'There's still no point in gigabit broadband' — then the families, game devs and video shops showed up

The honest audit

Terence Eden's post is refreshingly concrete: he pays £30/month for Virgin Media's 1Gbps down / 110Mbps up, and methodically shows he can't use it. 4K streaming needs about 25Mbps; his Fire Stick maxes around 80; WiFi devices hit roughly 450Mbps because of radio physics; most speed tests couldn't push past ~700Mbps. His conclusion: "For most domestic uses, including working from home, it's rare to need more than 100Mbps." He concedes gigabit "isn't at all useful now, but will probably be crucial in the future," and invites readers to name a genuinely gigabit-saturating use case.

The thread took him up on it.

The single-user blind spot

"The author is talking about using one device at a time … However many of us have families. I work from home and since getting gigabit, my video conferences have stopped degrading in quality right around the time the kids get home from school." — the author of the murex shell

That's the flaw in the premise: a home network's load is concurrent, not sequential. The bottleneck isn't any one stream — it's all of them at 4pm.

The professionals for whom gigabit is the floor

"Video production. Gigabit is 125MB/s. If you're shooting a day in 10bit 4k … you have like ~1TB of data … it would take over 2h at max speed. That's why many still ship hard drives with courier." — a developer building a large-file transfer tool

"I download multiple 80-100GB builds every single day just to do my job. Virgin's 1.2Gbps connection is barely good enough … being able to download a 10[0]GB game from steam within 10-15 minutes max is amazing." — a game developer

The argument both sides are really having

The most useful comment reframed the whole debate away from raw speed:

"I'd take guaranteed 100Mbps without outages over best effort 1Gpbs any time." — a commenter prioritizing reliability over peak speed

That's where Eden and his critics actually converge. For a solo streamer, 100Mbps really is plenty. For a family or a professional, gigabit is already saturated. And for nearly everyone, the thing that actually ruins a video call isn't the missing 900Mbps — it's the outage, the jitter, and the asymmetric 110Mbps upload that no amount of headline down-speed fixes.