Yeah, OK.
Who does this guy work for? Comcast?
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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I'm on 500/500 because my firewall throughput is about 700Mbps. I could go up to 3Gbps symmetrical. However, I have not been able to find any non-enterprise level hardware that supports above 2.5Gbps.
I'm curious if anyone here has hardware recommendations that isn't the provider provided stuff that can make use of >1Gbps
An SFP-capable router (like Mikrotiks) and fs.com transceivers
While I agree that there is no real use for gigabit for the average person, I disagree that rolling out gigabit everywhere is pointless.
For anyone who wants to use the internet for more than the consumption of content, the old upload speeds were a significant barrier. Gigabit, and especially gigabit upload speeds largely removed those barriers.
Symmetric gigabit in every home has taken away a bottleneck for people who want to, for example, run a bandwidth intensive internet business from their home. It provides people with opportunities they might otherwise not get.
I know it is a bit churlish to complain that people haven't read the post, but I literally say in it:
To be clear, I think it is a great thing that the UK Government is pushing ISPs to deploy gigabit everywhere. It isn't at all useful now, but will probably be crucial in the future.
Symmetric gigabit is this a thing, tho? Usually consumer level broadband can be huge download, but meekly upload no matter the tech used because they'd like to sell you more expensive options. That said I'd benefit greatly with it. And agree with you (and partially OP) that it's not for everybody. But those of us who need it, it'd be awesome.
I have 2 gig symmetric fiber and it costs $70 a month.
Speed tests confirmed that I'm actually getting 2 up 1.8 down consistently.
I have my whole house wired with cat 5e and it's pretty nice.
Yes, it is, but with fiber. I have 1 gig up and down through my county's public fiber network, with a future option to expand up to 2.5 gig symmetric.
Technically it is with fiber, what operator offers you is another story. I'm glad for you, I wish I had the same option. If you don't mind, what country and price?
I'm meant to be getting it this summer when they finish building around here. Very much looking forward to not having that bottleneck at the edge of my local network.
It is, in locations with consumer fiber. Had it at the last place I lived, and hands down it was the hardest thing to give up when we moved.
Cool, I wish we had that in Slovenia. Currently on 1000/100 fiber. 🥹
I have fiber in my basement and could book gbit. Upstream is still nerfed, currently I have 250mbits down, 50 up
Edit: disregard that, just checked with my ISP and apparently I have an old plan, and could book 1 gig symmetric. For thrice the cost, though
On my previous coax connection upload was severely limited, even if download went up to gigabit. Now that we have fibre we can get 1 gig up and down.
This whole blog post is moronic, if you don't need it, buy a smaller package.
For me the extra price is peanuts, and it's absolutely amazing to be able to play a new game minutes after I bought it instead of hours.
Before we moved we didn't have fiber, and downloading a game could take so long that I would have to wait until the next day to play it after starting to install it.
This also means that I can uninstall games I don't use without worrying if I might want to play it later, this spares me from needing massive storage.
I also prefer to preload media to watch on our media center/TV, and it's nice to be able to have a movie ready in a matter of a couple of minutes.
Tbh, I don't think the post is bad at all. If you have special high-bandwidth use cases that require massive speed you know that already and then the article isn't for you.
If you say you "didn't have fiber" I'm guessing you were on 50MBit VDSL? Then, of course, switching to gigabit makes sense.
In the blog post the author explicitly doesn't say "Go get VDSL", but they compare Gigabit with 500MBit. That's not nearly that much of a difference, you'll still be able to play a new game minutes after you bought it, but just twice as many minutes. If that at all, because if you have wifi in your home, it will likely limit your bandwidth to less than 500MBit in real use anyway.
The main point of the post is to show whether a regular user really benefits from Gigabit, and no, they don't. Their netflix stream will not improve when going from a few hundred MBit to a Gigabit. Neither will most of their experience.
If you are lucky enough to live in a place where Gigabit costs nothing, sure, might as well. The only provider who serves Gigabit to my home wants €65 per month for that, €780 per year. That's a lot of money for something that maybe saves me a few minutes once or twice a month.
