8 ms·

Even if they mean MBit, I rarely need more than 8. What are some of the things people do that they need something that fast?

smoldesu 4y ago
Docker.
- rhacker 4y ago
  I use that too. And beyond that, the original analogy was that the light bulb was so helpful that it spread to all the farms and rural lands by 1960. Why do we need 25 MBit on all the farms and rural lands?
  - misnome 4y ago
    All that tractor DRM has to phone home somehow!
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Well, because people live on those lands. I grew up in a rural area, and my limited access to internet almost failed me in multiple classes that required online testing. My bare-minimum Hughesnet setup would only give you 50kbps after you depleted the "Full Speed" 50 gigabytes a month of 25MBit speeds. No worries though, only $10/gigabyte to get back online so you could take your Biology quiz without getting kicked off halfway through. Now that stuff like Starlink exists, it's easier to give the finger to Hughesnet and exploitative WISPs. Even still, the years I spent growing up with bare-minimum internet at cable-package prices has made me spiteful. It should have been addressed long before the private sector got around to fixing it.
    - freedomben 4y ago
      Fellow ruran here, I've tried explaining to people just how good it felt to give Hughesnet the bird (in some regions called "the finger") when Starlink rolled in, and until you've had nothing else it's hard to imagine how much it affects. Also people forget: farmers have families and kids, etc, and while the farmer themselves may not need much internet, the kids can't even do basic school anymore without it. But that said, farmers still have and watch TVs, facetime with their families, stream music, etc. All that said though, Starlink is up to like $120/month and still not reliable enough to fully ditch the backup exploitative WISP if you work from home as I do, so Starlink is walking dangerously close to the line of exploitative. But they're here and working, so I will happily pay the money. I just hope that over time the $/b will get a lot more competitive.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    Agriculture moves a fair amount of data around. You probably don't need 25 Mbit today, but need more than the ancient infrastructure can supply. The infrastructure being built to be capable of closing the latter gap is able to handle much more both for reasons of accommodating future needs and simply where the technology is now for modern installations. And for that reason, as a farmer, I can get gigabit service on my farms, but where I live in an urban area where the infrastructure isn't as old and is still moderately capable I am topped out at 50 Mbit service.
wruza 4y ago
I have around 8mbps (1 mbyte/sec) and downloading everything big is painful. Nvidia driver - 10min. Vbox update - 3min. Linux netinst - feels like forever. Big npm/docker/etc updates - few minutes of waiting. Witcher 3… ohh. Also you can’t watch 1080p without stutters while waiting. You can’t watch 1440p60 or 4k in any case. Why do we need 25 MBit on all the farms and rural lands? (quoted from another subthread) Because otherwise these areas will get stuck with <25mbps forever, and there’s already no reserve in 8-10mbps.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
  Please let's not confuse more units here. 8Mbps (please capitalize the "M" for "mega" and lowercase the "b" for bits) is 8,000,000 bits per second. That translates to about 0.954 MiB/sec (Mebibytes per second, see the "i" and the capital "B"?) which is close enough to 1. We must keep in mind that there are two disparate things being measured in this thread and by FCC. The FCC is ostensibly measuring advertised signaling rates. Your Gigabit Ethernet signals at 1,000,000,000 bits per second, but can't transfer data that fast. Likewise, my cable ISP signals at 100Mbps down and 5Mbps up (yeah, it's criminal) but download speeds are a different thing. Download speeds can, and should, be measured in computer-oriented mebibytes per second, rather than bits per second, because you are, after all, transferring files. (And yeah, disk space is often measured in powers of ten...) Your ISP's data cap is undoubtedly measured in gibibytes or tebibytes (even though they call them gigabytes or terabytes, that's what the units mean.) So when you run speedtest.net or Ookla or whatever, you're measuring the actual throughput that the computer's network interface can squeeze through the narrowest straw in your link to the server. That is necessarily a touch lower than the lowest signaling rate of whatever equipment is in-between. Internet connections are sold by trumpeting signaling rates, but those are NOT download nor upload speeds. Never confuse them, because they are overly-optimistic estimates of your maximum throughput (which is infeasible given most PHY and link-layer frame designs.)
  - wruza 4y ago
    I don’t get why my comment caused this. No one would think of millibytes per second in that context, and the 4% difference between mebi and mega plays no role here either. I don’t even know if my meters are binary or decimal and am curious where this assumption comes from.
teaearlgraycold 4y ago
Downloading 50GB Steam games in minutes so you can join your friends without having everyone wait around. And, most importantly, flexing on people with speed test results :D
shjake 4y ago
1 Megabyte per second seems like extremely slow. You need 6/7x more to stream 4k properly and downloading modern games would take forever. If you have a couple of people using it simultaneously even HD might not be great..
maccard 4y ago
8Mbps is just about enough to stream netflix in hd. If you have other household members doing anything else it's inadequate. It's also borderline inadequate for any online gaming whatsoever. Hitting network speed limits doesn't just cap you in those scenarios, it degrades very badly very quickly.
- tomnipotent 4y ago
  > It's also borderline inadequate for any online gaming whatsoever. 8Mbps is more than enough for a few dozen people to play any modern game on the same connection.
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    In my experience, a big problem is upload, which is sometimes as low as a tenth or hundredth the download. That really hurts remote work. Another factor is that high speed internet tends to have lower latency, because I guess you just have to build our more infra. That helps remote work and gaming.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - zamnos 4y ago
    Not if they're using GeForce NOW or any similar service. One person needs 15 Mbit for 720p, never mind a few dozen.
  - maccard 4y ago
