
How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds? - simoncion
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/feamster/how-will-consumers-use-faster-internet-speeds/
======
riebschlager
I live in Kansas City and have enjoyed Google Fiber for the last three years.
(First the free 5Mbps, then the $70/month Gigabit)

The answer to this question, for me, is "Doin' the same shit. Slightly
faster."

The speed test results are always fantastic, but real internet usage isn't
quite as utopian as the hype makes it out to be. In some cases, I suspect
there are bottlenecks between my house and whatever server I'm connecting to.
In other cases, it almost feels like intentional throttling.

Netflix and Hulu performance is outstanding, but Amazon Prime videos
occasionally drop into that super-blocky low bandwidth mode for seemingly no
reason.

Most websites work great, but I've had super weird experiences with sites and
servers that use IPV6 when I'm on my MacBook.

It's these weird quirks that probably keep me from noticeably changing my
internet habits. But, as usual, YMMV.

~~~
cm2187
To me the main difference is upload speed. Suddenly you can start using the
internet as a LAN, and then only it starts to make sense to work in the cloud,
save all your files there, not worry about the house burning down or being
burglarised. Probably even more useful for smaller businesses.

~~~
riebschlager
I totally agree with that. I can throw a 100MB ZIP into my Dropbox folder
without a second thought. Box and Google Drive are equally snappy.

With Google Fiber "Free" and Time Warner before it, I was capped at 1 Mbps
upstream and cloud services were much more or a chore.

~~~
revelation
In light of this, would you now revise your original comment?

~~~
riebschlager
Not really. Before or after gigabit, I'd throw that file in my Dropbox. It
just sucks less now.

A fast connection doesn't mean that I'm deciding to throw more stuff online or
make _more_ use of cloud services. It's just nicer that the stuff I have to
transfer moves a helluva lot faster now. So I haven't noticed a significant
difference in my usage.

------
noonespecial
Its not about what they'll do in a "what we always did just more/faster" kind
of way. Its about the new, unimagined things that will take off once everyone
is linked well at 1gbps.

When we went from modems to "broadband" (>1mbps or so) it grabbed the good-
ole-boy music industry by the throat and shook them so hard they've still got
PTSD. >10 and the movie/tv industry had their reckoning. Consumers won huge
both times. Can't wait to see whats next.

~~~
petra
But we had music piracy before 1mbps , only limited. And we had video torrents
at before 10mbps(and at low quality), so those use cases we're clear, and we
could have guesses that maybe legal versions of those activities will also
appear.

But currently the limits are more tied to physiological limits - the highest
bandwidth channel for a human is the eyes and we know their limits (somewhere
between 1080p to 4K depending on various things), and we've almost covered
that.

The only open question is VR streaming, but i wonder whether this work
considering the extreme low latency required ?

~~~
cbd1984
> But we had music piracy before 1mbps , only limited.

Quality has a quality all its own. Music piracy in the era of Old Napster
(before they went legitimate) was terrible. Horrible mislabeled MP3s at a
bitrate best described as "wax cylinder quality" with no album artwork or
other extras buying a CD would provide. Plus, of course, you were stuck behind
dial-up, and even poor-quality MP3s go at about a megabyte of data per minute
of music, so you were looking at substantial download times over unreliable
connections for anything approaching a full album.

It was wonderful only in that it worked at all, and that it had music record
stores wouldn't touch, at least not if you were out in the boonies. It was one
of the few pre-YouTube channels for obscure and out-of-print music. However,
that didn't make it convenient in any absolute sense, and it was usually only
high-quality compared to not having the music at all.

These days, with most torrent software, you can download a whole discography,
in high-quality FLAC with full album images and so on, well-organized and
correctly labeled, simply by copying-and-pasting a magnet link. Multiple
megabyte downloads go by in seconds. The difference in the experiences is
night and day.

