3 ms·

I've often wondered about this. I get about 50mbps at home, and it's essentially more than enough for everything I do. Sure, having a faster connection speed wo

I've often wondered about this. I get about 50mbps at home, and it's essentially more than enough for everything I do. Sure, having a faster connection speed would be great for big downloads, but I've never had any idea what I might do differently if I had gigabit fibre. Even something like 4k video streams fit in several tens of mbps, a family of 4 could all stream different 4k programmes with less than 200mbps between them. I'm not sure if I'm just suffering a lack of imagination, and don't realise what I'm missing out on. People who have really fast connections (gigabit): what do you do differently online that those of use with just "quite quick" connection don't?

whatshisface 7y ago
If enough people had super-fast internet, downloads would get bigger. You could stream a desktop from a remote server for example. On a scale less threatening to software freedom, games could stream their art assets, allowing you to explore petabyte-sized worlds on consumer hardware. You could easily toss trained neural networks back and forth for whatever applications were dreamed up for them. However, you're not going to see this if 99% of people have 50mpbs. In that world, you'll only see things that use 50mpbs.
- ianai 7y ago
  Being able to subscribe to a high end gaming machine that always has the latest hardware and streams local is one option. Imagine always being able to play games in max resolution and settings with no hiccups? Or maybe virtualizing presences more often. We could manufacture displays the size of walls right now - and presumably someday OLED that size will be affordable. Who knows what sort of real time innovations could be made. Ie tracking objects at a small scale for large patches of land. Weather, wild life, idk. Remote controlled drone surveillance for wild fires.
tsbinz 7y ago
Things I do with gbit fibre at home: * Buying a game on steam and playing it very soon after. * Buying a movie right before I leave on a trip and still being able to watch it on my iPad offline. * Putting a video on a cloud hoster and not needing to wait until I can give a shareable link out. It's all things you can do with 50mbit, but the speed difference really makes a difference. I rarely get the full gbit though, with steam (after I tinkered around a bit with regions) it's more like 60 megabytes per second for example.
lodi 7y ago
I recently got 1.5Gbit fiber in Toronto (it was only $10 more than gigabit, and that was only ~$20 more than 250Mbit...) Anyway, it hasn't been hugely transformative, but it alleviates a few headaches: 1) The biggest benefit is that uploads/downloads are symmetric. If you backup to the cloud, this is a big deal. All of the "definitely overnight" stuff can now be done in under an hour anytime. 2) I never worry about what anyone else in the house is doing. Stream all you want over wifi, there'll still be a full gigabit of bandwidth for my workstation. I don't have to mess with QoS or anything; there's literally just an oversupply of bandwidth. In fact, until I upgrade to 2.5 or 5gbit ethernet I literally can't saturate my connection... 3) I'm less likely to hoard stuff. I don't bother downloading steam games in advance and keeping them installed forever; I just download on demand and delete it after I'm done with it. This is currently allowing me to transition everything to SSDs.

whatshisface 7y ago

If enough people had super-fast internet, downloads would get bigger. You could stream a desktop from a remote server for example. On a scale less threatening to software freedom, games could stream their art assets, allowing you to explore petabyte-sized worlds on consumer hardware. You could easily toss trained neural networks back and forth for whatever applications were dreamed up for them. However, you're not going to see this if 99% of people have 50mpbs. In that world, you'll only see things that use 50mpbs.

ianai 7y ago
Being able to subscribe to a high end gaming machine that always has the latest hardware and streams local is one option. Imagine always being able to play games in max resolution and settings with no hiccups? Or maybe virtualizing presences more often. We could manufacture displays the size of walls right now - and presumably someday OLED that size will be affordable. Who knows what sort of real time innovations could be made. Ie tracking objects at a small scale for large patches of land. Weather, wild life, idk. Remote controlled drone surveillance for wild fires.

tsbinz 7y ago

Things I do with gbit fibre at home: * Buying a game on steam and playing it very soon after. * Buying a movie right before I leave on a trip and still being able to watch it on my iPad offline. * Putting a video on a cloud hoster and not needing to wait until I can give a shareable link out. It's all things you can do with 50mbit, but the speed difference really makes a difference. I rarely get the full gbit though, with steam (after I tinkered around a bit with regions) it's more like 60 megabytes per second for example.

lodi 7y ago

I recently got 1.5Gbit fiber in Toronto (it was only $10 more than gigabit, and that was only ~$20 more than 250Mbit...) Anyway, it hasn't been hugely transformative, but it alleviates a few headaches: 1) The biggest benefit is that uploads/downloads are symmetric. If you backup to the cloud, this is a big deal. All of the "definitely overnight" stuff can now be done in under an hour anytime. 2) I never worry about what anyone else in the house is doing. Stream all you want over wifi, there'll still be a full gigabit of bandwidth for my workstation. I don't have to mess with QoS or anything; there's literally just an oversupply of bandwidth. In fact, until I upgrade to 2.5 or 5gbit ethernet I literally can't saturate my connection... 3) I'm less likely to hoard stuff. I don't bother downloading steam games in advance and keeping them installed forever; I just download on demand and delete it after I'm done with it. This is currently allowing me to transition everything to SSDs.