“Tech stuff, bragging rights – mostly the second one…”
That’s what I told the Frontier tech when he left earlier this afternoon after upgrading my 2 Gbps Internet service up to 5 Gbps – admittedly a completely unnecessary residential speed even with five people all streaming different things at the same time!
Still, it’s cool, and my ISP had a Black Friday promotion that made it cheaper than the price I’ve been paying for 2-Gig ($99/mo for a year), so I had to jump on that. All of the 10-gig Ubiquiti gear in my closet pretty much demanded it.
I do find it kind of amusing that I’ve officially hit the sweet spot where speed tests have a hard time maxing out the line speed, and even the same with hardware – I tried downloading a test file from Usenet to the cache SSDs in my NAS and it got up to 350 MBps (2.8 Gbps) before throttling down much lower, though that could’ve been an availability issue with the file I chose. Most movies and TV shows these days average around 190 MBps (1.5 Gbps) for me, so it’s not super likely that I’ll see vastly improved speeds in my day to day use…
…but that won’t stop me from making some tweaks to see how close we can get to that 625 MBps max anyways!
It might have to wait until I can build a new server with NVMe M.2 drives and whatnot, but in the meantime, my recently upgraded laptop that I haven’t written about yet can now support 5-gig (technically my last one could do 2.5 Gbps with an adapter), the servers are all wired for 10-gig, and an upgrade for our wifi is only a stone’s throw away, so we’re using it even if it’s wonderfully excessive here at the tail end of 2024.
Who knows what the future will hold?!
After living on gigabit for about two years and 2-gig for 2.5 years, it wouldn’t surprise me to see it creep up to 10-gig in the next 2 – 3 years. The official cap for Frontier right now is 7-gig (at almost 3x the cost, it’s just too expensive right now … but a few years ago they wanted the same for 300 Mbps, so…), and several other ISPs across the country are offering between 8 and 10-gig, with one (Ziply Fiber) offering an impressive 50-gig plan for only $900 a month!
I can’t imagine trying to justify that one to the wife, but in time those prices will come down, too.
The future is awesome like that – at least in terms of fiber Internet prices…