this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Dude, 100Mbps isn't good enough anymore either
What? That’s plenty for the average person.
I think person* is the keyword here. Many families have several people concurrently watching streaming video, listening to music, and playing games that are required to have an internet connection. 100Mbps is not enough.
Streaming music is a very negligible impact. We've had streaming music for 2 decades.
Yeah that one bothers me... The most demanding MP3s are what... 320kbps? That's 3.3GB per day. That is not really a hard demand on bandwidth at all. 100GB/month. And that's the max bitrate MP3 does... Most services are probably doing 128kbps...
Spotify has an Audio quality table on their site... https://support.spotify.com/us/article/audio-quality/
Low = 24kbps, 0.2471923828 GB/day
Normal = 96 kbps, 0.9887695313 GB/day
High = 160 kbps, 1.6479492188 GB/day
Very High = 320 Kbps, 3.2958984375 GB/day
These are very reasonable and easy numbers to obtain on just about any internet connection. The only way this is an "issue" is if you're running like a couple hundred streams at once.
Right, but this is about setting a minimum standard for it to be classified as broadband. For an average individual 100Mbps is high speed internet.
And most families probably have cheap wifi routers with poor snr as their main bottleneck.
I would like to disagree, since every "news" site started adding auto playing videos and ads on each and every page. what should be a 2kB text now comes with a 50MB video Download...
That's like two people streaming high def TV at the same time.
No way, that would be 6.25 MB/s for tv. For a two hour movie that would be 50GB. Is a 4k movie really 50GB?
Depends on the quality. YouTube 4k is about 25mbit/s, so that's 3-4 4k YouTube videos playing at the same time on a 100Mb/s connection.
4k Blu-Rays OTOH can be about 50GB or larger even. You wouldn't ordinarily stream that but you could stream one or two blu-rays with a 100Mb/s connection.
100Mbit/s is plenty for current use-cases.
I have a number of movies (about 100-ish titles) in my library that are well above 50Mbps.
Back to the future (1989) as an example is 72.24 GB in my library.
Meh, it's good enough to be usable. I have 50/10 Mbps down/up and I can watch 1440p videos just fine. What do y'all use your internet for? Do you have like 5 family members watching stuff at the same time?
The average US household has something like 2.5 people in it. It's safe to assume (statistically) that at least two of those people are old enough to consume web content unsupervised.
Then there are edge cases that aren't quite so crazy, like 5 person households where everyone is over the age 14.
So yeah, for one person 50/10 is likely just fine. But for the average household 100/15 is likely closer to baseline.
With the increase in WFH and distance learning, I think up/down parity should be a priority as well. Not everything is just about your ability to consume mass-marketed entertainment.
https://www.fiercetelecom.com/broadband/theres-no-reason-docsis-cant-become-symmetrical-spec-cablelabs
Here’s an interesting article about it. It’s really a limitation of current DOCSIS (fiber is a lot simpler) tech/equipment, but it’s being improved.
One major AAA game update will likely break your connection for hours for all intents and purposes.
Bitrate of a 1440p youtube video is going to be around 20mpbs (±4). Your 50 down connection couldn't handle more than 2 streams. The lowest reported bitrate is 16mbps on their support page (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zippy=%2Cbitrate). 50/16 = 3.125, with network overhead you'd be VERY lucky to get 3 streams going without stuttering.
It's entirely possible that a family of 5 would run into issues if they're all home and some want to watch videos.
My family of 4 have been Plex trained... So I mitigate a lot of these problems personally.
But it's more likely that the 10 up breaks things even more. One person in the house uploading anything (or participating in zoom/teams/etc calls) will cripple your ability to make ANY request to the internet.
You are describing symptoms of bufferbloat, not capacity problems.
No... I'm not. Downloading a 100GB game from Steam for example will gladly eat the full 50 mbps this person claims is "usable". A 100GB download would be ~4.5 hours at full speed. With ANY amount of overhead it will be more than 5 hours.
A download saturating the full connection is a capacity problem.
To the second point... If you are on a zoom call and are uploading the full 10 mbps of your connection speed. You will have problems uploading requests to fulfill for download.
Both of these are capacity problems. Not bufferbloat. Quite honestly, this capacity problem can CAUSE bufferbloat. There will be excessive queuing and packet loss.
Multi-hour downloads have been a thing since capacity was measured in kbps. If a simple TCP transfer causes excessive queueing, then the queueing algorithm is broken.
A router with OpenWrt and
luci-app-sqmcan fix this problem, at least for an internet connection with a fixed speed limit.LMAO. No. This has nothing to do with a router. TCP is a "fair" protocol. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/tcp-fairness-measures/
How you can argue about this stuff and now even know how it works... beyond me.
A steam download (which tends to open multiple TCP channels, thus choking other connections on a network)... That's taking 50 mbps + your youtube video that wants to take 7mbps. 50+7 = 57 which is > 50 mbps. This is literally a capacity problem.
Once again... It would be the fact that you're using more than your actual bandwidth that you would cause excessive queueing and thus have a bufferbloat problem. But simply switching queueing mechanisms won't resolve it. especially if you're using traffic that isn't prioritized. Nor does switching queueing mechanisms mean that the problem was bufferbloat to begin with.
Well, if you currently have this problem and want to fix it, I've shown you the way. OpenWrt is free software.
Otherwise, there's no point arguing about it.
OpenWrt can't magic extra bandwidth in your pipes.