If we look at the biggest network uses for consumers right now, its mostly video streaming and games. A 1 Gbit connection can already stream video at well above the maximum desired quality we will likely ever want. And better codecs are coming out which reduce the networking requirements even more. For video games it seems that large games would go with an asset streaming model like microsoft flight sim which can easily be done with 1 Gbit.
Are there any future developments that might make 10Gbit desirable in the consumer space?
There is a tradeoff that has to be made when you use an efficient interframe compression algorithm (i.e. x264 or mpeg). Latency becomes a factor, and you lose the ability to instantly seek/generate a given frame without keeping track of the ones that occurred prior. You also need specialized hardware or high performance CPUs on both sides. This also has issues tolerating high frequency visual changes between frames.
When using an intraframe technique (i.e. jpeg), none of the caveats apply, with the exception of 1 new one - The amount of bandwidth required is increased substantially if you intend to serve a sequence of these approximating a video (a la mjpeg).
I've had a lot of people give me grief for this idea, but I assure you a sequence of jpegs at 60fps looks like some kind of magic butter compared to the same encoded with more efficient techniques. Especially, when you put a human in the loop with an input device. You literally don't have to worry about the type of content at all. It just looks good always. The range of devices that can quickly encode (<10ms) jpeg at 30+ fps is surprisingly large (basically anything with a cpu made in the last decade).
I've almost memorized the most important bits of libjpegturbo by this point. Can't say I've even begun to scratch the surface on the likes of AV1, etc. Don't think I'd really like to just seeing the shadow of the damn thing. This kind of simplicity has benefits that can be hard to quantify.
Any time I can make some tradeoff like this, I like to think into the future. Is the speed of the average connection going to increase or decrease from this point? Do we need 100% of the planet to have 10GbE before we can begin exploring these ideas?
10Gbit/s Internet connectivity sounds like a lot, but it's only 10 times the speed of what we have now.
Think about RAM, CPU frequency, non-volatile storage, and graphical rendering capability these have increased orders of magnitude, as have Internet connection speed.
I don't know what it will be used for, but I'm certain that new use-cases will reveal themselves as that speed becomes broadly available.
It will certainly allow new business models, for things like storage of raw video and video editing, but broadly, I think it's unexplored territory.
Personally, 802.11n and whatever crappy DSL link speed I get is good enough for me, but I don't do video, social media, or online gaming. I can rent access to machines much better positioned to take advantage of greater bandwidth if I ever need them.
The problem is the switches are still too expensive :(
we can look at computing history and see there hasn't been a limit to what people will want. However much processing, storage, or bandwidth we had at the time, there was always use for more.
Personally though I'm still on ~60Mbps download at home FWIW and feel simply no need to upgrade. Whole family can watch - independently - Netflix/Youtube/etc. No issues WFH while they do so. I'd find the upgrade to 100Mbps or 200Mbps quite cool from a tech point of view, having started with dial-up 25 years ago, but honestly I have no real need for it.
UltraHD - 4K - needs 25Mbps or thereabouts, remember.
- videocall with hundreds of people where everyone can see everyone else
- higher definition, extremely realistic VR
- instant transfer of gigantic files. I work as a data scientist and I'd love to just slack someone the result of a quick and dirty experiment on a 50GB dataset. It sounds ridiculous now, but it isn't.
- real-time collaborative editing of gigantic files (video, sound, tabular data).
One thing I didn't have enough bandwidth for was doing a presentation on Google Meet to a group of people, presenting a 4K screen. I suspect it does several 1 to 1 connections, rather than broadcasting, which would explain the drop in performance when presenting to a group.
Even if the need is there, ISP+Transit cores are not up to it. But it does make a lot of sense to have a 10Gbe last mile with 500Mb/s sustained(without oversubscription) and 10Gb/s burst usage. Especially in metro-areas.
I imagine telco consumer routers becoming a MEP.
Imagine one of them downloading huge steam games every other day while others live stream.
I know it's pure luxury, but when I had a 10gbit I enjoyed having it.
Having more bandwidth makes new things possible. So the question isn't what do people do now that can make use of 10Gbit, but rather if everyone had 10Gbit what could be done that we can't do now.