> I think beyond 1gbit, the benefit become super marginal and the hardware expensive
Is it expensive though? We spend how much of our lives online. How much do you think this all-spanning life upgrade costs? What is the price of never ever dealing with buffer-bloat? Take a guess.
I calculate it as a one time $356 cost plus labor. You might have paid more for your wifi system. 128 port 25gbe switches are around $20k ($156/port). Transcievers are under $100 and you need one on both ends. For a lot of already deployed fiber, this is a drop in replacement. This is absurdly cheap. Given how cheap this is it's an obvious & enthusiastic heck yes. Who wouldnt throw down $356 right now to get 25Gbe for life?
Cost gets a bit more complicated when it comes to the POPs & their uplink. Subscribers are going to be way oversubscribed even with some fairly expensive 100Gb uplinks. As you get further from an exchange the difficulty grows geometrically (because pops become.further hops away from the ix). Peering needs to be bigger too, as does transit (but ask whether the net volume of traffic grows elastically or not), which has costs. But I think we need to frame this question a bit better, of whether it's "worth" upgrading. Honestly costs are so low it doesnt make sense not to; the rest of the world is just milking us, bilking us, charging what the market will bear, protecting it's profit centers, and this company init7 is doing what makes financial sense for the consumer. Donwe need all that? Maybe maybe not. Should we settle for less? There's almost no financial case when the hardware is so so so very cheap. This tech sounds magical but 25Gbe is not exotic, not extreme technology; "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet".
A significant part of my life is online, indeed, but 99% of the time, bandwidth is a nonissue. Latency, very important. Bandwidth, not so much. I haven't experienced any bandwidth related internet problem in the past ten years, and that's moving from apartment to apartment, from hotel to hotel, from airport to airport.
Don't get me wrong. I'm very much in favor of this upgrade. I just don't think it's going to be an everyday quality-of-life improvement for most people. It's more about providing a service for people with special needs, and future-proofing the infrastructure.
> 99% of the time, bandwidth is a nonissue. Latency, very important
Indeed. And I'm speaking as someone who downloads most visual media before I watch it, so bandwidth matters to me. But not that much. With 100-200 Mbit/s I am good.
Cookie prompts, newsletter pop-ups, scrolljacking and ads constitutes the majority of wasted time for me, by a long shot. Latency to sites in other parts of the world can cause problems sometimes, since number of round trips can be quite high with TLS neg + progressively loaded content.
It sounds like you're just taking about cost for the ISP to upgrade.
To actually realize your faster speeds, you need to spend thousands of dollars yourself on new switches and NICs. And then, as mentioned, the benefits are marginal. You would have to be streaming 10+ 4K movies at once to even "need" gigabit, let alone 25Gbps.
Wifi 7 is expected to be capable of 30-40Gbps. A dual port nic can be had under $200. Currently low/medium port count equipment has no demand, but perhaps the wifi7 world or pressure like init7 generates can make more visible & obvious the market demand. For anyone setting up today, do what I did: (used byt plentifully available) 18 port 40Gbps infiniband switch for $150, nics for $100.
I semi agree that I dont think we know what this is for. Never ever having buffer bloat is a tempting first ask. Connectivity is more than the sum of throughputs, as your figures imply- there's questions of availability too.
Being able to access each other's systems at near local speeds sounds quite compelling, could help jumpstart post-Big Social computing. You talk about netflix streams, but those are heavily compressed with the best offline encoding on the planet: if i just want to open Steam Remote Play Together & share realtime 4K with a friend, I'd need a lot more throughput since I have much much much less efficiemt encoding. If i wanted Remote Play Together with 3 friends, well, that figures goes up. If my family member also wants to do the same, now we're using a lot or maybe all the throughput & we're starting to have some contested bandwidth, some rising latencies.
The truth is somewhere between. Rationalizing ourselves down to what sounds sensible today, to me, is a cruel trick, is not just path dependency but an ideology that believes only in what we have & can see now, & refuses exploration & trying. To me the world & tech is spiritually fueled by why not thinking, by deciding to opt for the extra thats within reach.
Forgoing a cheap (still less than the price of a nice tv, by far), available one-time purchase option that vaults us into near-local connevtivity caliber with the world is still a lock in my book.
A router with a 25G uplink and a bunch of 10G sfp slots will set you back $600
There's benefits to 25G (certainly when transporting 4K video around which needs more than a 10G nic), whether that's worthwhile for a typical home is likely "no", so unless you've got hundereds of employees in an office it doesn't feel very useful.
The calculation works only if each customer has their own fiber.
Unfortunately for most (consumer) FTTH deployments, that's not the case. Most of them are GPON, where the initial deployment was more effective, as up to 64 of your customers share single fiber, but then that means all of them have to upgrade all 64 of them at the same time, you cannot do them one at the time (see also the speed of XG-PON upgrades).
Additionally, many providers forced use of their CPEs. If you can send out SFP module and the customers can put it into whatever they want, it is much simpler, as replacing CPEs for all the customers on that fiber.
Is it expensive though? We spend how much of our lives online. How much do you think this all-spanning life upgrade costs? What is the price of never ever dealing with buffer-bloat? Take a guess.
I calculate it as a one time $356 cost plus labor. You might have paid more for your wifi system. 128 port 25gbe switches are around $20k ($156/port). Transcievers are under $100 and you need one on both ends. For a lot of already deployed fiber, this is a drop in replacement. This is absurdly cheap. Given how cheap this is it's an obvious & enthusiastic heck yes. Who wouldnt throw down $356 right now to get 25Gbe for life?
Cost gets a bit more complicated when it comes to the POPs & their uplink. Subscribers are going to be way oversubscribed even with some fairly expensive 100Gb uplinks. As you get further from an exchange the difficulty grows geometrically (because pops become.further hops away from the ix). Peering needs to be bigger too, as does transit (but ask whether the net volume of traffic grows elastically or not), which has costs. But I think we need to frame this question a bit better, of whether it's "worth" upgrading. Honestly costs are so low it doesnt make sense not to; the rest of the world is just milking us, bilking us, charging what the market will bear, protecting it's profit centers, and this company init7 is doing what makes financial sense for the consumer. Donwe need all that? Maybe maybe not. Should we settle for less? There's almost no financial case when the hardware is so so so very cheap. This tech sounds magical but 25Gbe is not exotic, not extreme technology; "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet".