5 ms·

Just curious, but what does she need that bandwidth for? I am expecting the usual replies of running a server, having better upstream capabilities, and the very

Just curious, but what does she need that bandwidth for? I am expecting the usual replies of running a server, having better upstream capabilities, and the very typical 'techies gonna have bandwidth', but I would love to hear some weird unexpected ways to use bandwidth like that.

bane 11y ago
I honestly have no idea. I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it. FiOS keeps upgrading it every year or so (it started as a 15/5 I couldn't saturate), so that's nice. At least I'm basically in "first world" territory even if I live in the U.S. I suppose when 4k video becomes more common I'll feel it, but I don't even have anything that can display 4k right now and Verizon will probably just upgrade it to 75/75 or 100/100 by that point. One nice benefit, I have a plex server I can access remotely and it works well outside of my network. But I'd live with just my netflix account if I had to "rough it".
- icelancer 11y ago
  I have 50/20 with a family. Two laptops and Netflix going on the Media Center PC plus my work easily causes degraded service on certain appliances in peak times.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- simoncion 11y ago
  > I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it. Unless you've throttled your torrents, or you're connected to a really slow swarm, you have almost certainly saturated your download. I have -er- 100/10 or 100/15 service from Comcast. If I'm downloading anything >= 100MB, and a member of the household is going to start a new Netflix stream, I need to pause the download, or else the stream will be degraded for a long time. Also, unless you're using a decent router, it's very possible that your router can't route and/or NAT at 50mbit or faster. I know that Apple Airports can and Ubiquiti EdgeRouters[0] can. I would also expect that an ISP-provided router would route fast enough. [0] If you're in the market for a new router and are somewhat network savvy, or are comfortable with running OpenWRT on your router, I strongly recommend the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It routes and firewalls at ~1Gbit/sec (when offloading is enabled) and costs right around $100. Check out the Newegg reviews that aren't "It's slower than I expected" or "It's totally broken" for an idea of what you'll be getting in to. I've had mine for nearly a year and -other than the eventually dodgy external power supply[1] it shipped with- it has been rock solid. [1] The unit I got had been sitting in a box in a warehouse in Florida for ~two years before it arrived on my doorstep. The failing power supply presented as infrequent spontaneous reboots with nothing unusual in syslog, which became more and more frequent until the power supply just stopped providing power entirely. Replaced it with a wall wart that I had on hand and have had no trouble since.
  - mrbill 11y ago
    The ERL-3, ER-X, etc, run a Vyatta fork, not OpenWRT. I love mine.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      I didn't intend to imply that the EdgeRouters run OpenWRT. I guess that wasn't clear. :( 'Tis true that the forked version of Vyatta (Vyatta 6?) that the EdgeRouters use is rather different than OpenWRT, but if one has figured out how to work with OpenWRT's UCI configuration system, one can figure out how to work with Vyatta's configuration system, too. And, both OpenWRT and Vyatta run on top of Linux, so -if needed- one has a Linux system that one can configure directly.
  - bane 11y ago
    Nope, no attempt at bandwidth controls from my end. My wife is watching some kind of HD stream from her home country, I'm watching netflix or youtube and web surfing, and have 3 torrents pulling down from archive.org right now at around 1-2Mb/s. I'm sure there's some kind of fallback to SD from Netflix, their webpage claims I need 5Mb/s to get 720p, and 25Mb/s for "Ultra HD" (whatever that is and I'm pretty sure I'm not getting that for old episodes of Firefly) leaving me with somewhere between 25-45Mb/s. I'm pretty sure my wife isn't gobbling all that up with whatever it is she's watching. Web browsing is much lighter. So all told, worst case I'm looking at - 6Mb/s torrents - 5Mb/s Netflix - let's say 5Mb/s for my wife's video - some fraction of 1Mb/s for our collective web surfing Maybe 17-20Mb/s? Amazingly, with all that going on, if I go do a speed test, it still showed me around 40/50 so I'm definitely under that.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  I have a 35/35 connection that I regularly saturate, and unfortunately it's the best available. (Frontier offers better service elsewhere, but not here.) I don't saturate it 24 hours a day, but when I use it, I use all of it. For the download bandwidth, between videos, large packages, and source code, the limiting factor is almost always on my end. And for upload, I use it with VPN, with regular backups, with git, with scp, and with rsync. I would love to have a gigabit connection to see if that connection would still be the limiting factor, and I suspect it still would be sometimes.
- georgerobinson 11y ago
  Envy! We have a 3.0/0.5 DSL connection which can support 1 high quality or 2 medium to low quality Netflix streams. Web browsing is tolerable when everyone is online, but the second the uplink bandwidth is saturated (0.5Mbit/s) everything else grinds to a halt. I think you'd notice it too if your connection weren't symmetric. That is, your connection was 50/5 or 50/10. We were on-track to get a 50/50 fiber connection (the service supports up to 1000/1000) - however the ISP hasn't yet started to build the network out to our village - a year later than they said it would be available. In contrast, our neighboring villages all have their service, but there is a risk they will pull out since the build cost is 3x what they forecast (narrow country roads where the only option is to dig up the road, rather than run cable under verges or sidewalks). FWIW, the build cost is a measly £600,000 - or $929,670, which in my estimate works out at between £600 and £1200 per resident.
  - willyk 11y ago
    FYI, based on my past experience, for avg urban customer the total acquisition cost for a cable ISP on DOCSIS 2/3.0 was about $750 -- small delta vs your new build cost.
    - georgerobinson 11y ago
      Virgin Media is the only UK-based ISP that uses cable (DOCSIS). All others use VDSL2 where available, ADSL2 or just plain old ADSL (g.DMT) if you're sufficiently rural. The trouble is that Virgin Media have much cut out for them if they want to match the availability of VDSL in the UK. Therefore, I can imagine they will be targeting large towns on the commuter belt long before they consider more rural villages.
  - bane 11y ago
    I've been around the UK and Ireland so I know what you mean about the roads and the difficulty of running infrastructure around them. I remember back when we had DSL we could saturate it, even with just some casual youtubing. Funny thing is, we never asked for or paid for symmetric connections, our phone company just did it one day as part of a system upgrade and sent everybody new routers. And they've done at least one bandwidth upgrade since then. I grew up pretty rural so I can definitely sympathize with your pain. The first world will arrive soon!
- dzhiurgis 11y ago
  > I don't believe I come close to saturating it. Well your HD streams are very compressed and possibly downsized resolution. People DO want 4K 60 fps uncompressed streams, but there is just no way to support them all at once.
  - bane 11y ago
    It looks like Netflix is claiming 4k at 25Mb/s (at their standard degraded quality). So we'll need more bandwidth in the future, but I don't even have anything in my house that can display 4k anyways so I'm not too concerned.
wmf 11y ago
The author started out with no broadband at all: http://www.loomcom.com/blog/2015/02/22/its-comcastic-or-i-accidentally-bought-a-house-without-internet/ http://www.loomcom.com/blog/2015/02/22/its-comcastic-or-i-ac... If you're going to have to pay to run some kind of Internet to your house, I guess you might as well get fiber. The bandwidth is probably a free bonus.
dmm 11y ago
Imagine that you decide to get a security camera system for some reason. Maybe you have a valuable collection of something or you have a small business with lots of easily moved/sold equipment. You can easy buy or assemble a DVR system with up to a few dozen cameras from a number of sources. These systems can be very valuable in ways you may not expect. My parent's recently captured video of a car accident in front of their house. This video greatly benefited a long-time neighbor and friend. Anyway you get a system that has good video coverage of your building's doors and windows and can record say a few days worth of video. You're golden, right? Unfortunately you are vulnerable in a fundamental way. An intruder can find the video recorder box and destroy it. I personally know individuals this has happened to. So you come home from a long week and find your building broken into and the video lost. What can you do about this? Simple... find a neighbor/AWS/colo box/etc and stream the video there too. It records a few TB of data and provides a backup in case of theft or destruction. This differs from typical backup situations of home users because of the bandwith involved. Because ideally you would stream the video directly from the cams. If you have 10 cams producing 2 mbps, thats 20mbps. That's a lot of upload for the typical home connection, but for a symmetrical gigabit connection it's a drop in the bucket. This is just one example. Having the bandwidth available makes so many things easy that were previously very difficult.
- dmm 11y ago
  Here's another one: Modern games are huge and SSDs are small. Buy all your games on steam. When you want to play a game just tell steam to get it and it downloads at 50+ megabytes / second. Play your 20GB game in less than 7 minutes. When you're done just delete it. There is no reason why games couldn't be designed for this use case and be playble immediately, downloading in the background.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    Keep in mind that the services you use have to pay money for bandwidth, too.
    - solotronics 11y ago
ThrustVectoring 11y ago
That's asking the wrong question, in my book. The right question is something along the lines of "if companies know there are many people with that much bandwidth, what new products and services would they be selling us?"
- nitrogen 11y ago
  I think we'd see more "private cloud" usage; put a secure box in your house with all your data you want to access elsewhere, give photo/video links or hashes or decryption keys or whatever to your family and friends, etc.
  - willyk 11y ago
    Looking to the broadband wonderland in South Korea of Japan w/Gig service for $25 provides some insight into the sevices/uses of that sort of broadband -- based on my experience it fundamentally changes your computing practices.
staunch 11y ago
The biggest advantage of fiber is often latency/jitter. I had 4ms ping flat and 0% packet loss to local LA Quake Live servers when I had FiOS in LA. Almost LAN-like play. Cable internet is always has much higher ping, more jitter, and more packet loss. Supposedly I can get gigabit internet from AT&T here in Cupertino but they cap at 1 TB and I'm not excited about paying $110/mo for the equivalent of a ~3 Mbps sustained connection.
scurvy 11y ago
I routinely download coredumps from crashed devices and servers to analyze them locally or upload them to other partners. Some of these are full dumps, so have fun moving 256GB on a daily basis with a slow connection.

