How much use would you get from a 1 gigabit internet connection?
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Missed the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Having an uber fat pipe is not really what most people need. Having a nice low latency (eg below 10ms) is what will really enable realtime thin client apps, cloud based n-tier apps (where part of the business logic layer is on the client), MOBAs and MMOs. I don't want Gigabit because I pump huge volumes of data (about 50Gb per month), I want Gigabit because I hit my latency wall several times every day.
Upload is the key, but there are other factors too (Score:5, Insightful)
More download speed would be nice, but hardly revolutionary. My biggest problem with Internet speeds is lack of upload bandwidth.
We're well into the 21st Century. We're supposed to be able to do full-screen video calls, and the technology does exist to do that. My Mac comes with a barely-HD video camera, which takes 1Mbps [apple.com] to do a single video call. That's more bandwidth than most of the AT&T U-verse deployments. And this video call will glitch if anybody in the household does anything else at the same time, because the entire 1Mbps upload bandwidth is needed for the ACK packets on any downloads.
Countless applications have been eliminated because of this fundamental lack of upload bandwidth. I think it's the second-largest barrier to Internet innovation right now. Right behind lack of IPv6.
And then there are quotas, and latency, and bufferbloat, and extreme overselling. Internet in the US sucks.
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:4, Insightful)
Which points out another flaw with the poll; it assumes that you'll continue your current usage patterns even with a much faster network connection. To me, the whole point of getting one is that it would make things practical that simply aren't a plausible option today. Backing up my whole hard drive to the cloud would be hopelessly impractical with my current 5Mpbs upload, but it would become plausible if I could upload 200x faster. The creators didn't think of that and add a "I would start doing things I can't today" option.