re: Holy Cow! Just signed up for gigabit service in Chattanooga, TN

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Yeah, I don't know why people can't imagine a use case different from their own. Just one torrent can saturate gigabit.

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Few people are torrenting all day at 1gig, and only the more popular torrents are going to get enough peers to saturate that pipe but yeah if you are really into software and movie theft then you will notice the difference with 1gig.

Another use case is if you're synchronizing lots of data backups from your home to the cloud. You will notice a difference with 1gig depending on how much new data you have to backup. (think movies and pics)

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Or, maybe you've cut the cord and your family of 5 are all streaming video at prime time and you don't want heavy browsing or downloading to cause buffering (nor do you want the streaming to impact your browsing).

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You can easily do all this with a 100meg connection. Theoretically you should be able to do this with a 50meg connection, but YMMV.

A lot of people don't realize that it only takes around 6.7mbps bandwidth to stream HD video from Netflix. 4k can be accomplished with 25mbps. I think the point is that few people would notice the difference between a 200mbps connection and a 1gbps connection.

In 5 years we will definitely be tapping into that bandwidth though so I hope everyone gets fiber. As far as 10gig goes for residential use? It'll be a while.