While others across the industry battle it out over 10-gig claims, Google Fiber is looking to go bigger, plotting the rollout of a symmetrical 20-gig service for select residential and business cus | The service will use Nokia's 25G-PON gear and initially be available later this year as an invite-only product.
I have their 1gbps plan, but I don’t see how I could utilize anything faster.
My provider recently started offering a 2gbps plan for $30 more a month. I was tempted until I thought about the money I’d need to spend on new equipment to take advantage of it. 1gbps fiber is plenty for now.
Tbf, a lot of these multi gig plans are geared to families, where more than one person could be doing high bandwidth activities. Or even just one person doing high bandwidth things doesn’t cause the other persons zoom call to stutter.
That being said, ain’t no one NEED 20gbits but by god I would enjoy it.
Thing is though, most consumer networking gear is capable of a maximum of 1gbit, so to even take advantage of 2gig or 2.5gig you at least need a router with a 2.5gig uplink. If you have this you can have a couple of people on the network using a gig each.
My setup is a 1.2g cable connection going into a 2.5g port on my router, with a couple of servers connected to the router over 10g. This basically lets me download off of my servers at the full speed of the network but the rest of my devices are limited to 1gig.
Going up to 20gig would require a large investment to see the benefits. First you would need a router with a 25g uplink port, which is really only going to be found on a specific tier of “enterprise” gear. These routers aren’t going to have a bunch of ports so you are going to need to dump the output either to a 25g switch or a couple of 10g switches (probably the most cost-effective option). From there you can distribute out to 20 machines at 1g.
Anyway, you are definitely right about the aim of a service like this but to see the benefits of a 20g connection would require some very expensive and specialized equipment.
Ya, mine is slow rolling 2gig but it kind of fucked me up because now I want 6E mesh APs and it’s going to cost me like $500. I know I don’t need it, but the fact that I could have it is tempting. Plus I need 6E for the VR headset I also don’t have.
Things that take seconds now take even fewer seconds!
You can hit your data cap in half the time!
I don’t think Google fiber has a data cap, but that is second hand from a friend that has it.
Oops, I actually know that but I got a little lost in the comment chain. I had just read the comment above yours talking about the 2gbps plan, hence the “half the time.” My ISP has also started offering 2gbps but still has a 1TB cap which means it’s possible to hit the cap in just over an hour which is pretty funny.
So one thing that a lot of people overlook is that even with a data cap the higher speeds is still more convenient if you consume the same amount of stuff. It isn’t as noticeable now as it was when speeds went up in the kilobyte ranges thought so many people won’t even see the difference especially if they don’t hit the cap.
That said, caps are bullshit since network congestion are caused by when people use it at the same tike, not because of the total amount per month.
if it’s taking seconds, then there’s already a problem
120 GB game update files.
I’ve yet to see a remote website that’ll send me 1gbps continuously except a speed test… and whilst it’s nice to see big numbers on those, it isn’t really justifying the cost.
Even things like microsoft and steam stuff throttle far lower than that (presumably because they don’t want a million people trying to hit them for 1gbps constantly).