Once upon a time, Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> said:
On 12/25/20 11:39 AM, Cory Sell wrote:
I saturate my 1G connection most during game downloads, file downloads/uploads, full backup uploads, etc.
I also self-host a lot of services for personal use and having that peak speed is really nice when you need it. It also had no traffic limit per month which is my biggest complaint about the lower tier services and also a huge complaint I have with regards to the direction that residential services are moving towards.
Obviously for downloads it's nice, but how often is that happening? A time or two a month max? It seems sort of strange the providers would build out infrastructure for such a niche activity.
With an Xbox Game Pass subscription, there are a ton of games available for play at no additional cost (with some games being added and removed monthly). My group of Xbox friends will regularly look at the list and say "let's try this one" - it might be a few gig or a 60GB or more download (I've got a few games over 100GB). We might play it for 10 minutes, decide it isn't to our liking, delete it, and try another game. I think the highest Xbox download rate I've seen is around 350Mbps (with a wired gig link to the Xbox) on my gig home service. The other aspect of it is that we're doing these downloads while continuing to play other games and chat (both things sensitive to latency). Some have family/roommates in the home, so they may be streaming audio and/or video at the same time. Do we fill up a gigabit? No, probably not... but we'd notice if we had a lot less. Bandwidth is like disk space - you think "I'll never use all of this", and then the availability changes behavior. Having ability to do more means your behavior changes to utilize more. We don't NEED high speed Internet to download games - we could leave the download running overnight for example - but being able to download big games in minutes means we get to try more games, finding new things to like. -- Chris Adams <cma@cmadams.net>