4 ms·

What if you have a family with four kids, all of whom need to engage in remote learning on occasion? 20Mbps is also entirely noticeable for bulk downloads, whe

by vitus 4y ago

What if you have a family with four kids, all of whom need to engage in remote learning on occasion? 20Mbps is also entirely noticeable for bulk downloads, whether it's a Steam download or a Windows update. By going from 20 -> 100 Mbps, you save nearly an hour on a 10GB download (1h6m -> 13m).

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
In the unlikely scenario where all four children are simultaneously using the internet full-throttle, they're still each getting 5 Mbps down, which Netflix says is sufficient for 1080p video. Upload speeds could start to be a problem though, and IMO that's a much more significant issue. > 20Mbps is also entirely noticeable for bulk downloads It is, but downloading Steam games quickly is not a critical need. It can be done in the background.
- vitus 4y ago
  5 Mbps down is certainly more than adequate for a single 1080p stream that's been compressed ahead of time. When you have to stitch together multiple real-time streams as in a classroom environment, then the actual numbers can vary significantly. If your kids are forced into remote learning, and you're working from home, then we might be talking more like 3-4 Mbps per person if your network is split 5 or 6 ways. And unless you're on a business internet plan, the only guarantee you have when you buy a 20Mbps plan is that your ISP will throttle you to that rate if you exceed it. To be clear: I think most people would be happy if they could get a guarantee of 50 Mbps download speeds. But the fact of the matter is that during peak hours, if you pay for higher download speeds, you get a higher fraction of the available spectrum. Your big-name cable companies can have oversubscription rates of 100x or more. That doesn't translate to only getting 5Mbps out of your 500Mbps connection at peak, but you will see _some_ contention. If you're paying for 20Mbps under the assumption that you'll only need 18Mbps at peak, you'll be frustrated when you end up only getting 15Mbps and all the video calls stutter / cut out intermittently.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    > If you're paying for 20Mbps under the assumption that you'll only need 18Mbps at peak, you'll be frustrated when you end up only getting 15Mbps and all the video calls stutter / cut out intermittently. But isn't that the real problem here? Companies shouldn't be able to advertise a 20 mbps connection if they aren't able to maintain that speed. Dropping one megabit on occasion may be reasonable, but five is at the point where you should be compensating customers for the outage. My thesis is not "everything is fine and everyone should shut up and accept what they've got." My thesis is that we're focusing on entirely the wrong thing.
    - dendriti 4y ago
      Are you literally incapable of understanding that other peoples' needs are different from your own?
    - vitus 4y ago
      There are certainly a lot of problems with incumbent ISPs that many other commenters have pointed out: deceptive marketing practices, anti-competitive behavior (ranging from lobby-driven legislation to lock out new entrants, to outright sabotage / destruction of cables), wildly asymmetric up/down speeds driven by economies of scale from 20 years ago, just to name a few. Yes, even 4k video streaming at 20 Mbps is viable (assuming that your connection is stable). Yes, poor wifi performance / latency / bufferbloat / squirrels eating your coax are more common underlying causes of end-user pain points. But that doesn't mean that there aren't common use cases that benefit significantly from adding more bandwidth, nor does it mean that adding more upstream capacity is useless in the context of these other factors. Also, let's be realistic: most regulators don't have anywhere close to the level of technical expertise that you'd expect from, say, a network engineer. It's a lot easier to reduce everything to the single dimension that is download speed, and it's a lot easier for a layperson to understand said changes. It's also a straightforward way to place pressure on ISPs to upgrade their networks if they want to keep saying that X% of their customers have access to broadband plans.
      - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
viraptor 4y ago
Tbf, the updates can just take longer to download. Higher speed does not enable them as such, which is what the op asked. Similar for steam - spending extra hour for a download ahead of time is... fine for me.
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  Great that it's fine for you. Is the fact that you enjoy waiting for downloads a reason to push the same suffering on others?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - viraptor 4y ago
    You've got strong opinions here, but... chill. I'm not enjoying the wait, I'm not pushing it on others and some wait time to play a game is not suffering. The question was what does the higher speed enable - of course it makes lots of things better, but waiting less is not enabling.
    - FireBeyond 4y ago
      > The question was what does the higher speed enable - of course it makes lots of things better, but waiting less is not enabling. It enables more productivity, if it doesn't take me x time to upload photography to a client, or push a bunch of Docker images to a remote, but x/2, x/3. That cycle time being reduced is useful.

