But it's not like the Chinese government to provide that kind of service out of kindness.
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Meanwhile, Telia in Estonia: "The Estonian customer doesn't prioritize connection speed or price, that's why we don't need to offer competitive speed/price ratios compared to what we have in other European countries"
Written in Switzerland from my 25GBps symmetric connection (for like 60$/month) that I have for a couple of years 🤷♂️
Also for personal use the difference between 1Gbps and 25 (or, I guess, 100GBps) is essentially zero… your everyday connection is via WiFi (good luck to get more than 1GBps there) or on a home server/NAS/workstation where likely you run batch jobs where the difference between 1 minute or 5 minutes is not a huge deal (and yes I am not saying 1 vs 25 because at that speed generally the bottleneck is the place where you are getting data from)
Plus what consumer can even support higher bandwidth? Computers are starting to come with 2.5G Ethernet, switches are coming down in price but still pretty expensive for home use (and complex), and any existing wiring is likely close to topped out.
For anything faster, you’re all too likely to need enterprise equipment for a lot more money and a lot more complexity.
I’ve briefly considered updating to faster internet but
- I don’t have a rational need
- I’d have to replace switches and wiring
- I don’t have the time to commit
- even building a file server that can sustain that bandwidth is a challenge
I have a 40Mbps down, 5Mbps up connection for $30. Consider yourself as real lucky.
I'm sure I have the same ISP as you, but so far I didn't splurge to buy 10G or 25G gear.
If you don't mind telling, what router and switches did you go for?
Or did you go the Michael Stapelberg route?
Hi from Canada. 1.5 Gbps for $66 a month plus cellphone plan of $50 🤦🏼
I have symmetrical 10 Gbps at home ($30/mo) and I'll agree. When it's nice when you have big updates, for most households 1 Gbps is going to be just fine. As you say, the vast majority of users are bottlenecked by Wi-Fi.
The bigger crime are all the asymmetrical connections that people on technologies like Cable TV networks have, where you get 1-2 Gbps down but only something tiny like 50 Mbps up. This results in crappy video calls, makes off-site/remote backups unfeasible, means you can't host anything at home, etc.
you get 1-2 Gbps down but only something tiny like 50 Mbps up
That's exactly what you get in Australia, even if you have FTTP, 95% of ISPs only offer up to 1000/50Mbps, and that's if you live in the big cities. Mine costs ~US$70/mo btw. And they have a 'typical evening speed' that drops to 860/42Mbps (I've never heard of such a concept outside Australia. Yeah, totally not a scam).
A handful ISPs offer 1000/400Mbps and you'll be looking at ~US$125/mo. Anything faster you'll be handed with astronomical commercial bills.
Do you actually have 10G switches and network cards, or is everything behind your router on 1G?
Not OP, but I have my NAS and my office PC on 10Gbps SFP+ fiber, but that's so I can have fast speeds to my NAS. Spinning platters are now the limiting factor on throughput, and it'll be a while before SSDs come down in price enough for the kind of data hoarding volume I have. Roughly needs to be cut in half two more times, which is maybe closer than we all think.
2.5Gbps switches are generally good enough for home use while using plain copper wires, but I use a lot of old enterprise hardware on my network. Enterprise hardware never heard of 2.5Gbps ethernet.
Also, I found out my Unifi Edgerouter X maxed out at 500Mbps unless I shut off a lot of features. Upgraded to an OPNsense box. There's probably a lot of home user routers that are similarly limited.
Seconding this, while I have the option for multi-gig at my address, I don't have the need, once you get around gigabit upload speeds life is fine.
I can upload hours of uncompressed gameplay to YouTube in under an hour, and that's limited mostly by their ingest speeds (≈300Mbps) and not my end, so that's plenty.
With all that said, the option for consumers is great, I'm thankful I have that choice, wish more people had it too.
50gbps **shared line using passive optical splitters. Bit misleading there Chona, nobody is getting an actual 50gbps connection to their house.
"Chona"
Hahah.
Most residential fiber globally currently is GPON with a 1-2 Gbps shared line using passive optical splitters, split up to 32 ways. Raising that shared line to 50 Gbps is a great upgrade.
Its not that out of this world, though it is currently completely unneccessary. 10gb+ has been somewhat common residentially for years.
Getting real tired of these „China is 30 years ahead of us“ clickbait headlines on an almost daily basis. They‘re always completely overblown and sadly really warp the public perception of the country and their government.
I'm sure the hardware for 50Gbps optics wouldn't be cheap for the consumer 🤣
Enterprise adopted 100GbE networking around 2019. You can now buy used network cards for around $100 each.
We're testing this same tech in the UK as well: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/02/openreach-and-nokia-claim-uks-first-live-test-of-50gbps-broadband.html
China might be a little ahead but it's hardly a leapfrog.
I live in London and my speed is 64-69Mb, only two choices of BT/Openreach or Virgin Media where I live sadly. I have thought about switching to VM as they seem more stable where I live now, I do check other fibre options like Community Fibre, Hyperoptics and YouFibre regularly to see 8f in my area, sadly not yet :o(
AT&T still hasn't installed fiber in my old neighborhood where one of their lines cuts straight through a row of houses that conveniently do get fiber, while everyone else is stuck on cable.
Did I mention they received billions in federal funding to upgrade everyone?
We already have private 100gbps in Australia and our public network just trialled it last year so rollout is expected this year there as well.
Why is anyone celebrating 50gbps? I can’t imagine Australia is anywhere near leading here.
This is for PON technology. 1 fibre can be split 32-ways to feed, you guessed it, 32 customers. 50g over a fibre that is split 32-ways with a minimum of 15db loss is impressive.
I guarantee those 100gbps circuits are a single fibre all the way from the provider to the customer. And they are expensive, very expensive.
I wonder if they use semiconductor optical amplifiers in the receivers, or if they can make do with avalanche photodiodes.
The 100G stuff I'm looking at has 18.5 dB budget with APDs, that seems rough considering you want a few kilometers of fiber, a few splices and a few connectors (probably LC/APC) as well.