    My job is video game networking. The problem isn't steady state usage, it's burst usage combined with other devices on the network. 15kbps might be enough for 98% of use cases but you occasionally need way more.
    - tomnipotent 4y ago
      I just checked multiple games from Destiny 2 to MW2 and Valorant. None peaked more 100-150Kbps, and that's the high end.
fullstop 4y ago
Do you live alone?
gcheong 4y ago
I think you want to be a bit ahead of where the technology is now to have some room for future possibilities and assuming you're pulling cable you might as well pull the "biggest" one you can(i.e. fiber). To give an analogy, we recently remodeled our kitchen, which required a rewiring of the electrical given current standards. That alone used up all the remaining circuits of our 100 amp panel. But we have several gas appliances that we eventually want to switch to electric heat-pump technology (water heater, dryer, furnace) and an EV which I'd like to have a level 2 charger for but that would most likely mean a service upgrade to 200 amps. On the flip-side, we have 1000Mbps; thinking about whether we have enough bandwidth to do X isn't even a thing now.
- zamnos 4y ago
  The Internet is a utility and flows like water, so in this analogy, homes should have enough Internet to meet their daily needs, but they don't need so much as to be a factory. For a theoretical household of 4, 8 Mbit is way too low, but it does say that 10 gigabit might be excessive. The thing is though, that the analogy breaks down when running fiber allows for future backend upgrades and faster future speeds over copper.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
  You remodeled in 2023 and you only provisioned 1 Gbit? There are already 2.5 and 5Gbit copper Ethernet PHYs out there. You said "pull the biggest one you can" but - 1Gbit of fiber? I mean, I guess if your chief usage of traffic is to the outside world, a really snappy LAN doesn't mean much at all; it's not your bottleneck. But I'm confused about your post which appears to contradict itself. Perhaps I misunderstood, and your kitchen remodel only involved AC electrical and no networking. No IoT fridge yet? If I were pulling network cabling today for a remodel, it'd surely be multi-mode fiber in the 100Gbit range, right? Right?
  - gcheong 4y ago
    The 1 Gbit is the service to the house, not the LAN, and it was (still is?) the fastest we could get at the time we got it (2016). The remodel was the kitchen cabinetry, electrical, and plumbing only, no network. While I personally don't see a need for an IoT fridge in my foreseeable future, I'm not opposed to internet connected appliances generally if I see an advantage to having one.
simoncion 4y ago
> What are some of the things people do that they need something that fast? Remote programmer work. I push and pull around many GBs every day. 8Mb/second would be -at best- difficult to bear. I also often do teleconferencing (and screen sharing) while pushing around lots of data. If there were multiple people on my LAN who were doing remote programmer work, or who were just -say- watching "streaming" video while I was working, or -say- chose to patch a video game while I was working, 8Mb/second would make working impossible. Hell, even 40Mb/second is pretty terrible. I recently moved from a 1400/40 Mb link to a ~300/300 Mb link. Despite the dramatic reduction in download speed, it's way, way, way better.
michaelmrose 4y ago
Infrastructure is about sufficient capacity for peak not average usage. The first thing you have to understand is that bandwidth is oversubscribed and largely asymmetrical. You may easily only get 70% of bandwidth and you'll need to get a LOT down to have even a modest up. 4K streaming video can easily be 25Mbps. A family of 3-4 people can easily have multiple TVs and each one can be using bandwidth even when nobody is attending to it. Presumably this family has none because none of them will work. The average family has 25 internet using devices including computers, laptops, consoles, smart devices etc. Meanwhile average websites have ballooned up to 2MB or 16Mb per page. If you get 70% of max bandwidth and divide it even 10 ways you'll easily be waiting around 10 seconds per page. It's common now to have a camera out front triggered by motion but this requires more upstream than your 8Mbps connection from 1999 is liable to have since most connections aren't symmetrical. Same with video conferencing which will largely be impossible. What's that you say johnny wants to play the latest triple A game? Well its 80GB of data. With over subscription and other devices you'll be very lucky to average more than 2Mbps over the 4 days this will require during which the family connection will suck even more than it normally does.
freedomben 4y ago
If anyone in the household works from home, that 8 will be totally saturated by a single video meeting. If there are young kids that want to watch netflix, two parents needing to work, and if you're a developer who has to pull docker images or download a large file, God help you. I have 35 Mbps now and it still gets very painful sometimes.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  "Live within the bounds of what's available" seems to be a lost concept these days. I'm rural, I work remote, and I've done so for quite a while on about a 15/3 connection. I've got somewhat better now, and I have Starlink for the house right now (though at the ever-increasing costs, I'm debating dropping it and going back to a rural WISP for bulk transfer). If you're on a lower speed connection... you don't try to live life like you're on gigabit. You cache content locally (Jellyfin or Plex solves a lot, DVD season pack bundles are dirt cheap on eBay and a USB DVD reader can read anything), you do lower bandwidth stuff, and you work around the availability. I've taken many video calls with audio over a cell phone, because my ISP was having a crappy day. You can invent scenarios in which you "need" gigabit, but they sound like the artificially constructed situations they are, because not everyone has 16 people working from home with another 12 insisting on their own individual 4k streams.
  - freedomben 4y ago
    This seems like your position: don't try to improve things. just work around the situation. that seems silly, and I don't think that's ever been a widespread driving philosophy. Much more common (and sadly, also lost these days) is building a better world for our kids and their kids, etc. Trying to improve life for us and those around us, with hope that the next generation has it better than we did.
    - Syonyk 4y ago
      I try. Which is why I reject a lot of the digital nonsense that's just attention vampires for the sake of advertising profits.

