There's a lot of comments on this thread pointing out typical bandwidth usage of popular streaming services, games etc and claiming that there's no need for higher bandwidth connections.
There's an important point that I think people are missing, which is that the bandwidth usage of internet services is going to be carefully tuned to balance quality and stability at typical internet speeds. When a large portion of consumers have < 100Mbps down of course all services are going to use < 100Mbps of bandwidth - you don't know what kind of stuff you're missing out on because of these slow internet speeds, because nobody is making it available, because it wouldn't work.
The most obvious thing that we already know we're missing out on is video streaming quality. You've possibly already noticed that low contrast dark scenes and scenes with snow/rainfall don't look very good on Netflix/YouTube/insert streaming service here - this is because these are the kind of scenes with the most obvious sacrifice of quality from video compression. (It's also possible you haven't noticed this, because streaming services generally avoid producing content that doesn't play well with their video compression).
There is still a market for Blue rays for precisely this reason, compression does a lot of harm to the image and streaming services often run at 1/4 or less the bitrate. There is also the sound compression as well which is very heavily done on places like Netflix, presumably because their intended audience is watching on a tablet or a low end smart TV that has terrible in built speakers but if you have reasonable addon speakers and especially surround sound the average has clearly gotten worse.
The effect is very dramatic on Youtube and Twitch. Twitch has its ~6mbit/s limit and Youtube limits 1080p to around 10 mbit/s and 4k to about 18mbit/s which is well below the blue ray standard bitrates for these resolutions. You can't even override it with a better quality upload as it always compresses the Video to its standard bitrates. It shows up a lot in game footage where grass often becomes a smudge. The somewhat manipulative use of this recently has been DLSS and FSR. These two technologies effectively hide really well within Youtube's compression, while using them they introduce noticeable artifacts but once compressed by Youtube they largely disappear and appear almost identical to the original image. Soft images due to Temporal Anti Aliasing and reduced resolution also appear relatively normal on Youtube, they just hide in the impact of the compression.
These defaults for ADSL levels of performance of the internet are quite harmful to image and sound quality across a range of services and while those companies might not want to pay for more bandwidth we as customers should want better bitrates for when we play it on devices capable of showing and producing better.
You really see how lame our so-called HD is on streaming services when a lot of pixels change at once. Images of rough seas and fast-moving live sports are good examples.
And “4K” under 100 Mbps? A joke.
My parents are stuck with AT&T (which peddles glorified DSL), and Netflix barely works.
>There's an important point that I think people are missing, which is that the bandwidth usage of internet services is going to be carefully tuned to balance quality and stability at typical internet speeds.
...or the fact that there can be and often are more than one person in a single household.
This was super noticeable for a few years whenever I went back home to visit my parents. I would struggle to load basically anything on my laptop most evenings due to the 5 mpbs or so being split between 3+ devices (although the weak signal in most rooms due to the poor placement of the router that they were not interested in moving somewhere more central didn't help either). Eventually when the pandemic hit and my father started working from home, they quickly discovered that he would not be able to get his work done if my mother was streaming something at the same time, so they ended up upgrading to a more expensive plan, and the next time I visited, I was pleased to find that my issues had vanished.
i can provably determine whenever someone in my household is using youtube. We have "fixed wireless" as primary internet access right now, and the upstream is measurably between 300 and 800 kilobits. However, the "router" assumes perfect connection (which i am guessing is somewhere around 5mbit) so any sort of QOS is out the window. And it's behind CGNAT, so i'm getting a class C on a class A private network, and all gaming stuff that doesn't like NAT to begin with balks. I've worked around that (check my github or whatever), but the fact remains, without literal triple-NAT my household can't actually use the internet as it exists, even with potentially 40mbit downstream speeds.
In video many things become possible with higher bandwidth availability:
Youtube Recommended video bitrates for 60fps HDR UPLOADS:
8K: 150 to 300 Mbps,
2160p (4K): 66 to 85 Mbps,
1440p (2K): 30 Mbps,
1080p: 15 Mbps,
Some example uncompressed video bitrates:
1080p60: 3 Gbps,
2160p30: 6 Gbps,
2160p60: 12 Gbps,
2160p/8k@60: 24 Gbps and upward,
It might be hard to imagine using uncompressed video over the internet,
I know it is for me.
