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Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com

Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com

From: "Owen DeLong via NANOG" <nanog@nanog.org>
To: "Michael Thomas" <mike@mtcc.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2022 1:26:39 AM
Subject: Re: FCC proposes higher speed goals (100/20 Mbps) for USF providers


> I agree that it probably doesn't change much for the ISP's (my rural ISP installing fiber apparently disagrees tho). The thing is that if you're talking about downloads, the game manufacturers will just fill to whatever available capacity the pipes will give so it probably won't ever get better.

I don’t think game manufacturers expand their games based on available download bandwidth. I think that games have gotten richer and the graphics environments and capabilities have improved and content more expansive to a point where yes, games are several BluRays worth of download now instead of being shipped on multiple discs.

However, this isn’t exactly new… Windows used to come on something like 31 3.5” floppies at one point.

However, yes, a download will fill whatever bandwidth is available for as long as the download takes. If you’ve got 1Gpbs, the download will take significantly less time than if you have 100Mbps.

> Maybe there a Next Big Thing that will be an even bigger bandwidth eater than video. But I get the bigger limitation these days for a lot of people is latency rather than bandwidth. That of course is harder to deal with.

Latency is a limitation for things that are generally relatively low bandwidth (interactive audio, zoom, etc.).

Higher bandwidth won’t solve the latency problem, but it does actually help some in that it reduces the duration of things other customers do to cause congestion which increases latency.

Owen