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> I’ve got symmetric 2 gbps at home, and frankly I struggle to find a purpose for it. I think for the vast majority of people, download speeds are the important

by comex 5y ago

> I’ve got symmetric 2 gbps at home, and frankly I struggle to find a purpose for it. I think for the vast majority of people, download speeds are the important thing. The majority of Internet traffic today is video, where there's no real reason for bandwidth usage to be asymmetric. You might be streaming webcam video up to a Zoom call or streaming a movie down from Netflix. Today, the former has far lower video quality than the latter. But why should it? Why can't we stream equally high-quality 4K (and better) video in both directions? …Well, bandwidth is only one reason, with other reasons including the low quality of most webcams and processing power limitations. And video doesn't require that much bandwidth. The 20Mbit the EFF is complaining about is already good enough for one 4K video stream. Still, only one, and only if that 20Mbit is an actually achievable transfer rate rather than a theoretical cap. 100Mbit would be much more comfortable, especially for multi-user households. On the other hand, 2Gbps is beyond what video streaming will have any use for in the foreseeable future. But I'd argue most people have no need for 2Gbps down either, with some exceptions.

oarsinsync 5y ago
> The 20Mbit the EFF is complaining about is already good enough for one 4K video stream. Still, only one, and only if that 20Mbit is an actually achievable transfer rate rather than a theoretical cap. 100Mbit would be much more comfortable, especially for multi-user households. Focusing explicitly on "20Mbit ... is already good enough for oen 4K video stream", this is only true if the peak rate is 20Mbit, or if it's not a real time application, where buffering can be applied to smooth out that stream. Try streaming a 4K RDP session on 20Mbit, and watch that experience degrade rapidly during any periods of high motion on the remote machine. Averages only work for workloads that can be smoothed. For any real time applications, what matters most is the peak rate. For example, a single 4K RDP session can peak at over 80Mbit. Even at 50Mbit, the session will become unusable during peak motion periods, in the worst possible way: you lose the content, and there's a delay before you're able to interact with the session in real time again. So yes, 20Mbit is good enough for lowest common denominator stuff, but there's a lot of value being ignored outside of watching TV.

by comex 5y ago

oarsinsync 5y ago

> The 20Mbit the EFF is complaining about is already good enough for one 4K video stream. Still, only one, and only if that 20Mbit is an actually achievable transfer rate rather than a theoretical cap. 100Mbit would be much more comfortable, especially for multi-user households. Focusing explicitly on "20Mbit ... is already good enough for oen 4K video stream", this is only true if the peak rate is 20Mbit, or if it's not a real time application, where buffering can be applied to smooth out that stream. Try streaming a 4K RDP session on 20Mbit, and watch that experience degrade rapidly during any periods of high motion on the remote machine. Averages only work for workloads that can be smoothed. For any real time applications, what matters most is the peak rate. For example, a single 4K RDP session can peak at over 80Mbit. Even at 50Mbit, the session will become unusable during peak motion periods, in the worst possible way: you lose the content, and there's a delay before you're able to interact with the session in real time again. So yes, 20Mbit is good enough for lowest common denominator stuff, but there's a lot of value being ignored outside of watching TV.