It’s not official, but you don’t always need to replace Cat5 cable with Cat6 to support 10Gbps Ethernet. Cat5 might only get you a quarter of the range of Cat6 on a good day, but since the range of Ethernet is 300 feet you would need a really big house to have cables that were too long.
But generally the real question is how often the extra speed would give you a real measurable advantage. If it’s only a few times per month then it’s probably not worth the extra subscription cost.
Game downloads, whether on a console or a PC, come from a CDN. The difference is that Steam has a lot of capacity. They can have millions of players all downloading the same game on the same day at gigabit speeds. Console makers invariably cheap out and cannot reach the same level of service.
Hell, it might be the case that console manufacturers are doing the same stupid shit that EGS is doing. Perhaps they wrote their download code back when 50mbit/s was a dreadfully fast download speed for the average USian to have and they haven't updated it since. (And why would they? What's a consumer's alternative other than "Pay 1k or more for a gaming machine that can run games delivered through Steam" or "Don't play video games"?)
They give you an IP address, maybe ipv6 or a static ipv4 address if you pay more. They compete on quality of service, network policies, backhaul capacity, price, necessary services like DNS, extras like email or bundled Netflix subscriptions, etc, etc.
Some of these qualities are more legible than others.
> What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??!
Honestly, most people go for the shiniest number they can afford.
But I will say that as a software developer who has had to fix bugs on random branches of very substantial software projects (web browsers), there is a tradeoff between recompiling the whole project and simply downloading the binaries that the CI system has already built. When I had to jump six months or a year into the past to test some old build, gigabit service was the difference between a few minutes to download the binaries and 20–30 minutes to recompile them myself.
But these days 100Mbps is really more than enough.
An interesting technology that might become a killer app in a year or two is 4D gaussian splats. This is a way of creating photo–realistic animated 3D scenes that the user can move around in, viewing them from all angles (without any need for artists to build geometry or paint textures). Right now streaming them in real time needs about 500Mbps. I’m sure that a few years of iteration on compression techniques will lower it significantly, but it’ll always be more expensive than mere 2D images (even animated 2D images). For reference, most streaming services use about 15–25Mbps for a 4K television stream.
That may or may not be true, but in this case many cities signed exclusivity agreements with cable companies in the 60s and 70s when cable was becoming popular. Back then it was not technically feasible to have multiple cable companies sharing the same cable; the same set of analog channels had to be broadcast to every subscriber. Multiple subscribers, often hundreds of them in apartments, were attached to the same run of coaxial cable in a daisy chain or using splitters. Those agreements carried over to internet service once the cable companies started offering it. It made sense 50 years ago, but today it means that we haven’t actually had much of a free market. Now the FTTH is cheap and readily available, that is starting to reverse simple because the monopoly agreements only apply to _cable_ networks, not to fiber networks.
XGSPON is actually 40Gbps down, 10Gbps up. The 40Gbps is actually four separate 10Gbps downlinks on different frequencies. Filters are used so that each customer only sees one of those downlinks. Just a little note.
> In reality point to point is not really a benefit in 99.99% of scenarios, residential internet use cannot saturate 10G/10G for long, even with many 'heavy' internet users (most users can't really get more than >1gig internally over WiFi to start with).
This is so true! The whole thing about Netflix is such a canard. A 4K stream from Netflix tops out at 16Mbps. Other streaming services use 25Mbps, or speeds in between. 40Gbps is 1600 individual 4K streams, but XGSPON can only be split to a maximum of 128 customers. I guess if all of those customers have more than 12 televisions going at once…
You’re more likely to see congestion from many customers all hitting a speed test server at once just to see how shiny the numbers are.
You're confusing XGS-PON with NG-PON2. NG-PON2 isn't really used anywhere AFIAK, the "real" upgrade path is 50G-PON (50G/50G shared). NG-PON2's tunable lasers are expensive so didn't get traction.
Plus, the fiber trunk that runs near your house is not necessarily relevant. What matters are the _endpoints_ of that trunk line. They’re not just going to dig it up and splice your house into the middle of that fiber bundle. (This is a critical difference between fiber and water/sewer services!)
Instead there will need to be a central office (CO) in or near those towns that has a fiber trunk running to it. Then smaller fiber lines can be run from the CO outwards towards potential subscribers. The cheapest way to do this is with PON (passive optical networking) service, where a single fiber carries 10Gbps or 40Gbps service that can be split using prisms to service dozens of customers. XGSPON is 40Gbps, serves up to 128 customers, and has a maximum service distance of 16km. If you’re the first subscriber in that area, that €250k might be for opening up a whole new CO plus running a PON fiber bundle the whole 8km between it and your neighborhood.
The free market is not a lie, it’s just that a lot of our politicians have lost their faith in it. That lead them to agree to local monopolies. Ziply, however, has broken out of that model and has been growing aggressively. It’s not perfect, but it’s good.
Probably just because there are so many ISPs in the USA that keeping track of all of them is impossible. I only know about it because I’m a customer (but not sadly of their 50Gbps service; maybe one day).
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