Pri
Pro Member
Most of the time our internet is sitting idle but we do get through about 5-6TB a month with two adults and three kids. This is recorded by our pfSense router and is accurate.I just don't think downloading video games is what the average internet connection is going to be used for the vast majority of the time. If you have 3 kids that are constantly downloading AAA titles, then yes of course, you can definitely use gigabit.
When I was a gamer, I would download maybe 1 game a month on average, and I wouldn't delete them for years. 95% of the time I played the same game over and over again. Unless I was downloading more often than 1 game per week, I wouldn't care if a 100GB download finished in 40 mins or 10 minutes.
Games have been ~100GB for a decade, people were downloading them on 20-50 mbps connections. I'm not saying we shouldn't want faster connections, all I'm saying is that I don't think more than 10% of people at most right now on sub-200 mbps feel their connection is slow and are making a purchasing decision based on speed, and I think figures show that. I would bet more than 50% of consumers right now would go for 200/200 over 1000/1000 if it was £5/month cheaper.
And that's all about gigabit vs. slower. The thread is about multi-gigabit. I don't even know if Steam can serve you faster than gigabit right now. How often are you downloading games that you're actually noticing having to wait on a 1 gig connection, aren't you going to fill up your storage quickly? 2 gigabit is HDD speed.
Like... I remember having to wait 20 seconds for a web page to load and everyone switching to DSL when it became available within 2 years, I guess I'm thinking about this a little differently than some people here. Also, I think Ookla on average measures max connection speed pretty well, although Wi-Fi is a bottleneck past 400 mbps. But again - I think if the average person actually needed much faster speeds you would see the average Ookla speedtest quickly climb to north of 300 mbps, given that over 80% of people in the UK have access to speeds like this. But no, we are at 80 mbps average for home connections.
Sorry I'm typing and posting too much.
To me, when I want to download something big I want it done as soon as possible. Time is precious. And I think ISP's know this, Community Fibre recently said they were surprised by the uptake of their 3Gb service and had to delay some installs due to a lack of equipment. There is demand for higher speeds.
I had 100Mb in 2010 from Virgin Media (got in on a trial). That was awesome but even then I felt it wasn't fast enough when I wanted to download large things, mostly games from Steam. And sure people have been downloading 100GB games on slower 20-50Mb/s connections but that takes 4 hours and 26 minutes to transfer 100GB on 50Mb/s and 11 hours and 6 minutes on 20Mb/s. That's fully flat out 100% utilisation too, stopping others in the house from enjoying YouTube, Netflix or whatever in a lag-free stutter-free way.
Meanwhile, I can download 100GB in 11 minutes at 1.2Gb/s and as soon as I get CF installed that'll be about 4 minutes. Simply wonderful and honestly not that much money. If YouFibre were here and I could get their 8Gb for £99 a month I'd do it in a heartbeat. I'm not at all suggesting I'm the normal consumer just saying I understand the time things take and the usage of my own family, I'd say totally we would get the use out of it.
By the way Steam can handle these kinds of connections. I know someone on a 10Gb connection and they get about 6Gb/s from Steam. However, his limiting factor appears to be his CPU handling the download and unpacking of the files and not the internet connection itself, so it may go faster with a better system as he's running an older Core i7 4930K from 2011.