But all the applications we can only do locally start to become possible
over large geographic areas. The applications could be amazing relative
to what we know and understand today.
I think applications we can't imagine would become possible with large jumps
in low-cost available bandwidth.
One of the things that frustrates me is that ISPs have successfully lobbied broadband surveys to exclude "inconvenient" plans.
AT&T asked that their DSL plans were not counted towards their "average bandwidth" because they were "obsolete and no longer being marketed".
To be clear - they were still _available_, and in many cases, your only option, but they were an anchor pulling down the average, so AT&T just "didn't want them to count".
> The most obvious thing that we already know we're missing out on is video streaming quality. You've possibly already noticed…
I only pay for the lowest tier of Netflix which does not give me HD, and I have literally never noticed a quality problem watching on my TV (which I have no idea the resolution of, honestly).
Apparently I don't care or notice much about quality. I actually have no idea if i'm the majority or you are.
We do the same. Subscriptions and rentals are 1080p. 4k versions of content usually cost twice as much. A few simultaneous compressed 1080p streams easily fit in the slowest broadband service I can get.
> There's a lot of comments on this thread pointing out typical bandwidth usage of popular streaming services, games etc and claiming that there's no need for higher bandwidth connections.
You said it, not me. You said there's shills on this thread. That's the only possible motivation to argue there's no need for more bandwidth, there's another reason I came up with but I don't want it to be plagiarized, so I won't say it, they're stuck rehashing the "really sincere" focus group maneuver. It's also because actual bandwidth meaning through a wire has more rights and is better protected from tapping than wireless or radio or what is it now 5G? So the whole game is to funnel people to depending on this little walkie talkie that never turns off and which has no buttons, and is so sophisticated you can't fix it yourself, and has a baseband (that's a whole nother conspiracy theory but it's boring), and it gets GPS readings like every time you don't consent for it to, and that's why they're attacking the pipe, the wire, the cable, the fiber, they want everybody getting a cellular antenna for everything. The wire means having rights, photons it's like, everything goes. Surveillance in fact, they want us all to literally broadcast our eg 911 calls instead of calling them on a landline. They don't like landlines because they're well-litigated, have rights, martyrs died over getting their line tapped or being unable to call 911 just by pressing 911 (there's a case over that, they were meant to dial 9 first, 9911, and victims couldn't get through to emergency service and one died), 5G turns back the martyr clock forty years.
Yeah totally want to get all my needs met by a nagging machine.
Like these guys run their own ISP you think they can't log into a site and tell them both sides of the story? They've been doing it since the 1910's. Or shill robots by this point. I wonder if it counts as public speaking if you're only speaking to robots. Just trying to pass the Cussen Test here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31111806
Regarding your Cussen Test, did you write this comment using something like GPT-2?
I got curious so I checked a few of your account’s other comments. Some of them are very similar to this one [0], but others are short and concise [1]. I can think of a few other explanations for this, but since you mentioned the test…
You know what? I've been diagnosed as spectrum autism, believe what you want. Suppose this can be reverse psychology, there is nothing I can say that can't be plagiarized. I don't have a really good way of proving it digitally. At least I'm getting replies, which I could not on the initial Cussen Test post. Any reply is progress, but I think I passed the test already, wow.
There's an important point that I think people are missing, which is that the bandwidth usage of internet services is going to be carefully tuned to balance quality and stability at typical internet speeds. When a large portion of consumers have < 100Mbps down of course all services are going to use < 100Mbps of bandwidth - you don't know what kind of stuff you're missing out on because of these slow internet speeds, because nobody is making it available, because it wouldn't work.
The most obvious thing that we already know we're missing out on is video streaming quality. You've possibly already noticed that low contrast dark scenes and scenes with snow/rainfall don't look very good on Netflix/YouTube/insert streaming service here - this is because these are the kind of scenes with the most obvious sacrifice of quality from video compression. (It's also possible you haven't noticed this, because streaming services generally avoid producing content that doesn't play well with their video compression).