5 ms·

My regular 100/100 line downloads 3Gb in five minutes. The difference in my life is miniscule compared to a gigabit line. Also the gigabit line requires hardwar

My regular 100/100 line downloads 3Gb in five minutes. The difference in my life is miniscule compared to a gigabit line. Also the gigabit line requires hardware all the way to achieve the promised speed.

pathartl 7y ago
When you're talking about 3GB, sure. If you look at video games, a lot of your AAA games are coming in at 12-70GB or even 100GB. Certain games (I'm looking at you PUBG) also don't optimize their updates, so some updates can be upwards of 10-15GB. Once you get into that realm time really does become a factor. I'm on 400/25 and I always dread installing Battlefield 4 after a fresh install. I think it's around 60-70GB right now and takes around 45 minutes to get everything downloaded.
- montecarl 7y ago
  Too bad steam has trouble hitting even 100mbit/s on my gig fiber connection. In fact I find that many services seem to throttle at exactly 100mbit/s, e.g. Dropbox.
  - penagwin 7y ago
    I had this exact issue then found out either my cable or port on my router was bad, and was only initiating a 100mbps link. Steam can hit 40MBps (over 300mbps) regularly for me. I find what you say to be true though, most services can't saturate my link - but I'd double check because exactly 100mbps is suspicious. Also don't use speedtest.net, try fast.com (run by netflix) - ISPS are known to "cheat" on speedtest.net (they can host a speedtest server inside their network) but fast.com downloads actual movie fragments from netflix's cdn.
  - pathartl 7y ago
    Might need to check something out. I saturate my 400mbit connection. Now PSN on the other hand... last time I used it Sony artificially limited it to something like 20mbit.
  - mijamo 7y ago
    Steam can saturate a 10Gbits/s in Stockholm so I doubt it wouldn't be hitting 100mbit/s on your connection. Dropbox does not throttle at 100mbit/s either. Maybe it's a problem with your ISP or your router?
  - eloisant 7y ago
    I constantly max my 1GBps connection when downloading from Steam. I suspect they have a CDN node in my ISP's datacenter.
jedberg 7y ago
It's not just single downloads though. It's also not having to hear from the other room "are you breaking the internet again?!" every time I need to download something large while my wife is watching Netflix.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  That's buffer bloat. Your router is putting your wife's Netflix data in a queue behind seconds or even minutes of data from your connection. Completely pointless but it made some microbenchmark 0.1% better so they shipped it. Buy devices that don't do that.
dawnerd 7y ago
Gigabit isn’t that special these days, normal consumer gear gets you close enough. Trust me, once you get a faster connection you definitely won’t want to go back to 100. It’s kind of like high DPI displays.
- toast0 7y ago
  > Trust me, once you get a faster connection you definitely won’t want to go back to 100. I had a 1G connection, but my most often used desktop would often switch to 100M, and it would take me weeks to notice. I would absolutely get a 1G connection again if it were reasonable, but a solid 100M is fine for everything other than really large up/downloads. Symmetric 10, with decent latency isn't that bad either. > It’s kind of like high DPI displays. Yeah, I've had those too, and I don't find them worth it. A slightly higher than 'normal' dpi, that I can run at 1:1 was pretty nice until my eyes got older.
  - mijamo 7y ago
    Symetric 10 does not even allow for streaming in good quality. 100 is good most of the time but then happens the moment you need some big chunk of data (ex: a game of 150 GB) and then you need to wait quite a bit. Also, if you have a larger household with everybody streaming and playing games, 100Mbits can saturate pretty quickly. As I don't have kids, 100Mbits is mostly OK for me but occasionnaly I wish I had more. Like when I moved my photo backup, 500GB to upload was a pain at 100Mbit/s, but obviously this is not something I need to do everyday.
    - toast0 7y ago
      I had a high quality 6M for a long time, and streaming was fine; much nicer (less buffering) when I got a bigger pipe though, although the bigger pipe was less consistent
  - rayiner 7y ago
    I also have a gig connection and a bad connection to a patch panel took out one of the twisted pairs and caused the link to downgrade to 100 base TX. Took me weeks to notice.