smoldesu 4y ago

Docker.

rhacker 4y ago
I use that too. And beyond that, the original analogy was that the light bulb was so helpful that it spread to all the farms and rural lands by 1960. Why do we need 25 MBit on all the farms and rural lands?
- misnome 4y ago
  All that tractor DRM has to phone home somehow!
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Well, because people live on those lands. I grew up in a rural area, and my limited access to internet almost failed me in multiple classes that required online testing. My bare-minimum Hughesnet setup would only give you 50kbps after you depleted the "Full Speed" 50 gigabytes a month of 25MBit speeds. No worries though, only $10/gigabyte to get back online so you could take your Biology quiz without getting kicked off halfway through. Now that stuff like Starlink exists, it's easier to give the finger to Hughesnet and exploitative WISPs. Even still, the years I spent growing up with bare-minimum internet at cable-package prices has made me spiteful. It should have been addressed long before the private sector got around to fixing it.
  - freedomben 4y ago
    Fellow ruran here, I've tried explaining to people just how good it felt to give Hughesnet the bird (in some regions called "the finger") when Starlink rolled in, and until you've had nothing else it's hard to imagine how much it affects. Also people forget: farmers have families and kids, etc, and while the farmer themselves may not need much internet, the kids can't even do basic school anymore without it. But that said, farmers still have and watch TVs, facetime with their families, stream music, etc. All that said though, Starlink is up to like $120/month and still not reliable enough to fully ditch the backup exploitative WISP if you work from home as I do, so Starlink is walking dangerously close to the line of exploitative. But they're here and working, so I will happily pay the money. I just hope that over time the $/b will get a lot more competitive.
- randomdata 4y ago
  Agriculture moves a fair amount of data around. You probably don't need 25 Mbit today, but need more than the ancient infrastructure can supply. The infrastructure being built to be capable of closing the latter gap is able to handle much more both for reasons of accommodating future needs and simply where the technology is now for modern installations. And for that reason, as a farmer, I can get gigabit service on my farms, but where I live in an urban area where the infrastructure isn't as old and is still moderately capable I am topped out at 50 Mbit service.

wruza 4y ago

I have around 8mbps (1 mbyte/sec) and downloading everything big is painful. Nvidia driver - 10min. Vbox update - 3min. Linux netinst - feels like forever. Big npm/docker/etc updates - few minutes of waiting. Witcher 3… ohh. Also you can’t watch 1080p without stutters while waiting. You can’t watch 1440p60 or 4k in any case. Why do we need 25 MBit on all the farms and rural lands? (quoted from another subthread) Because otherwise these areas will get stuck with <25mbps forever, and there’s already no reserve in 8-10mbps.

NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
Please let's not confuse more units here. 8Mbps (please capitalize the "M" for "mega" and lowercase the "b" for bits) is 8,000,000 bits per second. That translates to about 0.954 MiB/sec (Mebibytes per second, see the "i" and the capital "B"?) which is close enough to 1. We must keep in mind that there are two disparate things being measured in this thread and by FCC. The FCC is ostensibly measuring advertised signaling rates. Your Gigabit Ethernet signals at 1,000,000,000 bits per second, but can't transfer data that fast. Likewise, my cable ISP signals at 100Mbps down and 5Mbps up (yeah, it's criminal) but download speeds are a different thing. Download speeds can, and should, be measured in computer-oriented mebibytes per second, rather than bits per second, because you are, after all, transferring files. (And yeah, disk space is often measured in powers of ten...) Your ISP's data cap is undoubtedly measured in gibibytes or tebibytes (even though they call them gigabytes or terabytes, that's what the units mean.) So when you run speedtest.net or Ookla or whatever, you're measuring the actual throughput that the computer's network interface can squeeze through the narrowest straw in your link to the server. That is necessarily a touch lower than the lowest signaling rate of whatever equipment is in-between. Internet connections are sold by trumpeting signaling rates, but those are NOT download nor upload speeds. Never confuse them, because they are overly-optimistic estimates of your maximum throughput (which is infeasible given most PHY and link-layer frame designs.)
- wruza 4y ago
  I don’t get why my comment caused this. No one would think of millibytes per second in that context, and the 4% difference between mebi and mega plays no role here either. I don’t even know if my meters are binary or decimal and am curious where this assumption comes from.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago

Downloading 50GB Steam games in minutes so you can join your friends without having everyone wait around. And, most importantly, flexing on people with speed test results :D

shjake 4y ago

1 Megabyte per second seems like extremely slow. You need 6/7x more to stream 4k properly and downloading modern games would take forever. If you have a couple of people using it simultaneously even HD might not be great..

maccard 4y ago

8Mbps is just about enough to stream netflix in hd. If you have other household members doing anything else it's inadequate. It's also borderline inadequate for any online gaming whatsoever. Hitting network speed limits doesn't just cap you in those scenarios, it degrades very badly very quickly.

tomnipotent 4y ago
> It's also borderline inadequate for any online gaming whatsoever. 8Mbps is more than enough for a few dozen people to play any modern game on the same connection.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  In my experience, a big problem is upload, which is sometimes as low as a tenth or hundredth the download. That really hurts remote work. Another factor is that high speed internet tends to have lower latency, because I guess you just have to build our more infra. That helps remote work and gaming.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- zamnos 4y ago
  Not if they're using GeForce NOW or any similar service. One person needs 15 Mbit for 720p, never mind a few dozen.
- maccard 4y ago
  My job is video game networking. The problem isn't steady state usage, it's burst usage combined with other devices on the network. 15kbps might be enough for 98% of use cases but you occasionally need way more.
  - tomnipotent 4y ago
    I just checked multiple games from Destiny 2 to MW2 and Valorant. None peaked more 100-150Kbps, and that's the high end.

fullstop 4y ago

Do you live alone?

gcheong 4y ago

I think you want to be a bit ahead of where the technology is now to have some room for future possibilities and assuming you're pulling cable you might as well pull the "biggest" one you can(i.e. fiber). To give an analogy, we recently remodeled our kitchen, which required a rewiring of the electrical given current standards. That alone used up all the remaining circuits of our 100 amp panel. But we have several gas appliances that we eventually want to switch to electric heat-pump technology (water heater, dryer, furnace) and an EV which I'd like to have a level 2 charger for but that would most likely mean a service upgrade to 200 amps. On the flip-side, we have 1000Mbps; thinking about whether we have enough bandwidth to do X isn't even a thing now.