bane 11y ago

I honestly have no idea. I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it. FiOS keeps upgrading it every year or so (it started as a 15/5 I couldn't saturate), so that's nice. At least I'm basically in "first world" territory even if I live in the U.S. I suppose when 4k video becomes more common I'll feel it, but I don't even have anything that can display 4k right now and Verizon will probably just upgrade it to 75/75 or 100/100 by that point. One nice benefit, I have a plex server I can access remotely and it works well outside of my network. But I'd live with just my netflix account if I had to "rough it".

icelancer 11y ago
I have 50/20 with a family. Two laptops and Netflix going on the Media Center PC plus my work easily causes degraded service on certain appliances in peak times.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
simoncion 11y ago
> I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it. Unless you've throttled your torrents, or you're connected to a really slow swarm, you have almost certainly saturated your download. I have -er- 100/10 or 100/15 service from Comcast. If I'm downloading anything >= 100MB, and a member of the household is going to start a new Netflix stream, I need to pause the download, or else the stream will be degraded for a long time. Also, unless you're using a decent router, it's very possible that your router can't route and/or NAT at 50mbit or faster. I know that Apple Airports can and Ubiquiti EdgeRouters[0] can. I would also expect that an ISP-provided router would route fast enough. [0] If you're in the market for a new router and are somewhat network savvy, or are comfortable with running OpenWRT on your router, I strongly recommend the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It routes and firewalls at ~1Gbit/sec (when offloading is enabled) and costs right around $100. Check out the Newegg reviews that aren't "It's slower than I expected" or "It's totally broken" for an idea of what you'll be getting in to. I've had mine for nearly a year and -other than the eventually dodgy external power supply[1] it shipped with- it has been rock solid. [1] The unit I got had been sitting in a box in a warehouse in Florida for ~two years before it arrived on my doorstep. The failing power supply presented as infrequent spontaneous reboots with nothing unusual in syslog, which became more and more frequent until the power supply just stopped providing power entirely. Replaced it with a wall wart that I had on hand and have had no trouble since.
- mrbill 11y ago
  The ERL-3, ER-X, etc, run a Vyatta fork, not OpenWRT. I love mine.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    I didn't intend to imply that the EdgeRouters run OpenWRT. I guess that wasn't clear. :( 'Tis true that the forked version of Vyatta (Vyatta 6?) that the EdgeRouters use is rather different than OpenWRT, but if one has figured out how to work with OpenWRT's UCI configuration system, one can figure out how to work with Vyatta's configuration system, too. And, both OpenWRT and Vyatta run on top of Linux, so -if needed- one has a Linux system that one can configure directly.
- bane 11y ago
  Nope, no attempt at bandwidth controls from my end. My wife is watching some kind of HD stream from her home country, I'm watching netflix or youtube and web surfing, and have 3 torrents pulling down from archive.org right now at around 1-2Mb/s. I'm sure there's some kind of fallback to SD from Netflix, their webpage claims I need 5Mb/s to get 720p, and 25Mb/s for "Ultra HD" (whatever that is and I'm pretty sure I'm not getting that for old episodes of Firefly) leaving me with somewhere between 25-45Mb/s. I'm pretty sure my wife isn't gobbling all that up with whatever it is she's watching. Web browsing is much lighter. So all told, worst case I'm looking at - 6Mb/s torrents - 5Mb/s Netflix - let's say 5Mb/s for my wife's video - some fraction of 1Mb/s for our collective web surfing Maybe 17-20Mb/s? Amazingly, with all that going on, if I go do a speed test, it still showed me around 40/50 so I'm definitely under that.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