The music industry got angry at Old Napster. They're being crushed by
Bittorrent.

~~~
petra
Sure there we're definitely improvements in music quality.And sure 1mbps
wasn't enough , But it was easy to forecast demand for bandwidth - it's
reasonable that people will want higher quality music, we had decent guesses
what's the maximum bandwidth that would require , and the amount of music
people listened to stayed about the same - i.e. a lot.

But sure, BitTorrent definitely had a bigger impact on the music industry.

------
mattbroekhuis
I had 100 Mbps. it was 50/month. They sent out a promo for 1000 Mbps for
65/month. I got it, wired ethernet, can actually get around 950 Mbps on the
test sites.

Saw basically no difference in day to day usage. Even saw 0 difference in
download speeds off of VPS servers etc.

Was hoping my employer's VPN would be like I'm on site (or as close as one
could get). Bottle neck there as well.

------
Cyberdog
Given that so many folks nowadays just pipe their cable or DSL modems straight
into an 802.11g or n wi-fi router and then use that to connect most, if not
all, of their devices, I think many customers who pay for these gigabit
connections might end up disappointed.

------
mgbmtl
While I understand that gigabit Internet needs to be useful to the average
consumer in order to be sustainable economically, having more bandwidth (and
IPv6) at home allowed me to do things I would have never thought of doing
before. As someone in business where every penny counts, it makes a
difference.

When your average consumer is stuck on low speeds, imagine what the
consequences are on those who rely on this for their work (not to mention for
those who tinker and innovate in their "garage").

Where I live in Canada, even for your average business, it's either a barely
sufficient DSL/cable line at 70-100$/month, or fiber which usually starts at
500$/month. It's ridiculously expensive to get good bandwidth. Sometimes it's
easier to stick point to point antennas on the roof and connect directly to a
datacenter.

Faster speeds: they will find a use for it, and everyone wins.

------
cm2187
The limiting factor will become the local wifi network. I still find that real
wifi speeds are a fraction of what is advertised and I know very few people
who connect their devices with ethernet.

~~~
stephen_g
Yeah, wireless standards tend to be advertised as the maximum speed you can
get with perfect conditions, but WiFi drops the complexity of the modulation
the further you get away from the router and/or the more inteferance you have
around.

802.11ac can drop all the way back to 6Mbps under really bad conditions!

------
xorcist
In northern Europe gigabit to the home isn't uncommon. As long as you start to
wire up new developments with off the shelf ethernet equipment, the rest
pretty much follows. I'd wager ethernet is probably less expensive than cable
TV-cable, and ethernet carries _everything_.

The big difference with faster speeds is that you don't have to muck about
with QoS. Just throw bandwidth at the problem. This means you can actually
sell a product that would depend on it, since support becomes manageable.

1 Mbps is adequate for VoIP. But at 10 Mbps I can use it without thinking. I
can get an account with any provider, start simultaneous calls, and there are
no dropouts even when torrenting.

100 Mbps is adequate for IPTV, in broadcast HD quality, when the streams are
over a controlled network. But with 1Gbps it becomes just another service,
even if my kids stream too.

The big difference, as someone else pointed out here, is when upload speeds
catch up. Assymetric broadband is quickly ACK limited, which disturbs real
time streaming in the other direction. Latency is key here, and just getting
rid of that cable modem and hit the wire directly really helps.

Regarding piracy, I think it is obvious that it goes down when real time
streaming gets practical. It's more convenient, really. So more broadband
really _does_ transform markets. The problem for the past ten years has been
that it's not really deployed globally, and many of the rich western countries
are stuck with cable modems because of lock in effects. This should be an
obvious opportunity for an entrepreneurial spirit, just wire up a suitable
area and you can be first to sell IP services to them. Cable TV and phone
service _are_ moving to IP, it's just a matter of time.

------
robinhoodexe
When 4K (2160p) video will become mainstream we're gonna need more bandwidth
to stream it (Netflix for example). Even with h.265 or V8 it's atleast double
the bitrate compared to 1080p.

~~~
ollifi
Or we could stream 2K with less compression. They show 2K in most cinemas and
it looks pretty decent with low compression.

------
Semiapies
To load web pages with a gig of tracking Javascript on them.

~~~
Cyberdog
Ha ha ha… _sigh._ It's funny, yet also sad, because it's true. As someone
who's been building web sites since the late '90s, page weights seem to have
grown even more radically than the proportionate growth in the typical home
connection speed. Connections get faster, but page loads get slower.

Don't forget the CSS "frameworks," gratuitous fonts, and gigantic auto-playing
background videos, too.

