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Re:Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battli... by toomuchtodo on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @12:23PM (#21006954)
I don't disagree that asymmetric speeds are a problem, but I think there's this bubble where tech professionals think that once everyone has gigabit up and down, your average Joe is going to be demanding 10 gigabit and up, and the data isn't proving that out. People are happy to stream a couple of views of Netflix at once and that's it (even if you're thinking everyone is going to do live syncing of block volumes to the cloud; everyone might use iCloud for their Mac backups once Apple supports it natively for Time Machine, but even then deduplication and off peak transfers will do the heavy lifting).
Re:Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battli... by wlesieutre on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @12:54PM (#21007297)
Agreed with that, my connection is plenty fast. It would be nice to have a faster one, but not enough that I'm going to pay more for it.

I think I'm around 50 Mbps and it could be used much more heavily, but it doesn't make any sense on YouTube's end to send me a 50 megabit video stream. It's a the storage and upload costs on the provider side limiting that.

Even if you pay extra for Netflix's 4K support, that only needs 25 megabits. It's compressed to hell compared to a 4K bluray, but if we all had faster internet I don't know if that would change. It's lot harder to market the actual visual quality of a video compared to talking about how many pixels it has.

Maybe we'll see whole new services that need the bandwidth, but most stuff that sends a lot of data could be downloaded in advance if you don't mind waiting 5 minutes instead of having it instantly accessible. How many billion dollars are we willing to spend to build out faster networks to avoid that? What's the selling point for very fast streams, we go back to cloud mainframes and all of our devices are dumb terminals that stream our games and the whole OS from an AWS datacenter?

Re:Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battli... by gwright on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @12:50PM (#21007248)
Why is asymmetric speeds a problem? I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with having multiple types of service for different use cases. That is true with other utilities (electric, water, gas) and is part of general infrastructure planning in those areas.

Of course the actual pricing, availability, etc are also important but I don't think there needs to be a one-size-fits-all model for Internet bandwidth.

Re:Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battli... by toomuchtodo on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @01:04PM (#21007407)
Constrains end user capabilities. Harder to live stream or heavily use something like Dropbox with under 5Mbps up.
Re:Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battli... by gwright on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @02:35PM (#21008503)
I get that. I'm not saying that there aren't different use cases, I'm saying that it is reasonable that there should be different price points for the different use cases.

Even if the physical plant supported symmetric bandwidth, I would expect different pricing plans for different utilization patterns.

Re:Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battli... by calvinmorrison on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @12:53PM (#21007277)
Well, for one 4k streaming will probably significantly increase desired download speeds.