While I agree that there is no real use for gigabit for the average person, I disagree that rolling out gigabit everywhere is pointless.

For anyone who wants to use the internet for more than the consumption of content, the old upload speeds were a significant barrier. Gigabit, and especially gigabit upload speeds largely removed those barriers.

Symmetric gigabit in every home has taken away a bottleneck for people who want to, for example, run a bandwidth intensive internet business from their home. It provides people with opportunities they might otherwise not get.

This whole blog post is moronic, if you don't need it, buy a smaller package.
For me the extra price is peanuts, and it's absolutely amazing to be able to play a new game minutes after I bought it instead of hours.

Before we moved we didn't have fiber, and downloading a game could take so long that I would have to wait until the next day to play it after starting to install it.

This also means that I can uninstall games I don't use without worrying if I might want to play it later, this spares me from needing massive storage.

I also prefer to preload media to watch on our media center/TV, and it's nice to be able to have a movie ready in a matter of a couple of minutes.

Yeah, OK.

Who does this guy work for? Comcast?

I've just reinstalled Bazzite and about 10 games between Steam, GOG and Epic Store.

There absolutely is a point.

Also, if there are several people in the house using the internet at the same time (streaming, downloading, etc) the point becomes even clearer.

And thanks to DIGI, I pay €20/month for a 1 gigabit connection and 2 cellphones with unlimited data.

It's not gigabit if you've got 110 Mbit/s upstream.

I have to move very large (5 GB or larger) files around over the internet quite often. I am thankful to the 99% of people who are buying gigabit broadband despite absolutely not needing it for making it cheap and convenient for me.

A gigabit connection means you can torrent your Linux ISOs in seconds. If it's a symmetric connection, you can also backup your files up to the cloud without having to ship hard drives.

What a dumb take.

I make full use of my gigabit broadband (in both the places I have it - Bucharest and Bangkok), so there very much is a "point". I'm not going to bother enumerating all the ways I use it though, because the response will just be "ohhhh, but normal users don't do that". But exceptions are normal - the mistake being made here is assuming that you represent the whole human race just because you don't have a need for something.

Personally I think sanitary towels are useless, because I've never needed one and indeed the majority^* of the population don't need them...

This is just a cope post; "gigabit broadband is so fucking expensive in the UK I'm trying to justify it not being necessary". My gigabit fibre in Bucharest costs about 8eur/month, in Bangkok 15eur/month. I suspect if broadband in the UK were reasonably priced, this blog post would never have been conceived...

^* before you argue, remember (pre-)puberty and menopause are things.

I work from home and sometimes have large file transfers, and the rest of the house is also using it at the same time. 1gig wasn't necessary but it is appreciated.

There are many houses that don't need it and don't even come close to justifing the purchase, but faster internet and utility infrastructure upgrades are always a good thing.

I actually agree with this. The lowest speed my fiber ISP offers is symmetrical 300 by 300 unless you qualify as a low-income individual and then you can get a 100 by 100 plan for cheaper than that.

Personally, I think that's bullshit, and that anybody who wants to have the 100x100 plan should be able to have it without having to go through any kind of qualification step.

Where I live, 1Gbps symmetric is usually the standatd package around 40$/month, with 2.5, 10 and up to 25 available. Maybe ypu can find 100 or 500Mbps, but it's only marginally cheaper (or even more expensive).

Do most people need it? Probably not though.

Symmetric gigabit is great for DDoS botnet operators.

The aggregate bandwidth capacity of these networks exceeds 100 Tbps — more than most national internet backbones can absorb. And symmetric gigabit fiber rollouts keep making the math worse: average upstream bandwidth per compromised endpoint increased 75% year-over-year in North America.

I don't know who this is, but he clearly made some people here upset. :D

The whole post is about him not finding any sensible use for a 1 Gbit Internet connection for himself. He never ever mention any one else.

I really don't understand how this can be offensive for anyone else. Why is he not allowed to have an option about himself?

PS. I do believe that the title is somewhat click-bait though.

Nice

And all sites should do that choice thing via radio buttons (works without js). CSS has @layer (and also @supports) for a reason.

I'm on 500/500 because my firewall throughput is about 700Mbps. I could go up to 3Gbps symmetrical. However, I have not been able to find any non-enterprise level hardware that supports above 2.5Gbps.

I'm curious if anyone here has hardware recommendations that isn't the provider provided stuff that can make use of >1Gbps

I didn't read the article but I like to point out to people that ads are coming in at a whopping 4k, sometimes shitty sites even deliver several resolutions of the same ad. They even send over ridiculously high quality audio that has not been compressed. Some sites even jam pack hundreds of these ads per minute on each page you scroll to. It's even worse on sites that have infinite scroll.

My point being... the internet is broken, block as many ads as you can, fuck Google and fuck Comcast.

For me, the jump from 8 megabit (yes, 8) to 1000 megabit is a huge difference, and has become vital to my work flow.

So, ruling it out entirely is out of the question for me. It might be overkill to some, but definitely not for me.

I kind-of agree, however there's absolutely a lot of benefits in having low-latency Internet. Given the choice between, say, 500Mb/s cable and 50Mb/s FTTP I'd go for the latter any day, but the reality is that most people who are on FTTP will just go for the faster options because they're cheap and readily available.