Saturday, December 1, 2018

Do You Need Gigabit Internet Access?

Marketing headlines aside, there is relatively little value to be gained, for a typical consumer internet access account, by buying a gigabit internet access service, over an alternative operating at 100 Mbps.

Granted, loading web pages is but one of a number of use cases. But the benefits of “more bandwidth” and “lower latency” show why gigabit internet access actually does not solve as many user experience issues as you might expect.

After about 10 Mbps, page load time does not improve with bandwidth. The one clear exception is any internet access account with multiple users who are using a shared connection at the same time. Then access connection requirements shown here are “per user,” not “per connection.”

Better latency performance arguably has more impact on page load times. That is one reason why 5G is seen as supporting many new ultra-low latency use cases. Design latency is one millisecond for 5G. That noted, 4G latency already is low, at around 10 milliseconds.





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