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There’s no “killer app” for a gigabit connection but it does speed up some things you already do: - Backups - System updates - Game patches - Torrents Havi

There’s no “killer app” for a gigabit connection but it does speed up some things you already do: - Backups - System updates - Game patches - Torrents Having all those things be 10x faster than a 100mbit connection is nice. It’s a luxury, but it’s a nice luxury. For me it had the secondary effect of making me buy a decent home router and access point since my old Time Capsule couldn’t handle more than ~500mbit/s. As a result my connection is much better overall now.

falcolas 6y ago
+1 to all of these, with a special "My God, game patches" comment. 40GB day 1 patches are barely newsworthy these days. Keeping a library of games on your computer (or console) patched can easily run you hundreds of gigs a month.
- coddle-hark 6y ago
  I sold my PS4 because of this. I don’t have much time to play, maybe once or twice a month, but it felt like every time I turned the damn thing on I needed to first do a system upgrade (which takes forever) and then update the game itself (which again takes forever). All to play 30 minutes of Rocket League. Slightly off-topic since the PS4 couldn’t max out a gigabit connection anyways so not really a reason to upgrade. Maybe PS5 owners will feel the need.
  - musicale 6y ago
    This is a good point - PSN seems to have poor download speeds. The problem seems to be at Sony's end for their CDN or perhaps the peering connections are being throttled/bottlenecked. On PS4, I believe the motivation for game updates recopying all the game data is to defragment/optimize placement on disk to minimize seek time (particularly important for hard drives) and to maximize sequential reads. It may also do so for data integrity reasons. I don't think PS5 needs to do the same sort of block placement optimization, but it will still do the copying for PS4 games (just faster if you use its internal flash storage.)
- musicale 6y ago
  With digital game downloads and those 35GB patch updates (Overwatch, ugh) you appreciate every bit of bandwidth you can get.
908B64B197 6y ago
Torrents is the big one (for symmetrical connection). It has a bad reputation because it's used to distribute copywritten material, but I could see things like game updates being done via peer to peer. If I ran a game distribution platform I would even go further and offer a rebate on subscriptions for users willing to share their connection. After all, they would be saving me quite a bit in server costs and would help for places that are far from my CDN.

falcolas 6y ago

+1 to all of these, with a special "My God, game patches" comment. 40GB day 1 patches are barely newsworthy these days. Keeping a library of games on your computer (or console) patched can easily run you hundreds of gigs a month.

coddle-hark 6y ago
I sold my PS4 because of this. I don’t have much time to play, maybe once or twice a month, but it felt like every time I turned the damn thing on I needed to first do a system upgrade (which takes forever) and then update the game itself (which again takes forever). All to play 30 minutes of Rocket League. Slightly off-topic since the PS4 couldn’t max out a gigabit connection anyways so not really a reason to upgrade. Maybe PS5 owners will feel the need.
- musicale 6y ago
  This is a good point - PSN seems to have poor download speeds. The problem seems to be at Sony's end for their CDN or perhaps the peering connections are being throttled/bottlenecked. On PS4, I believe the motivation for game updates recopying all the game data is to defragment/optimize placement on disk to minimize seek time (particularly important for hard drives) and to maximize sequential reads. It may also do so for data integrity reasons. I don't think PS5 needs to do the same sort of block placement optimization, but it will still do the copying for PS4 games (just faster if you use its internal flash storage.)
musicale 6y ago
With digital game downloads and those 35GB patch updates (Overwatch, ugh) you appreciate every bit of bandwidth you can get.

908B64B197 6y ago

Torrents is the big one (for symmetrical connection). It has a bad reputation because it's used to distribute copywritten material, but I could see things like game updates being done via peer to peer. If I ran a game distribution platform I would even go further and offer a rebate on subscriptions for users willing to share their connection. After all, they would be saving me quite a bit in server costs and would help for places that are far from my CDN.