this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Dude, 100Mbps isn't good enough anymore either

[–] wsweg 29 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What? That’s plenty for the average person.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Streaming music is a very negligible impact. We've had streaming music for 2 decades.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] wsweg 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

And most families probably have cheap wifi routers with poor snr as their main bottleneck.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
  1. get yourself a good adblocker (ublock origin)
  2. Block autoplay by default (firefox has had this for years, chromium just added it)
  3. start deliberately avoiding such sites when you can
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's like two people streaming high def TV at the same time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Is a 4k movie really 50GB?

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] wsweg 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] p1mrx 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One major AAA game update will likely break your connection
One person in the house uploading anything will cripple your ability to make ANY request

You are describing symptoms of bufferbloat, not capacity problems.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] p1mrx 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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-sqm can fix this problem, at least for an internet connection with a fixed speed limit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] p1mrx 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

OpenWrt can't magic extra bandwidth in your pipes.