

The Gigabit Age Is Upon Us - willbarkis
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/17/the-gigabit-age-is-upon-us/

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cheald
Can home consumers actually utilize gigabit connections to any significant
degree yet? You need a sending pipe that'll accommodate you in order to
actually get what you're paying for. I've got a 60mbps pipe and rarely manage
to saturate it outside of things like Steam downloads.

To put it another way, Netflix 4k streams only require 20mbps throughput. I'd
have to be watching 4k streaming video on 3 devices concurrently to saturate
my _current_ connection; what on earth would you need to do to actually get
your milage out of a pipe that's 17 times larger?

~~~
Joyfield
Probably. Imagine having children. Streaming (up and down), videochatting,
gaming, torrenting, downloading patches and so on. They will not hit 1Gbit/s
all the time but when everyone is on the net at once it will be nice to have
some "room".

~~~
davidandgoliath
That, and, downloading GTA 5's 59 gigabyte installer in 12 minutes was nice...
Or, when I was about to leave on a road trip & downloaded my entire itunes
library in just a few moments. Lots of cases where insane speed is beautiful.

//moved to Chattanooga for gigabit($70 a month). Love it. :)

~~~
cheald
Those are definitely great cases, but they only apply when the upstream can
actually give you data that fast. My question is more - are there enough
upstreams providing pipes big enough that gigabit users can actually use what
they're paying for on a regular basis?

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PebblesHD
The rest of the world is fast moving towards 1000mb/s internet meanwhile I'm
sitting here in Sydney with my 'Ultra-fast' 6mbps ADSL. I can't even watch HD
youtube properly and these amazing advances are going on well beyond my reach.
Australia is quickly lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of
technology and it needs to make serious roads toward correcting that if it
wants to be taken seriously on a global stage. /rant

~~~
Veratyr
I think it's even worse that we _started_ moving towards gigabit (the NBN was
going to announce gigabit service just after the last election) and then
elected a government that's moving us _back_ to cable.

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PebblesHD
indeed, but sadly I won't even get cable. My area is already 'serviced' by
cable according to NBN Co. and isn't due for a rollout until after the end of
2016 and even then the current cable where available is overloaded as is. Even
if I can get hooked up to it it will likely not be an improvement.

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tsmith
I'm moving to Seattle, and impulsively ordered 1Gbps residential internet
service "just because" (from CenturyLink - IIRC it's ~$110/mo).

I since realized that I had no idea what to do with a 1Gbps residential pipe,
other than "download things really, really fast."

So, I Ask HN: does anyone have any ideas for interesting use cases for Gigabit
home Internet?

~~~
toomuchtodo
[http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warri...](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior)

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lorddoig
This makes me envious. In the UK, Holy Mother State has determined that 2Mbps
+ nasty contention ratio + fair usage policy and/or usage cap = "broadband".

~~~
PeterWhittaker
That's the government definition, but are better plans available for
reasonable cost?

A countryman of mine posted in reply to your comment that Canada defines
broadband as fairly slow, by modern standards, but I get 28Mbps/1Mbps right
now (over cable) and my daughter just ordered a 25/10 DSL package (from the
same service provider; two different physical plant owners, same ISP over
top). Both plans are reasonably priced, I think (at least compared to the big
incumbents and to what we are used to :->).

~~~
jusssi
28/1 is a crazy DL/UL ratio. It's probably beyond the point where the
narrowness of the uplink slows downloads.

I wish the official broadband definitions included something about the uplink.

~~~
dragonwriter
The official definition, at least the FCC one, addresses speed in both
directions.

