This isn’t really true. An HD movie on Netflix/Hulu/Prime/etc is multi GB. It just doesn’t need to download fast, because anything faster than the bitrate of the movie won’t be perceptible.
But there are also games on platforms like Steam, Epic, PlayStation, etc. These are often very large.
For context, a 4K Blu-ray disc has a maximum transfer rate of 144 Mbps. Most streaming services are compressing much more heavily than that. Closer to 20 or 40 Mbps, depending on the service. They tend to be limited by managing datacenter bandwidth, not end user connections.
While I get that people hate having to download big games over 100Mbps, it’s something you do once and then play the game for weeks.
So build the capability and people will use it when they need it. My point still stands that 100Mbps is slow, even if most people are fine with it day to day.
Also, for a family of four, that would mean only 2 of them would be able to watch a 40Mbps HD stream at once. I get that that is relatively rare for 3 people in a family to want to stream at that speed at the same time, but I wouldn’t call something fast if it can’t support even that.
(YouTube recommends a bitrate of 68Mbps for 4K 60fps content and 45Mbps for 4K 30fps. Higher when using HDR.)
Where I’m going with this is that there are much more important things than going significantly over 100Mbps. Quality of service, latency, jumbo MTU sizes, and IPv6 will affect you in many more practical ways. The bandwidth number tends to be used as a proxy (consciously or not) for overall quality issues, but it’s not a very good one. That’s how we’ll end up with 1Gbps connections that will lag worse than a 10Mbps connection from 2003.
This isn’t really true. An HD movie on Netflix/Hulu/Prime/etc is multi GB. It just doesn’t need to download fast, because anything faster than the bitrate of the movie won’t be perceptible.
But there are also games on platforms like Steam, Epic, PlayStation, etc. These are often very large.
For context, a 4K Blu-ray disc has a maximum transfer rate of 144 Mbps. Most streaming services are compressing much more heavily than that. Closer to 20 or 40 Mbps, depending on the service. They tend to be limited by managing datacenter bandwidth, not end user connections.
While I get that people hate having to download big games over 100Mbps, it’s something you do once and then play the game for weeks.
So build the capability and people will use it when they need it. My point still stands that 100Mbps is slow, even if most people are fine with it day to day.
Also, for a family of four, that would mean only 2 of them would be able to watch a 40Mbps HD stream at once. I get that that is relatively rare for 3 people in a family to want to stream at that speed at the same time, but I wouldn’t call something fast if it can’t support even that.
(YouTube recommends a bitrate of 68Mbps for 4K 60fps content and 45Mbps for 4K 30fps. Higher when using HDR.)
Where I’m going with this is that there are much more important things than going significantly over 100Mbps. Quality of service, latency, jumbo MTU sizes, and IPv6 will affect you in many more practical ways. The bandwidth number tends to be used as a proxy (consciously or not) for overall quality issues, but it’s not a very good one. That’s how we’ll end up with 1Gbps connections that will lag worse than a 10Mbps connection from 2003.
Just updates running in the background use an enormous amount, let alone full game downloads.
Twitch and Youtube use a decent amount per hour as well.