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 As I said at the time: This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years.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 …
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.
if it takes multiple hours, streaming services and video calls could be lagging while the download is going. it becomes more meaningful when you are not living alone
That’s where traffic priorisation comes in. If your router is setup in a somewhat reasonable way it gives priority to smaller data streams to avoid just that.
most routers are way too underpowered for that. you are happy if yours has 128 MB of RAM and 64 MB storage, and then you can imagine how is it with their CPU.
Actually, no. That’s a very simple basic functionality. A router needs to identify the streams (identified by the 5-tuple of source and destination IP and port and the protocol) to work at all. It also needs to prioritise traffic to work at all.
Combining both features is trivial even on 128mb RAM, and it’s implemented in most routers.