------
AndyMcConachie
It's strange to me that these researchers don't look at countries that have
had 1Gb/s residential Internet connectivity for years. Why not investigate how
Internet usage changed in Slovenia, or S Korea, or some other more bandwidth
advanced country than the USA?

~~~
bjt
A before/after in a whole country is not as clean an experiment as the
randomized trial done in this study. With the whole country, there could be a
whole bunch of other variables changing in the before and after time frames.
(Like maybe some new service comes online that results in people using a lot
more bandwidth.) The design of this study allows the researcher to hold those
things constant.

------
client4
I co-run an ISP in Montana that started out wireless (40/10) and now does FTTH
(100/100 Mbps to 1/1Gbps). We don't see much difference between our wireless
and fiber customers in terms of consumption at the moment. I am interested to
see what happens when streaming VR becomes prevalent. Our biggest streams are
Netflix 4K streams; biggest downloads are steam/console game downloads
(~25Gbps).

It is fun to watch new customers bandwidth consumption. It maxes out for a few
days to a week...and then then drops. As far as we can tell people back
everything up, update everything, torrent everything .... and then run out of
things to download / upload.

------
jegoodwin3
Obligatory educational link on bufferbloat

[http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Introduction](http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Introduction)

'One of the most insidious things about bufferbloat is that it easily
masquerades as something else: underprovisioning of the network. But buying
fatter pipes doesn't fix the bufferbloat cascades, and buying larger buffers
actually makes them worse!'

------
rayiner
I wonder if there is a sampling bias given that they selected users who were
already paying for 100 mbps, which is a pricier premium tier.

~~~
simoncion
You could always ask. :)

The fellow who wrote the article is one of the folks who performed the study.

------
nitwit005
A good portion of the bandwidth that has been added so far has simply been
consumed by more bandwidth intensive versions of existing products. The user
behavior hasn't necessarily changed.

See Facebook's auto-playing videos as an example.

------
rabboRubble
I won't be using faster internet speeds. At least I won't until I'm assured
data caps are a thing of the past.

I "self-throttle" data speeds by opting for for the lowest tolerable internet
service to keep me under my cap.

F@#$ing Comcast.

~~~
Frqy3
Data caps are likely to become more prevalent with faster end user access
pipes.

ISPs have been (similar to yourself) using the limited access speeds to self-
throttle the data usage of customers to limit their aggregated backhaul costs.

~~~
rabboRubble
If data caps are to be more prevalent, I'd like to see ISPs regulated as a
utility. If I use more power, or make more phone calls I'm happy to pay more
for that use because the connection fees are equal between high and low demand
consumers.

If I pay higher monthly connection costs for high speed access (the monthly
service charge) and pay to actually use the service at the intended speed
(additional fees generated by a data cap), I am being double billed for
service.

Data caps in conjunction with a higher costs for high speed access are a
predatory business model.

------
Havoc
They won't use it - not soon anyway. There just isn't much of a usage case for
gigabit in the home context even if you're a family that needs multiple 4K
streams for some bizarre reason

------
dawnbreez
The real impact of Google Fiber--assuming it doesn't get sued to oblivion by
one of the other ISPs--is that it sets a new standard. Because Google is now
providing better service than, say, AT&T, AT&T must now up their game to keep
customers.

Thus, as Fiber rolls out to new areas, expect the pre-existing players to
either improve their own services (to everyone's benefit) or try to undercut
Google (to their own detriment).

------
ginko
Well I'd hope that many of the 'consumers' will become 'producers'. Although
I'm not too optimistic, considering Internet companies have done their best
effort to turn the fundamentally decentralized architecture of the Internet
into an centralized one over the past decade or so.

------
B-Con
Seems to me that it's more about what opportunities will arise to take
advantage of higher speeds. Most services aim at the typical consumer, general
public, so until the general public has high speed access on average there
will be few "reimagine how you do X" type services that leverage it.

------
Animats
It shouldn't take that much bandwidth to do things. I suspect that what's
really happening is that increasing the end bandwidth reduces the packet loss
rate in the cable system's routers. Someone needs to test this with something
that plays streaming video while noting packet loss rates.

------
jokoon
Low latency gaming, I hope.

That could even open the door to P2P multiplayer paradigms, which might make
MMOs support more player in a same world.

------
singularity2001
4K virtual reality web in 3D. Next attempt at vrml / second life might be _it_

------
imaginenore
As internet speed increases, we will see computers turning into thin clients.
Why pay for a ridiculously powerful desktop that's idle 98% of the time?

Once you reach gigabit speeds, you can do all kinds of crazy cool things, like
editing 4K videos remotely.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxHOzG-1KvM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxHOzG-1KvM)

~~~
userbinator
_Why pay for a ridiculously powerful desktop that 's idle 98% of the time?_

Because you actually _own_ the physical machine; some may disagree, especially
the DRM crowd, but there's a big difference between having hardware that is
and on your property and just having volatile control over a machine in some
unknown location.

~~~
DanBC
People used to buy DVD machines and DVDs, now they have Netflix and set top
boxes.

~~~
userbinator
...and buy BluRays instead of DVDs.