pathartl 7y ago

When you're talking about 3GB, sure. If you look at video games, a lot of your AAA games are coming in at 12-70GB or even 100GB. Certain games (I'm looking at you PUBG) also don't optimize their updates, so some updates can be upwards of 10-15GB. Once you get into that realm time really does become a factor. I'm on 400/25 and I always dread installing Battlefield 4 after a fresh install. I think it's around 60-70GB right now and takes around 45 minutes to get everything downloaded.

montecarl 7y ago
Too bad steam has trouble hitting even 100mbit/s on my gig fiber connection. In fact I find that many services seem to throttle at exactly 100mbit/s, e.g. Dropbox.
- penagwin 7y ago
  I had this exact issue then found out either my cable or port on my router was bad, and was only initiating a 100mbps link. Steam can hit 40MBps (over 300mbps) regularly for me. I find what you say to be true though, most services can't saturate my link - but I'd double check because exactly 100mbps is suspicious. Also don't use speedtest.net, try fast.com (run by netflix) - ISPS are known to "cheat" on speedtest.net (they can host a speedtest server inside their network) but fast.com downloads actual movie fragments from netflix's cdn.
- pathartl 7y ago
  Might need to check something out. I saturate my 400mbit connection. Now PSN on the other hand... last time I used it Sony artificially limited it to something like 20mbit.
- mijamo 7y ago
  Steam can saturate a 10Gbits/s in Stockholm so I doubt it wouldn't be hitting 100mbit/s on your connection. Dropbox does not throttle at 100mbit/s either. Maybe it's a problem with your ISP or your router?
- eloisant 7y ago
  I constantly max my 1GBps connection when downloading from Steam. I suspect they have a CDN node in my ISP's datacenter.

jedberg 7y ago

It's not just single downloads though. It's also not having to hear from the other room "are you breaking the internet again?!" every time I need to download something large while my wife is watching Netflix.

tialaramex 7y ago
That's buffer bloat. Your router is putting your wife's Netflix data in a queue behind seconds or even minutes of data from your connection. Completely pointless but it made some microbenchmark 0.1% better so they shipped it. Buy devices that don't do that.

dawnerd 7y ago

Gigabit isn’t that special these days, normal consumer gear gets you close enough. Trust me, once you get a faster connection you definitely won’t want to go back to 100. It’s kind of like high DPI displays.

toast0 7y ago
> Trust me, once you get a faster connection you definitely won’t want to go back to 100. I had a 1G connection, but my most often used desktop would often switch to 100M, and it would take me weeks to notice. I would absolutely get a 1G connection again if it were reasonable, but a solid 100M is fine for everything other than really large up/downloads. Symmetric 10, with decent latency isn't that bad either. > It’s kind of like high DPI displays. Yeah, I've had those too, and I don't find them worth it. A slightly higher than 'normal' dpi, that I can run at 1:1 was pretty nice until my eyes got older.
- mijamo 7y ago
  Symetric 10 does not even allow for streaming in good quality. 100 is good most of the time but then happens the moment you need some big chunk of data (ex: a game of 150 GB) and then you need to wait quite a bit. Also, if you have a larger household with everybody streaming and playing games, 100Mbits can saturate pretty quickly. As I don't have kids, 100Mbits is mostly OK for me but occasionnaly I wish I had more. Like when I moved my photo backup, 500GB to upload was a pain at 100Mbit/s, but obviously this is not something I need to do everyday.
  - toast0 7y ago
    I had a high quality 6M for a long time, and streaming was fine; much nicer (less buffering) when I got a bigger pipe though, although the bigger pipe was less consistent
- rayiner 7y ago
  I also have a gig connection and a bad connection to a patch panel took out one of the twisted pairs and caused the link to downgrade to 100 base TX. Took me weeks to notice.