I have a 35/35 connection that I regularly saturate, and unfortunately it's the best available. (Frontier offers better service elsewhere, but not here.) I don't saturate it 24 hours a day, but when I use it, I use all of it. For the download bandwidth, between videos, large packages, and source code, the limiting factor is almost always on my end. And for upload, I use it with VPN, with regular backups, with git, with scp, and with rsync. I would love to have a gigabit connection to see if that connection would still be the limiting factor, and I suspect it still would be sometimes.
georgerobinson 11y ago
Envy! We have a 3.0/0.5 DSL connection which can support 1 high quality or 2 medium to low quality Netflix streams. Web browsing is tolerable when everyone is online, but the second the uplink bandwidth is saturated (0.5Mbit/s) everything else grinds to a halt. I think you'd notice it too if your connection weren't symmetric. That is, your connection was 50/5 or 50/10. We were on-track to get a 50/50 fiber connection (the service supports up to 1000/1000) - however the ISP hasn't yet started to build the network out to our village - a year later than they said it would be available. In contrast, our neighboring villages all have their service, but there is a risk they will pull out since the build cost is 3x what they forecast (narrow country roads where the only option is to dig up the road, rather than run cable under verges or sidewalks). FWIW, the build cost is a measly £600,000 - or $929,670, which in my estimate works out at between £600 and £1200 per resident.
- willyk 11y ago
  FYI, based on my past experience, for avg urban customer the total acquisition cost for a cable ISP on DOCSIS 2/3.0 was about $750 -- small delta vs your new build cost.
  - georgerobinson 11y ago
    Virgin Media is the only UK-based ISP that uses cable (DOCSIS). All others use VDSL2 where available, ADSL2 or just plain old ADSL (g.DMT) if you're sufficiently rural. The trouble is that Virgin Media have much cut out for them if they want to match the availability of VDSL in the UK. Therefore, I can imagine they will be targeting large towns on the commuter belt long before they consider more rural villages.
- bane 11y ago
  I've been around the UK and Ireland so I know what you mean about the roads and the difficulty of running infrastructure around them. I remember back when we had DSL we could saturate it, even with just some casual youtubing. Funny thing is, we never asked for or paid for symmetric connections, our phone company just did it one day as part of a system upgrade and sent everybody new routers. And they've done at least one bandwidth upgrade since then. I grew up pretty rural so I can definitely sympathize with your pain. The first world will arrive soon!
dzhiurgis 11y ago
> I don't believe I come close to saturating it. Well your HD streams are very compressed and possibly downsized resolution. People DO want 4K 60 fps uncompressed streams, but there is just no way to support them all at once.
- bane 11y ago
  It looks like Netflix is claiming 4k at 25Mb/s (at their standard degraded quality). So we'll need more bandwidth in the future, but I don't even have anything in my house that can display 4k anyways so I'm not too concerned.

