with internet service providers in dozens of countries around the world
advertising gigabit or even faster internet service it's awfully tempting
to yell shut up and take my money and then bathe yourself in a waterfall of
dank mes but before you spend even more of your hard-earned dollars upgrading an
already too expensive internet plan there's a lot you need to consider first
of all how is that connection even getting to your PC or other devices is
it going to be a bottleneck well for most people the answer to that question
is by using the ISP provided router now
if that happens to be in the same room or you're lucky enough to have Ethernet
in your walls great any reasonably modern device except Smart TVs for some
reason should have a gigabit Ethernet port meaning you will get the full
benefit and even if you weren't so lucky as all that modern powerline network
adapters and even Wi-Fi can handle gigabit or more however everything that
I just said comes with some big big butts let's start with the most common
connection today Wi-Fi if you happened to buy yourself a premium Wi-Fi router
or access point in the last 20 minutes or so well congratulations 1center
you're ready to download at gigabit speeds sort of more on that later for
everyone else who grabbed a $15 USB Wi-Fi dongle and called it a day well
I've got some bad news advertised Wi-Fi speeds are a pipe dream specifically
this kind of pipe dream I mean sure with enough spatial streams your pre-plague
Wi-Fi 5 setup could hit gigabit in the real world but between your walls cats
and just plain old distance you'd be lucky to get half of that leaving the
rest of your tasty megabits untouched
now the justification for these advertised speeds is that with multiple
concurrent users all downloading at the same time the total might add up to
something approaching that number but that also assumes that you have a bunch
of people who are downloading at the same time and that your router and your
devices have implemented optional parts of the Wi-Fi spec that spoiler alert
they often didn't Oh and before I spoil that too our sponsor is Ridge they're
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bring your party hat and check out the sale everything I just said about Wi-Fi
applies equally to power line and mocha if you're on anything but the latest
version of the tech under optimal conditions it is unlikely that you need
a gigabit pipe to keep them fed but let's say for the sake of argument
you have overcome those problems let's meet potential bottleneck number two
your computer whether your computer looks like this or this or this or this
the data that reaches your network adapter still needs to be processed and
sometimes stored now as long as you have a solid state drive the storage part is
probably fine gigabit or 1,000 megabit
is just 125 megabytes per second it's
not that much in the grand scheme of things so then why is the processing an
issue well you you see data hosts and internet service providers greatly
prefer that the files you download are compressed this helps them save on
storage space and helps them save on bandwidth costs as your juicy memes
movies and games come flying over the wire the downside of all of this is that
someone needs to uncompress them that's
you which is why downloading games from Steam has turned into kind of an
informal Benchmark around here because it turns out to max out a gigabit line
in Steam you need a pretty modern CPU to max out 2 and 1/2 gig you pretty much
need a top-of-the-line gaming chip and to even approach the limits of the 10
gig connection that we have to our on-site steam cache we need a
$10,000 996 core Threadripper Pro now
as you can imagine most people's PCS and especially game consoles aren't equipped
with any of that stuff I mean even the PS5 and Xbox series X struggle to reach
full gigabit speeds for game downloads and as for the Nintendo switch well it's
in a class of its own the uh less advanced class struggling to reach real
world speeds of even just 100 megabit which was the standard on PCS so I don't
know 25 years ago now there are valid
use cases for fat download speeds and we will talk about those but first let's
change gears to what most people are actually doing with their internet
connection most of the time and it isn't playing that game it's playing other
games now obviously every game's a little different but but we spent 10
minutes in rocket league and Halo infinite moving about 6 megab and 15
megabytes of data respectively that doesn't mean you're going to be able to
get by with a25 megabit connection your voice chat uh might not be too happy
about that but what it does mean is that a 200 to 300 megabit connection is lots
for even a Full House of active Gamers especially now that steam allows local
transfers of game files however that doesn't mean that just any connection
will do because any gamer will tell you once you've got enough bandwidth latency
is the real difference between pone or be pwned and it can be worthwhile to
test drive any available local isps to see who Nets you the lowest ping times
to your favorite game servers the same actually goes for streaming games from a
service like GeForce now or Xbox Cloud depending on the resolution and frame
rate that you target they call for anywhere from 10 to 45 megabit now game
streaming is a unique past because even a tiny disruption can spell disaster so
while I wouldn't say you need gigabit I would probably double or even triple the
onp paper requirements just to ensure that my little sister's book report
doesn't get my squad wiped out but the same is not true of Netflix and other
video streaming services which is actually kind of funny when you consider
how much 4K video streaming gets talked about in ISP marketing materials we're
talking Max 50 megabit per stream and it
pre-buff in chunks for smoother playback kind of like your old old disman with
anti-ip so yeah the faster your connection the quicker you'll be able to
