7 ms·

I wonder how much of a push this will really be? For the vast majority of people even vanilla gigabit is of limited benefit... that's on the edge of what a con

by TylerE 4y ago

I wonder how much of a push this will really be? For the vast majority of people even vanilla gigabit is of limited benefit... that's on the edge of what a consumer SSD is writing at.

Gigachad 4y ago
Even as a regular consumer I see the benefit. I buy a new game, and its typically something like 100GB. Gigabit internet is the difference between waiting 15 minutes and 1 hour to play my new game. This is not an uncommon use case and the difference is quite large.
mikeyouse 4y ago
Right - the popular sentiment on my smallish town Facebook group is people dropping their 300mbps cable since Spectrum is an awful company to deal with in favor of cell-based (T-mobile or Verizon) home service. 90%+ of people in most areas don't need internet any faster than Netflix requires, and nobody is running ethernet so WiFi speeds are going to be the limiting factor in internet speed for most everyone else.
- TylerE 4y ago
  I went from ~250Mbit to Gigabit recently. I don't notice it on my wireless clients at all, but it is really nice on my main PC, which is tied directly into the router via a good 'ole cable. I've seen actual downloads speeds flirting with 100MB/sec, which is really nice when downloading some of these massive 50GB+ games.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
icedchai 4y ago
You may be off a bit. A gigabit is only around 125 megabytes a second. A low end consumer SSD is closer to a 550 megabytes second, or ~4 gigabits. A high-end NVMe SSD will get you 3 or 4 gigabytes a second. 30 to 40x a gigabit!
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Grandma running pirated Word 2007 on an ancient dust-clogged Dell laptop that her grandson upgraded with a cheap 256GB Lite-On mSATA SSD stolen from a throwaway work computer is probably only getting 125MByte/sec and certainly lower than that due to the plethora of IE addons constantly writing to it.
  - machinawhite 4y ago
    1. Stop confronting me 2. Can confirm these writing speeds
    - WJW 4y ago
      I'm now imagining this ancient grandma writing 125 MB/s into her pirated text editor, just cranking out volume after volume of cheap detective and romance novels. Later, after her death, it is discovered that this lady was the ghostwriter behind all of the top 50 bestsellers of the last 30 years. She would write faster too, if it weren't for that crappy SSD her grandchildren set her up with.
- robocat 4y ago
  > A high-end NVMe SSD will get you 3 or 4 gigabytes a second That is PCIe 3.0. For example the Samsung PCIe 4.0 990 PRO just released: sequential read 7.45GB/s and write 6.9GB/s — https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/samsung-announces-990-pro-ssds-for-pcie-4-0-with-big-speed-bump/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/samsung-announces-99...
- TylerE 4y ago
  Under ideal circumstances, yes. When say, torrenting, or anything else with non-ideal file access patterns real world speeds are not going to be nearly that high, especially on a consumer-grade drive.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    Nothing is ever ideal. The point is available SSD disk I/O bandwidth will exceed network bandwidth well above a gigabit.
cheschire 4y ago
I'm a deep computer nerd, I play lots of games, with a family watching streaming on 2 to 4 devices regularly, I buy a decent amount of games, download terabytes per year... I'm just fine with my 300 mbps connection. Even when it drops to 20 mbps occasionally it's not the worst experience. I'm not sure what it is that is different about me than my peers.
- metrix 4y ago
  I'm right there with you, as long as that 300 mbps connection is symmetrical, and the ISP is carrier neutral. I didn't know how big a deal neutrality was until I switched from Suddenlink to a small company called Vexus. Gigabytes of nightly backups went from hours to 5 minutes, and downloads from certain companies improved drastically.
chrsig 4y ago
This was my experience when I had a gigabit connection. I could download games from steam as fast as my ssd would write it. Which was pretty awesome, but I'm not often pushing that sort of bandwidth. The counter argument being that without it being a commodity, we don't know what might be invented if it were. We could miss out on, or delay lots of really amazing innovations.
- johnwalkr 4y ago
  That’s not my experience at all. I had 10Gbps internet in Tokyo. In normal browsing there wasn’t much difference between using wifi which I normally did and connecting by 10Gbps Ethernet. But downloading on steam was one case where the difference was amazing, I could download a AAA game in 1-2 minutes instead of 10-20.
  - Salgat 4y ago