by vitus 4y ago

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

In the unlikely scenario where all four children are simultaneously using the internet full-throttle, they're still each getting 5 Mbps down, which Netflix says is sufficient for 1080p video. Upload speeds could start to be a problem though, and IMO that's a much more significant issue. > 20Mbps is also entirely noticeable for bulk downloads It is, but downloading Steam games quickly is not a critical need. It can be done in the background.

vitus 4y ago
5 Mbps down is certainly more than adequate for a single 1080p stream that's been compressed ahead of time. When you have to stitch together multiple real-time streams as in a classroom environment, then the actual numbers can vary significantly. If your kids are forced into remote learning, and you're working from home, then we might be talking more like 3-4 Mbps per person if your network is split 5 or 6 ways. And unless you're on a business internet plan, the only guarantee you have when you buy a 20Mbps plan is that your ISP will throttle you to that rate if you exceed it. To be clear: I think most people would be happy if they could get a guarantee of 50 Mbps download speeds. But the fact of the matter is that during peak hours, if you pay for higher download speeds, you get a higher fraction of the available spectrum. Your big-name cable companies can have oversubscription rates of 100x or more. That doesn't translate to only getting 5Mbps out of your 500Mbps connection at peak, but you will see _some_ contention. If you're paying for 20Mbps under the assumption that you'll only need 18Mbps at peak, you'll be frustrated when you end up only getting 15Mbps and all the video calls stutter / cut out intermittently.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  > If you're paying for 20Mbps under the assumption that you'll only need 18Mbps at peak, you'll be frustrated when you end up only getting 15Mbps and all the video calls stutter / cut out intermittently. But isn't that the real problem here? Companies shouldn't be able to advertise a 20 mbps connection if they aren't able to maintain that speed. Dropping one megabit on occasion may be reasonable, but five is at the point where you should be compensating customers for the outage. My thesis is not "everything is fine and everyone should shut up and accept what they've got." My thesis is that we're focusing on entirely the wrong thing.
  - dendriti 4y ago
    Are you literally incapable of understanding that other peoples' needs are different from your own?
  - vitus 4y ago
    There are certainly a lot of problems with incumbent ISPs that many other commenters have pointed out: deceptive marketing practices, anti-competitive behavior (ranging from lobby-driven legislation to lock out new entrants, to outright sabotage / destruction of cables), wildly asymmetric up/down speeds driven by economies of scale from 20 years ago, just to name a few. Yes, even 4k video streaming at 20 Mbps is viable (assuming that your connection is stable). Yes, poor wifi performance / latency / bufferbloat / squirrels eating your coax are more common underlying causes of end-user pain points. But that doesn't mean that there aren't common use cases that benefit significantly from adding more bandwidth, nor does it mean that adding more upstream capacity is useless in the context of these other factors. Also, let's be realistic: most regulators don't have anywhere close to the level of technical expertise that you'd expect from, say, a network engineer. It's a lot easier to reduce everything to the single dimension that is download speed, and it's a lot easier for a layperson to understand said changes. It's also a straightforward way to place pressure on ISPs to upgrade their networks if they want to keep saying that X% of their customers have access to broadband plans.
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago

viraptor 4y ago

Tbf, the updates can just take longer to download. Higher speed does not enable them as such, which is what the op asked. Similar for steam - spending extra hour for a download ahead of time is... fine for me.

_Algernon_ 4y ago
Great that it's fine for you. Is the fact that you enjoy waiting for downloads a reason to push the same suffering on others?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- viraptor 4y ago
  You've got strong opinions here, but... chill. I'm not enjoying the wait, I'm not pushing it on others and some wait time to play a game is not suffering. The question was what does the higher speed enable - of course it makes lots of things better, but waiting less is not enabling.
  - FireBeyond 4y ago
    > The question was what does the higher speed enable - of course it makes lots of things better, but waiting less is not enabling. It enables more productivity, if it doesn't take me x time to upload photography to a client, or push a bunch of Docker images to a remote, but x/2, x/3. That cycle time being reduced is useful.