scrub within your content since those chunks will come down so fast but even
then there's a point of diminishing returns and past a few hundred megabit
Netflix's own servers are unlikely to send you the data any faster which
brings us to the third big bottleneck for data to transfer from one place to
another well it's going to have to be received by you but also sent by someone
else at the same speed and how many businesses do you know that like
spending extra money on an Overkill connection that most people won't
benefit from that's right guys the vast majority of the services that you use
are going to be throttled on their side rather than on yours well okay liners
put on a turbo tabbing browsing social media consumption machine I'm going to
use all the sites at once neat do you want the bad news first uh here let's
load up say LT store.com ooh cable
management and precision screwdrivers coming soon sign up for a notification
anyway I was going somewhere with this that sort of traffic page loads small
pictures videos is made up of a whole bunch of smallish requests and resource
files that are so small that they typically finish downloading before they
even get up to gigabit speed you can use the network tab of your browser's Dev
tools to reveal what exactly is going on behind the scenes when you visit a web
page just click through to review your timing details and you can see exactly
what's taking up time and potentially slowing down your experience it turns
out a lot of the time it's actually not the data transfer speed at all your
isp's default DNS needs to give you the IP address of a server before you can
connect and in many cases this takes dozens of milliseconds meaning that most
of the time you spend waiting that hyperfast connection was sitting idle
anyway compounding the problem you also need to wait for the remote server to
process your request and begin the transfer more idling the good news is
that switching to a public DNS provider like Cloud flare Open DNS or Google can
improve this performance in fact we did a whole video about it and Gibson
research offers a DNS Benchmark tool that can help determine the best option
for your location we're going to have that link down below the bad news is
that everything I just said is free and a fancier connection does nothing to
improve it wait bad news that's not bad news that's good news I like free stuff
oh wait here's the bad news what is this analytics and
advertising okay if a website is doing everything right those resources should
load after the content you actually care about so they shouldn't impact your
experience too much if they're doing it right in the real world though ads and
analytics can significantly impact your browsing speed services like
browser-based ad blocking or a pie hoold DNS resolver on your local network we
actually made a whole video about that as well we'll have that link down below can eliminate at least some of those
load times but as someone who relies on web advertising for my livelihood and to
pay my staff how you guys doing good
last paycheck clear yep good stuff I would only ask that you consider the
impact if you go that route now let's talk about your butts but Linus I like
to download and share Linux isos well
first of all your community spirit and commitment to open source is admirable
comrade but you should really be looking into a seed box for as little as a
dollar a month you can get dedicated space and bandwidth on a server in a
data center that has multiple high-speed internet connections all away from the
prying eyes of your internet service provider many of them even accept crypto
as payment because hey you know how much they hate when people share Linux isos
but lonus I want to run a web server at home okay again why virtual private
servers start even cheaper than seedboxes and have the same benefits
along with static IPS easy backup options and room to grow and scale if
you need more capacity in the future you also won't be risking your residential
connection being terminated because you're technically violating your isp's
terms of service you could even collocate if you want dedicated Hardware
with a Raspberry Pi costing under 10 bucks a month which is probably less
than that internet upgrade that you've been eyeing but lus I'm a content
creator and I need that sweet sweet upload speed all right you've got me on
that one a proper fiber to the home ISP
offers symmetric speeds that is to say that the upload speed is the same as the
download speed and I'll be the first to admit that when you're uploading
multiple 4K videos every week that higher upload speed and not having to
sit around and wait it's pretty amazing but watch out not all fiber services are
equal and many isps Market their services as fiber because I don't know
there's fiber somewhere but that last mile connection from your home to the
nearest node is actually docis 3 or 3.1 and your upload speeds tend to be much
slower another thing to watch out for is that we've never seen YouTube inest at
multi- gig speeds so you're probably still okay with a decent but not maxed
out connection which is especially true for Twitch in that case you only need
about 8 megabits per 10860 stream so
again real-time streaming I would build in some additional buffer in that case
even like Forex if you don't want your audience to be like Yay what happened
bottom line if you told 20-year-old lus that he would one day be arguing against
faster internet speeds he would have laughed in your face but things aren't
getting any more affordable out there right now guys and if a reality check
here can save even 1% of the people who watch this video just $10 a month that
would work out to over a million dollar saved a year which is a pretty big win
in my book you know what else is in my
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you guys like this uh maybe you'd like to watch Dan and Sean trying to clean up
the mess that Jake and I keep making of our Network hey take can I help