alt Hacker NewsThis is one of those things where I just have to express that a lot of the HN crowd is entirely divorced from the reality the rest of the world experiences. ;)
Nearly nobody has multigig anything in the home, a probably surprisingly large percentage of business networking is 1gig LAN or less. And most people would not notice the difference if they did.
I am glad it works for you, but everyone else most certainly doesn't need it. (Yet.)
Personally, I do try for mostly gigabit in my home, because I do selfhost, but I have a ~800 Mbps download service (200 Mbps upload, it's asymmetric) that was only 500 Mbps when I signed up. And to be honest most of my patch cables are CAT5e because I'm cheap. I do make sure to run CAT6 through walls though because I don't want to ever have to do it again.
Also, I used to have Astound, and I feel so much sympathy for Google Fiber customers, you have no idea what's coming. If you thought Google had a reputation for bad customer service... just wait!
I disagree. I pay $120 a month for 5Gbps symmetric connection. I could upgrade that to 10Gbps for 2x, but there is no reason at this point. Even the local max from the cable company is more than 1Gbps, 1.2Gbps down / ~300Mbps up for around $80. Everything is streaming now. I work from home, on video calls. My better half will be watching something the on AppleTV streaming, the kid will be doing the same. I have Backblaze running to do backups to the cloud. 3 different laptops that will run TimeMachine backups to the NAS. The AppleTVs also have the Infuse app on them to stream local video files from the NAS. The security cameras are a constant 60Mpbs 24/7/365 to the NVR. The laptops can push a gig wireless and 2.5Gbps when plugged into the Thunderbolt docks. It is not clear that I need 10Gbps everywhere, but it has its uses. The NAS is at 10G. The link from the main switch to the router is 10G. The 3 APs in the house are at 2.5G and the 2 outside are at 1G. There was a noticeable difference when after I right sized the shared links paths up from 1G. When I say noticeable it both perceived and measured. I used to work doing switch bring up and competitive testing so I have a pretty good idea how this all comes together. Given that a reasonably cheap set of APs can now handle clients at above 1G and internet speeds in some areas being above 1G, moving to at least 2.5G in places is useful and not divorced from reality. I am in tech, but I have help my not tech friends upgrade APs, et.al. for their normal everyday home use cases and they have all been quite happy with the change.
Not being divorced from reality is the only reason I have not dropped $5K on the new Dream Machine Beast that was just released and have not swapped out my Enterprise 48 PoE (1st gen.) for the newest version that has 12 10G-BaseT ports.