wmf 11y ago

The author started out with no broadband at all: http://www.loomcom.com/blog/2015/02/22/its-comcastic-or-i-accidentally-bought-a-house-without-internet/ http://www.loomcom.com/blog/2015/02/22/its-comcastic-or-i-ac... If you're going to have to pay to run some kind of Internet to your house, I guess you might as well get fiber. The bandwidth is probably a free bonus.

dmm 11y ago

Imagine that you decide to get a security camera system for some reason. Maybe you have a valuable collection of something or you have a small business with lots of easily moved/sold equipment. You can easy buy or assemble a DVR system with up to a few dozen cameras from a number of sources. These systems can be very valuable in ways you may not expect. My parent's recently captured video of a car accident in front of their house. This video greatly benefited a long-time neighbor and friend. Anyway you get a system that has good video coverage of your building's doors and windows and can record say a few days worth of video. You're golden, right? Unfortunately you are vulnerable in a fundamental way. An intruder can find the video recorder box and destroy it. I personally know individuals this has happened to. So you come home from a long week and find your building broken into and the video lost. What can you do about this? Simple... find a neighbor/AWS/colo box/etc and stream the video there too. It records a few TB of data and provides a backup in case of theft or destruction. This differs from typical backup situations of home users because of the bandwith involved. Because ideally you would stream the video directly from the cams. If you have 10 cams producing 2 mbps, thats 20mbps. That's a lot of upload for the typical home connection, but for a symmetrical gigabit connection it's a drop in the bucket. This is just one example. Having the bandwidth available makes so many things easy that were previously very difficult.

dmm 11y ago
Here's another one: Modern games are huge and SSDs are small. Buy all your games on steam. When you want to play a game just tell steam to get it and it downloads at 50+ megabytes / second. Play your 20GB game in less than 7 minutes. When you're done just delete it. There is no reason why games couldn't be designed for this use case and be playble immediately, downloading in the background.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  Keep in mind that the services you use have to pay money for bandwidth, too.
  - solotronics 11y ago

ThrustVectoring 11y ago

That's asking the wrong question, in my book. The right question is something along the lines of "if companies know there are many people with that much bandwidth, what new products and services would they be selling us?"

nitrogen 11y ago
I think we'd see more "private cloud" usage; put a secure box in your house with all your data you want to access elsewhere, give photo/video links or hashes or decryption keys or whatever to your family and friends, etc.
- willyk 11y ago
  Looking to the broadband wonderland in South Korea of Japan w/Gig service for $25 provides some insight into the sevices/uses of that sort of broadband -- based on my experience it fundamentally changes your computing practices.

staunch 11y ago

The biggest advantage of fiber is often latency/jitter. I had 4ms ping flat and 0% packet loss to local LA Quake Live servers when I had FiOS in LA. Almost LAN-like play. Cable internet is always has much higher ping, more jitter, and more packet loss. Supposedly I can get gigabit internet from AT&T here in Cupertino but they cap at 1 TB and I'm not excited about paying $110/mo for the equivalent of a ~3 Mbps sustained connection.

scurvy 11y ago

I routinely download coredumps from crashed devices and servers to analyze them locally or upload them to other partners. Some of these are full dumps, so have fun moving 256GB on a daily basis with a slow connection.