Fish Sticks

[Ryan Gallagher]

When 1gb fiber got put into my San Francisco neighborhood, it was 'almost' a life changing
experience for me. I would have friends come over and ask if they could download a movie
or a game while at my place. ( I have 'unlimited' service so that wasn't a problem. ) If I ever
had to move again, making sure that fiber service was available would be pretty high up on
my priority list while apartment hunting. My service provider is in the process of upgrading
to 10gb/s home service that they're already offering in some parts of The CIty here. I'd
consider upgrading, but I'd have to replace all of my wi-fi acess points and extenders,
to handle the extra bandwidth, and I'm not even sure any of my current computers can
work at that speed. I know none of my current laptops or tablets could handle it. So
although it's tempting, and the extra expense doesn't scare me away, I just don't see
any real benefit for me at this time go higher than my 1gb service.

Same. Most of my home machines are on a wired network, I'd have to upgrade that switch too. And most are legacy hardware with 1GB NIC tops. On Wifi only my phone would benefit from Wifi6 or better currently.

We are 10Gbit at work, and the 1Gbit booth switch is scheduled for upgrade... I'll let ya know if it seems like there are any real world benefits on the compatible machines. hah. I have trouble pushing a real 10Gbit over USB 3.2 gen 2, let alone the network interface. My gen2 nvme enclosure tops out around 700MB/s in write speed on Windows/NTFS, though 1100MB/s in CrystalDiscMark.

[Marcel Birgelen]

It's interesting how businesses often are neglected, not just by the providers that often tend to prefer to prioritize the rollout in residential areas, but also companies who tend to neglect their requirements, after they moved everything from local servers into someone's cloud.

I've got 8 GBit/s at home and a 1 GBit/s fallback via another provider. If the internet fails, not only I'm out of work, the wife is out of Netflix... not sure what's more dramatic.

At the office, we've got 2 x 10 GBit/s. It's hard to fill those pipes at the current load, even when trying. Most bottlenecks remain internal network performance. I upgraded my WiFi access points to something that does Wifi 7, but none of the devices really does anything like that. Still, I get about 600 mbit/s to 1.2 GBit/s on my Wifi, that's more than sufficient for what I usually need.

But I recently had a customer that had like 350+ people at the office, with everything in the cloud and everything behind an 100 MBit/s connection, based on a 10+ year old contract... Sleek conference rooms with expensive video conferencing gear in every room. They were wondering why everything on their network was so shitty and why everything worked smoothly when everybody worked from home... Their previous interim network engineer didn't really get the message: Their provider indicated that the connection was utilized for 70% on average... he kept interpreting it as: We've still got 30% more room left, so it's not the bandwidth... A new (interim) network engineer came in and they upgraded to 2 Gbit/s for less money a month and the issue instantly went away.

I wouldn't want to go back to the async xDSL and cable days. The nice thing about having some real bandwidth at your disposal at both the office and at home is that I find way less use for the cloud. Most of the stuff we do, we host ourselves nowadays.

It took a few years, but at least in the markets over here you see that those old cable ISP monopolies, with their outdated, asynchronous DOCSIS networks are getting hurt pretty badly by their all-fiber counterparts