Virgin have also upgraded me to Gigabit fibre.
Which, as I wrote a few years ago, is mostly pointless.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/12/whats-the-point-in-gigabit-broadband/
I wonder when gigabit will actually be useful?
Virgin have also upgraded me to Gigabit fibre.
Which, as I wrote a few years ago, is mostly pointless.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/12/whats-the-point-in-gigabit-broadband/
I wonder when gigabit will actually be useful?

(This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years.) My yearly contract with my ISP has just come to an end, so it was time to shop around for a better deal. They presented me with the following monthly options: Drop to 100Mbps for the same price I'm paying today (£44) Keep at 350Mbps for a tenner more (£55) Rise to 500Mbps for a fiver more (£49) Go to GI…
Anyway, if you want stupid fast Internet, sign up using this link and Virgin will both give us £50.
Using iperf, I can get a max of about 940Mbps between machines on my LAN.
I suspect that might be a limit of my router, USB-C Ethernet Hubs, and ancient cabling.
Most Internet speed tests simply can't handle gigabit connections.
Cloudflare's gets to about 900Mbps which I suspect is about as is good as possible.
But the reality is almost no service on the Internet can support gigabit home connections.
"'ullo John, gotta new router?"
Upgraded my Virgin Media to the newer Hub 5 (turns out the 5x doesn't have modem mode).
I can now get the full 1,130Mbps I'm paying for.
But, still, even though I have Cat6 cables most of my hubs, switches, and ports are only gigabit enabled. Domestic equipment simply can't use anything faster.
WiFi in a congested radio environment isn't going to get close.
Even if it could, most servers can't deliver that quickly.
@WiteWulf I'm not convinced.
4K streaming needs a maximum of 25Mbps. So unless your house has 40 people all simultaneously watching different Netflix shows, it's hard to see how it could be saturated.
@Edent 4k streaming doesn't really use all that much bandwidth in the grand stream of things. In my experience the biggest user of bandwidth in domestic situations is software updates, the main offenders being Adobe and console games. They will devour all the bandwidth you have (okay, maybe not 8Gb/s).
Now, that usage may be sporadic, but when it's there it will impact the performance of everything else on the network unless you have a good quality router that's tuned to avoid buffer bloat.
@Edent the other thing that's equally important, is that you need a *seriously* powerful router to forward packets at gigabit speeds.
Gigabit+ broadband is definitely a niche thing, you're right, but it can be used.