is among the most frequent single package updates, and that generally takes 5-6 seconds.
What is not true?
Do the math yourself, it’s only grade school level:
A download takes 100 minutes at 10Mbit. How long does it take at 20Mbit and how many minutes are saved?
The same download takes 2 minutes at 500Mbit. How long does it take at 1000Mbit and how many minutes are saved?
This calculation doesn’t even take into consideration that most servers don’t allow for gigabit downloads and that most wifi connections also don’t allow for gigabit.
and, not to forget, just because you have 1gbps or faster download available, doesn’t mean the other end and the pipes in between can deliver at that rate.