50Gbps is so very shiny…

But generally the real question is how often the extra speed would give you a real measurable advantage. If it’s only a few times per month then it’s probably not worth the extra subscription cost.

Some of these qualities are more legible than others.

Honestly, most people go for the shiniest number they can afford.

But I will say that as a software developer who has had to fix bugs on random branches of very substantial software projects (web browsers), there is a tradeoff between recompiling the whole project and simply downloading the binaries that the CI system has already built. When I had to jump six months or a year into the past to test some old build, gigabit service was the difference between a few minutes to download the binaries and 20–30 minutes to recompile them myself.

But these days 100Mbps is really more than enough.

An interesting technology that might become a killer app in a year or two is 4D gaussian splats. This is a way of creating photo–realistic animated 3D scenes that the user can move around in, viewing them from all angles (without any need for artists to build geometry or paint textures). Right now streaming them in real time needs about 500Mbps. I’m sure that a few years of iteration on compression techniques will lower it significantly, but it’ll always be more expensive than mere 2D images (even animated 2D images). For reference, most streaming services use about 15–25Mbps for a 4K television stream.

> In reality point to point is not really a benefit in 99.99% of scenarios, residential internet use cannot saturate 10G/10G for long, even with many 'heavy' internet users (most users can't really get more than >1gig internally over WiFi to start with).

This is so true! The whole thing about Netflix is such a canard. A 4K stream from Netflix tops out at 16Mbps. Other streaming services use 25Mbps, or speeds in between. 40Gbps is 1600 individual 4K streams, but XGSPON can only be split to a maximum of 128 customers. I guess if all of those customers have more than 12 televisions going at once…

You’re more likely to see congestion from many customers all hitting a speed test server at once just to see how shiny the numbers are.

Instead there will need to be a central office (CO) in or near those towns that has a fiber trunk running to it. Then smaller fiber lines can be run from the CO outwards towards potential subscribers. The cheapest way to do this is with PON (passive optical networking) service, where a single fiber carries 10Gbps or 40Gbps service that can be split using prisms to service dozens of customers. XGSPON is 40Gbps, serves up to 128 customers, and has a maximum service distance of 16km. If you’re the first subscriber in that area, that €250k might be for opening up a whole new CO plus running a PON fiber bundle the whole 8km between it and your neighborhood.

The free market is not a lie, it’s just that a lot of our politicians have lost their faith in it. That lead them to agree to local monopolies. Ziply, however, has broken out of that model and has been growing aggressively. It’s not perfect, but it’s good.

Surely they would be testing the configuration(s) that they use in production? They’re not running RDS without hugepages turned on, right?