While others across the industry battle it out over 10-gig claims, Google Fiber is looking to go bigger, plotting the rollout of a symmetrical 20-gig service for select residential and business cus | The service will use Nokia's 25G-PON gear and initially be available later this year as an invite-only product.
My provider recently started offering a 2gbps plan for $30 more a month. I was tempted until I thought about the money I’d need to spend on new equipment to take advantage of it. 1gbps fiber is plenty for now.
Tbf, a lot of these multi gig plans are geared to families, where more than one person could be doing high bandwidth activities. Or even just one person doing high bandwidth things doesn’t cause the other persons zoom call to stutter.
That being said, ain’t no one NEED 20gbits but by god I would enjoy it.
Thing is though, most consumer networking gear is capable of a maximum of 1gbit, so to even take advantage of 2gig or 2.5gig you at least need a router with a 2.5gig uplink. If you have this you can have a couple of people on the network using a gig each.
My setup is a 1.2g cable connection going into a 2.5g port on my router, with a couple of servers connected to the router over 10g. This basically lets me download off of my servers at the full speed of the network but the rest of my devices are limited to 1gig.
Going up to 20gig would require a large investment to see the benefits. First you would need a router with a 25g uplink port, which is really only going to be found on a specific tier of “enterprise” gear. These routers aren’t going to have a bunch of ports so you are going to need to dump the output either to a 25g switch or a couple of 10g switches (probably the most cost-effective option). From there you can distribute out to 20 machines at 1g.
Anyway, you are definitely right about the aim of a service like this but to see the benefits of a 20g connection would require some very expensive and specialized equipment.
Ya, mine is slow rolling 2gig but it kind of fucked me up because now I want 6E mesh APs and it’s going to cost me like $500. I know I don’t need it, but the fact that I could have it is tempting. Plus I need 6E for the VR headset I also don’t have.