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A Radiologist Has the Fastest Home Internet In the US (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Jason Koebler via Motherboard has interviewed James Busch -- a radiologist and owner of "the first 10 Gbps residential connection in the United States" -- at a coffee shop in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Motherboard reports: "For reference, the Federal Communications Commission officially classifies 'broadband' as 25 Mbps. His connection is 400 times faster than that. Busch found a way to make good use of his 1 Gbps connection, and now he's found a use for 10 Gbps, too. 'An X-ray averages around 200 megabytes, then you have PET scans and mammograms -- 3D mammograms are 10 gig files, so they're enormous,' Busch said. 'We go through terabytes a year in storage. We've calculated out that we save about 7 seconds an exam, which might seem like, 'Who cares,' but when you read 20,000 or 30,000 exams every year, it turns out to be something like 10 days of productivity you're saving just from a bandwidth upgrade.' While 10 gig connections sound excessive at the moment, Busch says his family quickly started using all of its 1 gig bandwidth. 'We ballooned into that gig within eight or nine months. With my kids watching Netflix instead of TV, with me working, we did utilize that bandwidth,' he said. 'There were situations where my daughter would be FaceTiming and the others would be streaming on the 4K TVs and they'd start screaming at each other about hogging the bandwidth. We don't see that at 10 gigs.' So why does Busch have a 10 Gbps and the rest of us don't? For one, 10 Gbps offerings are rare and scattered in mostly rural communities that have decided to build their own internet networks. Most companies that have the technology offer gigabit connections (a still cutting-edge technology only available in a handful of cities) at affordable prices and 10 Gbps connections at comparatively exorbitant ones. In Chattanooga, 1 gig connections are $69.99 per month; 10 gig connections are $299. Thus far, 10 Gbps connections are available in Chattanooga; parts of southern Vermont; Salisbury, North Carolina; and parts of Detroit and Minneapolis. But besides Busch, I couldn't find any other people in the United States who have signed up for one. EPB, the Chattanooga government-owned power utility that runs the network, confirmed that Busch is the city's only 10 Gbps residential customer. Rocket Fiber, which recently began offering 10 Gbps in Detroit, told me that it has 'no customers set in stone,' but that it's in talks with prospective ones. Representatives for U.S. Internet in Minneapolis and Fibrant in Salisbury did not respond to my requests for comment. Michel Guite, president of the Vermont Telephone Company, told me his network has no 10 Gbps customers, either."
Most home networks are 1Gbps ethernet so unless you won't go faster than that on a single port or even your whole network depending on your switch configuration. You need beyond consumer-level network gear to enjoy the full 10Gbps. As for WiFi, it is a joke at these speeds.
Now, even if you have a 10Gbps connection straight to your computer, what will you do with it? Watch movies? That's a few tens of Mbps at best, peanuts. Transfer files... now we are talking, but you better have a SSD or a nice RAID array, because most mechanical hard drives run at about 100MB/s or 1Gbps. Heck, SATA3 only goes 6Gbps, so that's an internet connection faster than most SSDs. Even your computing power can be limiting : 10Gbps is quite fast for all but the most basic kind of processing.
I sincerely don't see a use for a 10Gbps home connection unless you are running servers on it, or host a whole community of bandwidth hogs. The radiologist in the example is the edgiest of the edge cases. He has a remote location that can support more than 1Gbps but he can't work online, he also has a computer and home network that support such a speed and a workflow that makes a 7 second delay matter...