    In my experience you hit those speeds if you happen to be few short hops from the server/CDN.
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    I find that Steam decompression pegs one core of my CPU and downloads get stuck at 550-600 mbps. It would take a lot less time if it didn't compress anything.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      Yup, about the same for me (maybe slightly faster). Sometimes games have assets that compress really well, and then I end up downloading at 400mbps and maxing out my SSD writing.
      - zbrozek 4y ago
        Haha, yeah I bet most people who play games these days have a faster CPU than I do. My machine is eight years old.
gumby 4y ago
Your SSD comment aside: not everyone lives alone; during the lockdown we had four people using the network simultaneously during the day, plus of course some of my other machines using the network. We have friends with three or four kids, which would have magnified that demand.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Gigabit can support ~25 simulatenous Blu-Ray streams (and that's at the full 40Mbit). It wasn't all that long ago (~10 years) when the company I worked for had only 200Mbit to the internet, and that supported ~300 people pretty comfortably.
  - w-ll 4y ago
    Remember when cd players had 60 second anti-skip buffers?
  - pooperscoop 4y ago
DannyBee 4y ago
you are off by an a factor of 3-5 :). The random consumer ssd reads/writes as 300-600megabytes/second, easily. That's 3-5gbps, not 1gbps. A reasonable 7200rpm spinning disk can easily saturate 1gbps. Most home grade nas RAID arrays can saturate 10gbps. (obviously not 2 spinning disk mirror ones :P)
Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
An SSD nowdays has something like 3500 megabytes/second, a 1gbit connection can (roughly) provide at most 100 megabytes/second, so we are not even close to use SSD write speed at full capacity. That being said, downloading from Steam is incredibly different with a gigabit bandwidth.
fomine3 4y ago
Since every consumer fiber plan is best effort, I'll get better speed by using faster plan even though rated speed isn't needed. I get about 700-200Mbps on my gigabit fiber for download. I'm fine with 1Gbps but 200Mbps is sometimes slower. Hopefully 2Gbps is constantly available on 10gigabit fiber.
basilgohar 4y ago
There's more to Internet than downloading data straight to disk. Families can have multiple kids taking online classes while both parents are also working remotely. Many families have multiple devices per person that can be streaming, downloading, OR UPLOADING (commonly the aspect shortchanged in residential Internet) which, at times, can easily saturate a 1Gb connection. We always need to advance because others are too, and services demand greater speeds in returb. It's a bit of a race, but no need to claim it's useless. We can do things now that were unthinkable before due to such advances.
- agilob 4y ago
  >Families can have multiple kids taking online classes while both parents are also working remotely. Many families have multiple devices per person that can be streaming, downloading, OR UPLOADING (commonly the aspect shortchanged in residential Internet) which, at times, can easily saturate a 1Gb connection. My 37mbps can do that for 2 people constantly working from home and most of the time on meetings.
- CommanderData 4y ago
  My family of 6 would stream Netflix, game and I'd be pretty heavy handed myself all on my router tethered to my 4G connection while we were switching providers. We didn't notice anything surprisingly. Three was the provider at the time.
- omegalulw 4y ago
  20 kids x 25mbps streams each is still only half a gig. You are way off here. The only way you saturate a gig is if you download big games from Steam, etc. If each of your kid is doing that you would probably run into fair use limits and have to set up a central PC for catching downloads and stuff but that's still a niche use case.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  My guess is that most people will just use whatever router is supplied by the ISP, and those are going the be the cheapest China has to offer. Even if it is Wifi6, that will max out at around 1Gbps. Some might run Ethernet to their office or consoles, but I'd guess that most will just use wifi. There's also the issue of the networking gear. Home users will just buy 1Gbps equipment, or slower, if that's what fits their price point. For future use, and businesses it is nice to see speeds above 1Gbps being rolled out. For now though, promising 25Gbps to residential is easy marketing. The ISPs knows that it will barely be used.

by TylerE 4y ago

I wonder how much of a push this will really be? For the vast majority of people even vanilla gigabit is of limited benefit... that's on the edge of what a consumer SSD is writing at.

Gigachad 4y ago

Even as a regular consumer I see the benefit. I buy a new game, and its typically something like 100GB. Gigabit internet is the difference between waiting 15 minutes and 1 hour to play my new game. This is not an uncommon use case and the difference is quite large.

mikeyouse 4y ago

Right - the popular sentiment on my smallish town Facebook group is people dropping their 300mbps cable since Spectrum is an awful company to deal with in favor of cell-based (T-mobile or Verizon) home service. 90%+ of people in most areas don't need internet any faster than Netflix requires, and nobody is running ethernet so WiFi speeds are going to be the limiting factor in internet speed for most everyone else.

TylerE 4y ago
I went from ~250Mbit to Gigabit recently. I don't notice it on my wireless clients at all, but it is really nice on my main PC, which is tied directly into the router via a good 'ole cable. I've seen actual downloads speeds flirting with 100MB/sec, which is really nice when downloading some of these massive 50GB+ games.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

icedchai 4y ago

You may be off a bit. A gigabit is only around 125 megabytes a second. A low end consumer SSD is closer to a 550 megabytes second, or ~4 gigabits. A high-end NVMe SSD will get you 3 or 4 gigabytes a second. 30 to 40x a gigabit!

tenebrisalietum 4y ago
Grandma running pirated Word 2007 on an ancient dust-clogged Dell laptop that her grandson upgraded with a cheap 256GB Lite-On mSATA SSD stolen from a throwaway work computer is probably only getting 125MByte/sec and certainly lower than that due to the plethora of IE addons constantly writing to it.
- machinawhite 4y ago
  1. Stop confronting me 2. Can confirm these writing speeds
  - WJW 4y ago
    I'm now imagining this ancient grandma writing 125 MB/s into her pirated text editor, just cranking out volume after volume of cheap detective and romance novels. Later, after her death, it is discovered that this lady was the ghostwriter behind all of the top 50 bestsellers of the last 30 years. She would write faster too, if it weren't for that crappy SSD her grandchildren set her up with.
robocat 4y ago
> A high-end NVMe SSD will get you 3 or 4 gigabytes a second That is PCIe 3.0. For example the Samsung PCIe 4.0 990 PRO just released: sequential read 7.45GB/s and write 6.9GB/s — https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/samsung-announces-990-pro-ssds-for-pcie-4-0-with-big-speed-bump/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/samsung-announces-99...
TylerE 4y ago
Under ideal circumstances, yes. When say, torrenting, or anything else with non-ideal file access patterns real world speeds are not going to be nearly that high, especially on a consumer-grade drive.
- icedchai 4y ago
  Nothing is ever ideal. The point is available SSD disk I/O bandwidth will exceed network bandwidth well above a gigabit.

cheschire 4y ago

I'm a deep computer nerd, I play lots of games, with a family watching streaming on 2 to 4 devices regularly, I buy a decent amount of games, download terabytes per year... I'm just fine with my 300 mbps connection. Even when it drops to 20 mbps occasionally it's not the worst experience. I'm not sure what it is that is different about me than my peers.

metrix 4y ago
I'm right there with you, as long as that 300 mbps connection is symmetrical, and the ISP is carrier neutral. I didn't know how big a deal neutrality was until I switched from Suddenlink to a small company called Vexus. Gigabytes of nightly backups went from hours to 5 minutes, and downloads from certain companies improved drastically.

chrsig 4y ago

This was my experience when I had a gigabit connection. I could download games from steam as fast as my ssd would write it. Which was pretty awesome, but I'm not often pushing that sort of bandwidth. The counter argument being that without it being a commodity, we don't know what might be invented if it were. We could miss out on, or delay lots of really amazing innovations.

