Technology

China has this covered hands down. If you say Winnie, two mean looking Chinese men appear behind you.

It's so incredibly annoying when people use smaller order of magnitude descriptors simply so they can then write more zeros. A good chunk of the time too it feels like it's done to distract from a different point or to exaggerate without technically lying.

Doesn't help that technical jargon is only best used when communicating with someone in that field or understands it. Big number + alphabet soup always seems scary 😞

I’m just pretty sure my fiber vendor offers 10Gbps service but I’ve never had reason to check whether they offer it here. There app is not responding so I can’t verify …. They are better at fiber service than maintaining an app.

Personally I think gig fiber is the current sweet spot:

• price has come down a lot
• very low latency
• high reliability
• more than enough for most people

It’s technically overkill for most people but a huge benefit is it works. For everything. Cable tends to be way over-provisioned for plus asymmetrical and higher latency, so you won’t get the bandwidth you pay for, uploads will be slow, and latency may hit you while gaming or streaming. Most of the time cable or slower fiber will be good enough but you will hit glitches, buffering. My gigabit fiber has been rock solid for years, never a glitch, never a buffering, no slow uploads, never impacts gaming. It’s near perfect. I dont mind the extra cost due to the huge savings from dropping cable and phone

Worse than that, from the article:

The 50G-PON ITU-T standard supports theoretical speeds of up to 50 Gbps downstream and up to 25 Gbps upstream, though current real-world deployments in China - led by China Telecom, its regional branch Shanghai Telecom, and ZTE - typically provide 10 Gbps all-optical access.

So the 50G number is just theoretical and actual real world speed is only 10G. Due to regulations in the US, advertisements would need to advertise the real speeds. So this is really just the same as 10Gbps anywhere else.

It will be in 10 years when a majority of their country has access to it. Industrialization in China is on a different level.

In less than 25 years they will take the top spot for global economy, and likely everything else.

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 🤣

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.

I have a 40Mbps down, 5Mbps up connection for $30. Consider yourself as real lucky.

Not to mention the server is the bottleneck at that point. I have access to 2.5Gb/2.5Gb but only pay for 500/500 because, even that is faster than most servers, and of course all the mobile devices aren’t pushing more than 400 on WiFi.

Interesting--when I made a similar argument on Reddit some years ago, networking geniuses assured me that they needed more than 1Gbps to play lag-free games. This on /r/programming, no less.

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.

Bigger Number = Better

The math is mathing correctly

Decades ago....

"Why do I need electricity? I have candles. Lights seem excessive."

Yes, but once most people have electricity, new products will be designed to take advantage of it. Now you can have a washing machine, for example.

Broadband is the same. Once most of your population has high bandwidth, we can start to design things that will use it. Right now we're still designing for DSL speeds.

360 VR experience with 16K resolution, highly textured touchable surfaces, and smell-o-vision. Only a $40 Meta subscription with ads.

For me, the normal stuff. Mathematically my gig fiber is overkill for my usage. And internet services can rarely keep up with that - you want to download some update or new game? It’s throttled at the source regardless of your internet connection

But in reality when I visit people with “fast enough” internet, I always see glitches and buffering and lag. While it usually serves the need and sometimes gets advertised bandwidth, gig fiber always serves the need. I shouldn’t have to complain about my network or worry about how many streams or how big a download or how many people on their phones. I should never worry about lag during games or interrupted video calls. And I shouldn’t have to worry about sketchy broadband providers (like xFinity/ConCast) way over provisioning their lines or otherwise never delivering marketed bandwidth.

Gig fiber delivers. Always. Like any good infrastructure you don’t even have to think about it: it just always does the job

But computers are getting faster - it seems like even medium level laptops are coming with 2.5Ge, and everything is more and more digital, and we expect more all the time. Yes I do expect to want a faster connection within 5-10 years even without doing anything high bandwidth. Heck, if history holds, another couple upgrades of JavaScript and we’ll need 50G to load web pages

Seems surprising, especially because Estonia is known for its digitized government. I logically thought that it'd be complemented with decent Internet coverage.