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Gigabit Internet Access Now Supported By 84 US ISPs
An anonymous reader writes: According to Michael Render, principal analyst at market researcher RVA LLC, 83 Internet access providers have joined Google to offer gigabit Internet access service (all priced in the $50-$150 per month range).Render's data shows that new subscribers are signing up at an annualized growth rate of 480 percent each year. That "annualized" is an important thing to note, though; this is early days, and adding a few households, relatively speaking, means an impressive percentage change.
Speedtest sites don't tell the whole story, especially at higher speeds...
Some of the speedtest sites are only on 100mbit themselves, even those on gigabit are usually sharing the bandwidth at their end... And then there's peering, the interconnect between your isp and the speedtest site might not have 1gbit of free capacity at the time your testing. The end devices (or the software running on them) might also not be up to the 1gbps rate - lots of cheaper gigabit nics can't handle wire speed, long or bad cabling, flash based speedtest apps etc.
I've had a box with 1gbps in a data centre for a few years now, and i can quite happily pull 1gbps doing torrent downloads and from some linux mirror sites, but i get a lot less from speedtest sites and many things download a lot slower because the other end or something in between can't handle it.
You need to test a variety of different things, and at different times of the day...
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I don't see why a file download or upload should be done in seconds
Years sound fine to me. Why do we even need to communicate in the first place? The quicker the better, within reason. 1Gb/s is cheap, 10Gb is still expensive, but not for long. There's no reason we should have the fastest cheap networks.