johnwalkr 4y ago
That’s not my experience at all. I had 10Gbps internet in Tokyo. In normal browsing there wasn’t much difference between using wifi which I normally did and connecting by 10Gbps Ethernet. But downloading on steam was one case where the difference was amazing, I could download a AAA game in 1-2 minutes instead of 10-20.
- Salgat 4y ago
  In my experience you hit those speeds if you happen to be few short hops from the server/CDN.
- zbrozek 4y ago
  I find that Steam decompression pegs one core of my CPU and downloads get stuck at 550-600 mbps. It would take a lot less time if it didn't compress anything.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Yup, about the same for me (maybe slightly faster). Sometimes games have assets that compress really well, and then I end up downloading at 400mbps and maxing out my SSD writing.
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      Haha, yeah I bet most people who play games these days have a faster CPU than I do. My machine is eight years old.

gumby 4y ago

Your SSD comment aside: not everyone lives alone; during the lockdown we had four people using the network simultaneously during the day, plus of course some of my other machines using the network. We have friends with three or four kids, which would have magnified that demand.

TylerE 4y ago
Gigabit can support ~25 simulatenous Blu-Ray streams (and that's at the full 40Mbit). It wasn't all that long ago (~10 years) when the company I worked for had only 200Mbit to the internet, and that supported ~300 people pretty comfortably.
- w-ll 4y ago
  Remember when cd players had 60 second anti-skip buffers?
- pooperscoop 4y ago

DannyBee 4y ago

you are off by an a factor of 3-5 :). The random consumer ssd reads/writes as 300-600megabytes/second, easily. That's 3-5gbps, not 1gbps. A reasonable 7200rpm spinning disk can easily saturate 1gbps. Most home grade nas RAID arrays can saturate 10gbps. (obviously not 2 spinning disk mirror ones :P)

Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago

An SSD nowdays has something like 3500 megabytes/second, a 1gbit connection can (roughly) provide at most 100 megabytes/second, so we are not even close to use SSD write speed at full capacity. That being said, downloading from Steam is incredibly different with a gigabit bandwidth.

fomine3 4y ago

Since every consumer fiber plan is best effort, I'll get better speed by using faster plan even though rated speed isn't needed. I get about 700-200Mbps on my gigabit fiber for download. I'm fine with 1Gbps but 200Mbps is sometimes slower. Hopefully 2Gbps is constantly available on 10gigabit fiber.

basilgohar 4y ago

There's more to Internet than downloading data straight to disk. Families can have multiple kids taking online classes while both parents are also working remotely. Many families have multiple devices per person that can be streaming, downloading, OR UPLOADING (commonly the aspect shortchanged in residential Internet) which, at times, can easily saturate a 1Gb connection. We always need to advance because others are too, and services demand greater speeds in returb. It's a bit of a race, but no need to claim it's useless. We can do things now that were unthinkable before due to such advances.

agilob 4y ago
>Families can have multiple kids taking online classes while both parents are also working remotely. Many families have multiple devices per person that can be streaming, downloading, OR UPLOADING (commonly the aspect shortchanged in residential Internet) which, at times, can easily saturate a 1Gb connection. My 37mbps can do that for 2 people constantly working from home and most of the time on meetings.
CommanderData 4y ago
My family of 6 would stream Netflix, game and I'd be pretty heavy handed myself all on my router tethered to my 4G connection while we were switching providers. We didn't notice anything surprisingly. Three was the provider at the time.
omegalulw 4y ago
20 kids x 25mbps streams each is still only half a gig. You are way off here. The only way you saturate a gig is if you download big games from Steam, etc. If each of your kid is doing that you would probably run into fair use limits and have to set up a central PC for catching downloads and stuff but that's still a niche use case.
mrweasel 4y ago
My guess is that most people will just use whatever router is supplied by the ISP, and those are going the be the cheapest China has to offer. Even if it is Wifi6, that will max out at around 1Gbps. Some might run Ethernet to their office or consoles, but I'd guess that most will just use wifi. There's also the issue of the networking gear. Home users will just buy 1Gbps equipment, or slower, if that's what fits their price point. For future use, and businesses it is nice to see speeds above 1Gbps being rolled out. For now though, promising 25Gbps to residential is easy marketing. The ISPs knows that it will barely be used.