Where I am, I can pay for gigabit duplex or 500Mbps cable. The issue is that the upload speed on the cable circuit is only 30Mbps and I have multiple people streaming from my Plex server, playing games on servers I run, or I might be checking my security cameras while I'm out and about. The only time 300Mbps isn't enough for me is on big files from beefy CDNs like Steam, but 30Mbps gets constraining pretty quick.
they compare Gigabit with 500MBit. That’s not nearly that much of a difference
Not much of a difference in price either in most places. usually it's like 10-20% extra to double the speed.
The main point of the post is to show whether a regular user really benefits from Gigabit, and no, they don’t.
This is true, but to claim there is no point is false, saying that for most 500 Mbit/s is better value would be a way better headline IMO, heck most people will do fine with 100 Mbit/s.
We pay €58 for 1 Gigabit, and I think 500 Mbit is €49 if I recall correctly, so the difference is not a lot.
Of course it also matters if you are just a single person or a family of more people.
PS:
There was a use I forgot to mention, and that is when upgrading my OS, I use a rolling release distro of Linux, and I have quite frequent updates, most are small and finish in a matter of seconds, and even the biggest updates can usually finish within a couple of minutes. This is quite nice too.
Anyways of course lower speeds can be better value depending on the use case, but for us the cost of higher speed is negligible, and it's nice for families not to be slowed down just because someone is using a bit of bandwidth.
Symmetric gigabit is great for DDoS botnet operators.
The aggregate bandwidth capacity of these networks exceeds 100 Tbps — more than most national internet backbones can absorb. And symmetric gigabit fiber rollouts keep making the math worse: average upstream bandwidth per compromised endpoint increased 75% year-over-year in North America.
Where I live, 1Gbps symmetric is usually the standatd package around 40$/month, with 2.5, 10 and up to 25 available. Maybe ypu can find 100 or 500Mbps, but it's only marginally cheaper (or even more expensive).
Do most people need it? Probably not though.
I've just reinstalled Bazzite and about 10 games between Steam, GOG and Epic Store.
There absolutely is a point.
Also, if there are several people in the house using the internet at the same time (streaming, downloading, etc) the point becomes even clearer.
And thanks to DIGI, I pay €20/month for a 1 gigabit connection and 2 cellphones with unlimited data.
But how often do you do that? And do you need all 10 games instantly available on your PC?
I recently setup a new laptop on Fedora on a 150MBit connection. That was around 10min for downloading Fedora, 20min for installing it, another 20min or so for setting up Steam and Heroic launcher (for GOG, Epic and Amazon Games). I started the first game download on Steam while I was setting up Heroic and it was done downloading before I was done with Heroic.
Since I can only play one game at the time, I could already start playing and let the rest of my library download in the background.
A faster internet connection would have just shaved off a few minutes from the initial 10min downloading time for Fedora, but I don't know how fast the server even lets me download the image.
I mean, if you pay €20 for gigabit, sure, why not. The only network provider who serves gigabit at my home wants €65 per month for it compared to the €30 I pay right now. That's €420 per year extra, and there's really no point in paying that to save a few minutes every few months or so.
I’ve just reinstalled Bazzite and about 10 games between Steam, GOG and Epic Store
But why do you need 10 at once? I'd download the one I want to play first and then the ones I like to play later in the background.
Because I have the storage realestate for it and I'd rather download it all now, so I don't have to do it later.
And downloading even one, when it's large dozens of GB, a gigabit connection makes a difference.
A gigabit connection means you can torrent your Linux ISOs in seconds. If it's a symmetric connection, you can also backup your files up to the cloud without having to ship hard drives.
I get that there's a relatively distilled Linux user base here in the Fediverse, but what percentage of that group really needs ISOs that quickly, and presumably, often?
Is this to suggest that we'd try more distros if we didn't have to weigh the time needed to download them?
The cloud idea is better. It would be nice to be able to essentially quicksave to off-site before logging off for an extended period, or even periodically.
On the other hand, how many gigabytes does the average person need to back up on a regular basis? Even power users don't generate that much data, and I'd expect that they'd have some kind of rolling backup that does files at a time.
I work from home and sometimes have large file transfers, and the rest of the house is also using it at the same time. 1gig wasn't necessary but it is appreciated.
There are many houses that don't need it and don't even come close to justifing the purchase, but faster internet and utility infrastructure upgrades are always a good thing.
Nice
And all sites should do that choice thing via radio buttons (works without js). CSS has @layer (and also @supports) for a reason.
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