There’s still no point in gigabit broadband – Terence Eden’s Blog
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Six years ago, I nearly got my ISP to upgrade our fibre connection to 1Gbps. As I said at the time:
This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years.
What's the point of Gigabit broadband?
Well, it's a few years later and Virgin Media have just given me their Gig1 package for £30 per month. Nice! With all the inflation related price rises, it's great to get more for less.
But I'm still left wondering if this is massive overkill.
What can you actually do with their promised 1,130Mbps?
Online video calling isn't that intensive. All the 4K streaming services recommend 25Mbps - so I guess I could ask 40 friends to come round and stream simultaneously. Downloading Linux ISOs is pretty speedy on a connection half as fast - and is usually limited by the upstream. Same for game updates.
I've wired most of my house with Cat6 Ethernet - but most of my switches and ports are 1G rather than 2.5G, so the max bandwith isn't likely to get to any single device. The best I've got directly is around 940Mbps which is about what I'd expect from a gigabit port.
All my WiFi devices are limited by the reality of radio physics in a noisy environment - so about 450Mbps when close to the router. Some of my rooms are hard to reach, so they have HomePlugs beaming data across our electrical wiring. Again, physics dictates a fairly modest speed there.
I've got a VR headset - but haven't found anything that taxes its download speed. Especially given that it uses WiFi.
My 4K Fire Stick has a wired Ethernet connection. Its built in speed test maxes out around 80Mbps. In fact, most of the online speed tests I tried couldn't saturate the pipe - tapping out at around 700Mbps.
Some AI models and training sets are multiple terrabytes. But are they really likely to be downloaded multiple times per day? If they are, is there a real difference in waiting 7 minutes rather than 3.5?
Everyone jokes about website bloat, but the reality is much more prosaic. Latency to a CDN is a bigger contributor to the perceived slowness than the limits of a home connection.
So what about upload speed. The Internet is an inherently sucky medium; people download far more than they upload. In this case, upload is limited to "only" 110Mbps. Even if both of the people in this house were full-time Twitch streamers, I doubt we'd saturate that.
It's 2026 and I can barely recommend 500Mbps broadband. For most domestic uses, including working from home, it's rare to need more than 100Mbps. Sure, faster is always nicer and cheaper is always preferable, but what am I actually going to do with this speed?
Back in 2012, it was reasoned that the fastest legal use of the Internet was 2.5Mbps. We've blown past that limit thanks to video streaming and calling. But, on the assumption I'm not going to be using my connection to mirror Linux ISOs, what can I do with it?
I guess I can run a personal VPN from home. Handy if I want to stream geolocked content when I'm out of the country. But, again, 1Gbps is overkill for that - especially as I'm likely to be either on a mobile hotspot or hotel WiFi.
I could livestream all my security cameras 24/7 to a secure back-up vault. That isn't going to touch the sides of my upload speed.
Perhaps I could self-host all my stuff? Again, for personal use I'm limited to whatever speed my laptop or phone can get on a public connection. Given the risk of botnets, DDoS, hacking & the like, I'm not sure I'd want much public-facing stuff on my residential IP address.
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.
So if you have any ideas for what I can do to saturate this connection, please drop a comment in the box.
In the meantime, if you join Virgin Media using this link we will both get £50 bill credit.
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