Would be more exciting and worth paying attention to if Google Fiber wasn’t basically living in an iron lung over at Alphabet these days since they halted major expansion.
Wait is fiber rollout back? …
I’ll never understand how you guys in the US are fine with having bandwidth limits on your broadband connections. I’d be pissed. I even have unlimited on my phone. Like wth?
What makes you think people are fine with it? ISPs have monopolies over service areas and can do whatever the fuck they want. They have monopolies because of corporate lobbying. No amount of voting gets these corrupt fucks out of office bc votes literally do not matter and there’s only two parties, they’re both to the right of center, and they’re both bought and sold. Just to really make sure, we’re all taught from birth that the US is peak civilization and all other countries are backwater shitholes.
If you’re struggling to think of a use-case, consider the internet-based services that are commonplace now that weren’t created until infrastructure advanced to the point they were possible, if not “obvious” in retrospect.
- multimedia websites
- real-time gaming
- buffered audio – and later video – streaming
- real-time video calling (now even wirelessly, like Star Trek!)
- nearly every office worker suddenly working remotely at the same time
My personal hope is that abundant, bidirectional bandwidth and IPv6 adoption, along with cheap SBC appliances and free software like Nextcloud, will usher in an era where the average Joe can feel comfortable self-hosting their family’s digital content, knowing they can access it from anywhere in the world and that it’s safely backed up at each member’s home server.
Video calls were all over 1950s futurism articles. These things do get anticipated far ahead of time.
4K Blu-ray discs have a maximum bitrate of 128 Mbps. Most streaming services compress more heavily than that; they’re closer to 30 to 50 Mbps. A 1Gbps feed can easily handle several people streaming 4K video on the same connection provided there’s some quality of service guarantees.
If other tech were there, we could likely stream a fully immersive live VR environment to nearly holodeck-level realism on 1Gbps.
IPv6 is the real blocker. As you say, self-hosting is what could really bring bandwidth usage up. I think some kind of distributed system (something like BitTorrent) is more likely than files hosted on one specific server, at least for publicly available files.
I doubt a home server centered around software like nextcloud would ever become commonplace. I think a more probable solution involves integrating new use cases with devices people already have, or at least familiar form factors. For example, streaming from your smart TV device (chromecast, Roku, Apple TV, the actual TV itself) instead of from the cloud, or file sync using one of these devices as an always-on server. But, in both of these cases, there is in inherit benefit from using a centralized cloud operator. What are the odds that you have already downloaded the episode to stream to your TV box, but not your phone if that was where you intended to watch it anyways? And for generic storage, cloud providers replicate that data for you in various locations to ensure higher redundancy and availability than what could be guaranteed simply from a home server or similar device. I presume new use cases will need to be more creative.
I have 10 gig at home, and powerful enough networking hardware that can take advantage of it (Ubiquiti stuff)
Nothing can ever saturate the line. So it’s great for aggregate, but that’s it
Man, I’d love to sit on that. Growing up with 56k and living with 100Mb/s now is already a big difference, but it shows when I push and pull docker images or when family accesses the homeserver. 1Gb/s would be better, but probably I’ll somehow use up the bandwidth with a new toy. 10Gb would keep me busy for a long time. 20Gb would allow me try out ridiculous stuff I haven’t thought of yet.
Same, I got 10gbit because there was some competition early with fiber getting wider. Now my same provider has slower offers at lower prices but I don’t mind the extra bandwidth in the case I would need it and I have a grandfathered offer so pay the same as 1gbit.
It’s not often that I can saturate a 1Gbps line, unless you have a large household I don’t see much point in going over 1Gbps right now. Though I’m sure there are some exceptions.
Having a connection that’s not even close to saturated (or backbone for that matter) means lower latency in general. But it also means future proofing and timely issues resolution as you catch problems early on.
Future proofing an Internet line doesn’t make much sense to me. If a higher speed plan is available, I’d just upgrade my plan if the need arises, save money in the meantime.
