What else is the WLAN for?
I think the reason folks are interpreting this thread about ISP speeds is the fact that the OP was referencing them and asking about those numbers in particular. Would I (and I’m sure many others here) like a symmetrical gigabit or higher ISP connection? Sure.
Now I’m sure many of us here have extensive homelab environments. Not only “pro-sumer” but active testing environments to not only learn new career skills but to test things outside of the production environments we maintain to see if they are ready to rock. Those may well require more LAN speeds than gigabit, I personally enjoy the 10g backbone in my home environment and also have some 25g for CEPH to mess around with. There’s folks here running much more than that as well.
I don’t think anyone here would argue that we want the most possible LAN bandwidth. I also doubt that folks here are not already considering that and that their ISP speed is a secondary concern. Though we should remember that this thread is specifically about ISP provided bandwidth for the sake of discussion.
*edited for clarification
Depends on what you mean by WLAN.
Wireless?
Even when it comes to wifi, my laptops probably use more bandwidth back and forth to my NAS and other servers than they do to the WAN.
My brother has WLAN (mostly blind spots tbh) and I can get 10MB/s out of it with my laptop when I’m there. He recently got fiber WAN with 1Gbit/s. Everything says it is faster now…except for me, I still see 10MB/s and bouncy latency spikes. State of mankind 2025. We’re too nerdy to understand ![]()
I think I mistyped there … maybe this is clearer
I don’t think anyone here would argue that we want the most possible LAN bandwidth.
*the quoted post has been edited for clarity.
I have a laptop and a phone. On the rare occasions they need to talk to each other USB when the phone’s charging is fine. They are both joined to local WiFi but, eh, it’s not worth the hassle. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Out of everybody I know IRL nobody has a home/homelab network. Got one internet friend who has a NAS but they barely use it. So my experience is having enough home devices that talk to each other enough to motivate even 1 GbE wiring’s pretty uncommon.
I haven’t cared at home, well, ever actually. Only recently updated to 10 Gb USB DAS for some backups. But I’m not in the homelab enthusiast set.
I guess I just assumed we were mostly industry folks. My fault there as I really shouldn’t make assumptions of what folks do for a living. Out of curiosity are you in a tech role for a career or is this a fun and exiting hobby? Zero judgement or shade for either answer.
I’m my workgroup’s computer janitor, though usually it’s a small percentage of my duties. We’re the second most compute and data intensive within the, oh, couple hundred people around us in the org chart. So I’ve deployed some 10 GbE and stuff.
Dual 10 GbE would be nice at times but we don’t need it enough to spend for all the upgrades involved. Similarly, we don’t need 25+ GbE, so don’t get into x8+x8 switched PEG. Realistically, our networking follows whatever’s standard on desktop mobos so I’ve got some 2.5 GbE pods. Could make a push for 5 or 10 GbE but it doesn’t really matter since our bottleneck’s usually devices that support only 5 Gb USB but can’t even copy from their internal datastores at 480 Mb speeds. Hurry up and wait. ![]()
Mainly where higher end enterprisey kit’d be helpful to us is full rebuilds of archival RAIDs. But that’s rare and we’ve only needed to do it once (construction accident by people who should have known better, long story).
Interesting. I’m learning that not only can I not spell (though I really already knew that), but more importantly I’m learning that it may just be a bit odd to have a full rack and cluster setup in ones basement for … reasons ha!
Mmmmmaybe.
I live in 45 m², so the places I could put a rack are in use for other things.
Having our own rack’s been brought up at work but it’s total overkill. We have a colo arrangement with the other team that’ll cover the foreseeable future.
I run 4 websites, a 10TB NAS, wifi 6, and probably the best cable modem in town that’d stress test the neighborhood if I had full DOCSIS 3.1; all from a $30 paper rack shelf in a bedroom ![]()
It’s efficient though and I’m networked for the future™ ![]()
You have an Internet connection better than 99.99999% of the planet. Your upload is likely better than 99.9% of the planet. Not sure you should feel “enraged” about that. Maybe content and/or proud? Blessed, even?
Personally, I gave up chasing bigger numbers long ago. I realised that “good enough” really is good enough, and that other aspects of my life deserved more attention and resources. Besides, there’s no point saving 23 milliseconds on a LAN transfer when you’ll spend 7 minutes watching cat videos later the same day.
Lots of folks optimise the heck out of parts of their (work) life, but still sit in traffic for over an hour a day. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
In the big scheme of things, I don’t think LAN speeds matter for the overwhelming majority of people. Specifically, as long as the (W)LAN is at least as fast as their Internet connection, then I think actual (W)LAN speeds are pretty-much irrelevant for most folk.
Bottlenecks are where attention is paid. For most folk, that is their Internet connection. Until the bottleneck becomes the (W)LAN folks will buy network “appliances” from big box stores or use whatever their ISP gives them, accept all of the default settings, stick them on shelves, power them up, then ignore them until they break.
I pay for 100Mb down. I average 107. They claim I should get at least 70Mb up. I average 115.
Admittedly, I’m the only person on my node and I live on a main trunk line.
Edited to reflect the difference between capital and lower-case letters… ![]()
Never call tech support. They may ‘fix’ your out-of-spec connection.
So, we’re really new to fiber in my part of the rural South. When they were running the lines out this way, the guys informed me about the unicorn-like advantage of my property’s location. Where I sit, I’m never going to have competition for local bandwidth.
I was going to say similar… In the days of 512k/128k connections, you HAD to do QoS / traffic shaping on the firewall/router so that downloads wouldn’t slow to a crawl and web browsing become intolerably slow when your uplink got maxed-out.
And god help you if you did VoIP or conference calling like Skype / WebEx while trying to do other web browsing.
These days, it’s all about the streaming video… For a house with a family who all have Netflix accounts, you might want to opt to pay for higher-speed connections.
For me, it’s a chore to always have to try and find the cheapest, lowest-speed option an ISP has available. Used to be $12/mo for AT&T DSL, but ISPs wanted more, and prices climbed to $60/mo at minimum. Some had no lower-priced options. Others did, but did (and do) their best to hide them, have their sales reps tell you that plan is not available to you, etc., etc. It’s awful for average folks. Hopefully the competition from 5G cellular will help lower prices and stop the bundling and upselling.
Enraged was a bit of hyperbole there. It does make uploading and serving things a bit of a challenge but its not the end of the world.
There is depending on what you’re looking to test and what your daily uses also may be. Totally depends on the individual. Thankfully my cat videos are all live and in person!
Not only do i enjoy optimising my work and private life but I’ve even optimised my commute down to 11 min, took a few job upgrades but totally worth it.
Personally i have far slower and fewer wireless devices in my network so my WLAN isn’t really a concern. A few laptops and a few phones/tablets. I am coming to understand that my setup and mentality are different to most, and that’s cool with me. We can all play with our electrons as we choose.
MB or Mb? And nice score on the fiber, still waiting for it in my town.
Derp. I should really pay better attention, ha ha.
An advantage of living very close to high density residential and commercial property is that the incumbent telco offers 1G, 3G, and 8G symmetrical fiber internet service. Ditto for cell wireless service offerings. Luckily the choice in my neighborhood is entirely cost / benefit because the technology is widely available.
The government has mandated the incumbent offer fiber access to other ISPs. It’s a trade for low-to-no-cost incumbent monopoly access to the property easement corridors. It fosters limited competition. Unfortunately the incumbent has responded by buying these ISPs.