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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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Infrastructure is important, and walking back from these gigabit targets is awful. There is no replacement for fiber. We all deserve to have access to fast internet.
But to yell at a cloud for a moment, if we're being honest most people should not need gigabit. I know everyone is a gamer now, but let's forget about bulk downloads. For normal browsing most people should not need much more than about 12mbps. 12 mbps is fast enough to have two 1080p h265 streams running concurrently. And yet, when you try to use the modern web at that speed, it's a terrible experience because of all the adtech bullshit that gets crammed into every page. When I measured this Ars article it was 6.53MB. That is, to borrow a yardstick from a blogpost I reread recently, long enough to fit 3 or 4 of the great Russian epics inside. It is bigger than the shareware version of DOOM, big enough to fit the entire python standard package library documentation. For one article.
Don't let this cheapen the FCC being chickenshit and captured by specific perverse corporate interests, but publishers have sold us a bridge when it comes to the modern web. Web3 was supposed to fix all this with micropayments. I'd gladly pay whatever my paltry share of Ars' CPM they expected to get out of my pageview, wouldn't you? But cryptobros turned it into a get-rich-quick slopfest and then it died.
edit: having meandered over to my computer because I just cannot sleep, I decided to measure the page as I access it, with ublock, noscript, and umatrix turned on. That article now weighs just over 724kB. Way better. Reader mode loses the images and gets the article down to 2.49kB. Meaning the actual content is roughly 0.04% of the delivered size of the original page. The stylesheet alone is many times the size of the content. I know I'm really indulging my old man energy but web pages do not need to be this large. I know cache exists, and that's fine, but it's still a bit ridiculous. Some people in this world do still use dialup and/or pay per MB. Your 6.5MB web page might cost somebody a nontrivial sum to read, relative to their means.
The irony is not lost on me that my home instance itself is not the most lightweight web app. The page I am using to edit this comment is 1.9MB. With the cache active it's <100kB transferred per page load but still, if I weren't a hypocrite I'd probably switch to a Piefed instance.
He was wrong then, and you're wrong that nobody needs gigabit. Stop handwringing for big corporations. This isn't a difficult thing to do, it just makes companies slightly less money. America has some of the most expensive internet in the world, and some of the worst per mb.
For now*
The way tech moves, this won’t be the case forever. And it’ll be better to have it already then need it and have to wait another decade for it.
I get your point but also that's a bias borne from the industrial and technological revolutions, it's entirely possible that we may already are seeing the slow down of large scale technological advances from every 2-4 years seeing major leaps to every ten years or more, hell I cant think of any major tech jumps over the last 10 years of particular note outside of AI (hurk) and battery/ green energy neither of which need faster internet.
I remeber in the 90s deciding if it was worth removing line breaks in order to make my html on Geocities take up kbs less.
Most people hardly need internet at all, but that doesnt mean the option shouldnt be available. Working in IT, ive had architects in remote areas attempting to download revit files (sometimes many gigabytes in size) over a T1 connection (maximum 1.5mb/s). We convinced them to swap to a 4g connection after much back and forth.
Our internet needs are going up more and more over time, especially in the age of "vibe code and ship it". There are gonna be massive webpages, high quality video, and large downloads more often. 1gbps isn't that crazy of a goal to hit when my co-ax cable is putting out ~300 mbps.
Personally, just working from home, i have several instances where i need to download gigabyte+ files on company time, sometimes multiple times a day, but fiber isnt available yet. Add on my wife streaming something, guests phone connections, throttling, or just wifi interference and suddenly my 300mbps becomes something like 150 mbps or less, making an hour process 2 hours. Make it 5g and cloudy and now im fired for wasting company time.
The reality is that we're a big nation, and big nations are expensive and have insane needs. 1gbps can be achieved over coax fairly easily with enough infrastructure, but ISPs haaaatttteeee spending money when they can just collect a check instead
Yes but some of us DO need it for our small businesses to run.