zamnos 4y ago
The Internet is a utility and flows like water, so in this analogy, homes should have enough Internet to meet their daily needs, but they don't need so much as to be a factory. For a theoretical household of 4, 8 Mbit is way too low, but it does say that 10 gigabit might be excessive. The thing is though, that the analogy breaks down when running fiber allows for future backend upgrades and faster future speeds over copper.
NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
You remodeled in 2023 and you only provisioned 1 Gbit? There are already 2.5 and 5Gbit copper Ethernet PHYs out there. You said "pull the biggest one you can" but - 1Gbit of fiber? I mean, I guess if your chief usage of traffic is to the outside world, a really snappy LAN doesn't mean much at all; it's not your bottleneck. But I'm confused about your post which appears to contradict itself. Perhaps I misunderstood, and your kitchen remodel only involved AC electrical and no networking. No IoT fridge yet? If I were pulling network cabling today for a remodel, it'd surely be multi-mode fiber in the 100Gbit range, right? Right?
- gcheong 4y ago
  The 1 Gbit is the service to the house, not the LAN, and it was (still is?) the fastest we could get at the time we got it (2016). The remodel was the kitchen cabinetry, electrical, and plumbing only, no network. While I personally don't see a need for an IoT fridge in my foreseeable future, I'm not opposed to internet connected appliances generally if I see an advantage to having one.

simoncion 4y ago

> What are some of the things people do that they need something that fast? Remote programmer work. I push and pull around many GBs every day. 8Mb/second would be -at best- difficult to bear. I also often do teleconferencing (and screen sharing) while pushing around lots of data. If there were multiple people on my LAN who were doing remote programmer work, or who were just -say- watching "streaming" video while I was working, or -say- chose to patch a video game while I was working, 8Mb/second would make working impossible. Hell, even 40Mb/second is pretty terrible. I recently moved from a 1400/40 Mb link to a ~300/300 Mb link. Despite the dramatic reduction in download speed, it's way, way, way better.

michaelmrose 4y ago

Infrastructure is about sufficient capacity for peak not average usage. The first thing you have to understand is that bandwidth is oversubscribed and largely asymmetrical. You may easily only get 70% of bandwidth and you'll need to get a LOT down to have even a modest up. 4K streaming video can easily be 25Mbps. A family of 3-4 people can easily have multiple TVs and each one can be using bandwidth even when nobody is attending to it. Presumably this family has none because none of them will work. The average family has 25 internet using devices including computers, laptops, consoles, smart devices etc. Meanwhile average websites have ballooned up to 2MB or 16Mb per page. If you get 70% of max bandwidth and divide it even 10 ways you'll easily be waiting around 10 seconds per page. It's common now to have a camera out front triggered by motion but this requires more upstream than your 8Mbps connection from 1999 is liable to have since most connections aren't symmetrical. Same with video conferencing which will largely be impossible. What's that you say johnny wants to play the latest triple A game? Well its 80GB of data. With over subscription and other devices you'll be very lucky to average more than 2Mbps over the 4 days this will require during which the family connection will suck even more than it normally does.

freedomben 4y ago

If anyone in the household works from home, that 8 will be totally saturated by a single video meeting. If there are young kids that want to watch netflix, two parents needing to work, and if you're a developer who has to pull docker images or download a large file, God help you. I have 35 Mbps now and it still gets very painful sometimes.

Syonyk 4y ago
"Live within the bounds of what's available" seems to be a lost concept these days. I'm rural, I work remote, and I've done so for quite a while on about a 15/3 connection. I've got somewhat better now, and I have Starlink for the house right now (though at the ever-increasing costs, I'm debating dropping it and going back to a rural WISP for bulk transfer). If you're on a lower speed connection... you don't try to live life like you're on gigabit. You cache content locally (Jellyfin or Plex solves a lot, DVD season pack bundles are dirt cheap on eBay and a USB DVD reader can read anything), you do lower bandwidth stuff, and you work around the availability. I've taken many video calls with audio over a cell phone, because my ISP was having a crappy day. You can invent scenarios in which you "need" gigabit, but they sound like the artificially constructed situations they are, because not everyone has 16 people working from home with another 12 insisting on their own individual 4k streams.
- freedomben 4y ago
  This seems like your position: don't try to improve things. just work around the situation. that seems silly, and I don't think that's ever been a widespread driving philosophy. Much more common (and sadly, also lost these days) is building a better world for our kids and their kids, etc. Trying to improve life for us and those around us, with hope that the next generation has it better than we did.
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    I try. Which is why I reject a lot of the digital nonsense that's just attention vampires for the sake of advertising profits.