Is it?  I mean, as an industry, we already recognize that the average user downloads approx. 5 times more than they upload.  In fact, we use it to bash users who want a synchronous speed... tell them that's unreasonable.

I get your point, that if you try to use the outliers corner cases as your "measure", that's a problem.  And I agree that game companies might get lazier in terms of efficiency and distribution methods.  I'm just saying we need to be careful to have the conversations, and be open to them.  We need to provide good, well-thought-out reasons, and justify our reluctance to hit "low profit" areas.  Especially when we work in a sector that's being provided billions of dollars a year to do that very thing.  Short quips like "Downloading is a really bad thing to use as a reason" overly simplify the (real) problems and needs down to insulting sound bytes when talking to the public.  

I realize you're talking to an in-group here, and might not have said the same publicly, so I'm not being overly critical, it's just an observation to clarify my own point

Sincerely,
Casey Russell
Network Engineer

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On Mon, Jun 6, 2022 at 12:12 PM Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> wrote:


On 6/6/22 7:56 AM, Casey Russell via NANOG wrote:

For a long time now...

I have had the opinion that we have reached the age of "peak
bandwidth", that nearly nobody's 4 person home needs more than 50Mbit
with good queue management. Certainly increasing upload
speeds dramatically (and making static IP addressing and saner
firewalling feasible) might shift some resources from the cloud, which
I'd like (anyone using tailscale here?), but despite
8k video (which nobody can discern), it's really hard to use up >
50Mbit for more than a second or three with current applications.


One single digital game download to a console (xbox, playstation, etc.) can be over 80Gb of data.  That's half of your Saturday just waiting to play a game.  That assumes you'r'e getting the full 50Mbit (your provider isn't oversubscribing) to yourself in the home.  It also assumes your console (and all the games on it) is fully updated when you fired it up to download that new game. Hope you didn't want a couple of new games (after Christmas or a birthday).  I admit, it's not a daily activity, and it might not look like much in a monthly average.  But I'd argue there are plenty of applications where 50Mbit equals HOURS of download wait for "average families" already today, not seconds. 

And gig everywhere would just encourage them to make 8000GB downloads. Downloading is a really bad thing to use as a reason.

Mike