I went from a 1.5/1 Gbps fibre connection down to a 20/10 Mbps when I moved. There is a MASSIVE difference. Rural internet is dog shit and no one cares
I honestly believe that is because rural areas are almost always represented by republicans, voted in by majority republican voters. both groups of which are extremely disinclined of making the entirety of human knowledge easily and quickly accessible, because then people might see how much things are better in other countries and start asking questions to their federal representatives.
They also fall prey to the classic "only one Internet provider" shit because of the whole "whoever pays to have the lines in owns those lines forevermore" shit we have here
It cost Comcast 10k to run a new line half a block to a place I lived 6 years ago, and that was in a rather empty part of my town.
Imagine how much it costs to run lines M I L E S to rural people's homes. Who's even going to try setting up there when someone else already has done it?
My area is controlled by Dems that are pretty lib, but thanks to how expensive it is to start an ISP we have literally 1 option for an almost 75 square mile area for non-sattelite Internet. Their max speed is 100 Mbps synch, and you have to fill out a PDF to get service (including putting s password for your account on said PDF, I put "fuck No im not" for mine for obvious reasons), and their techs will ignore service requests (they installed their stupid rental router and charged me monthly for it despite me saying not to) and lie (they said they couldn't add my owned router to their list multiple times before someone finally took it's fucking MAC address from me)
Your download speed being fast or slow doesn't mean the servers hosting the data you're accessing or the DNS servers between you and that server are going to feed you data at that speed.
Game stores like Steam and GOG can provide download speeds of up to 1 Gbps or more, also torrents have no speed limits, it depends on the number of seeders
Yeah, I regularly hit about 80MBps (640Mbps) from Steam. I’m pretty close to their San Diego servers, so I get the good pipes. If I was closer, I’d probably be able to hit gigabit speeds.
Yes, but normal websites might not. There’s no reason to if the amount of data being transferred is so small. Even large transfers, particularly streaming video providers, will have trouble feeding data to you at 1 Gbps simply because the network interface on the server might be saturated, the switch it’s connected to might have a slower CPU, the DNS server might be tossing your data into a queue or have a slower CPU itself. There are SO MANY hops between you and whatever data you’re trying to access, and every one of them influences the speed at which data will get to you. I’m not saying gigabit speeds aren’t worth paying for, but not everyone needs those speeds, especially if their ISP’s hardware isn’t up to snuff.
Your connection would not allow streaming one Blu-ray quality video stream, and good luck doing anything else in the connection while that is happening.
If your work sent you a 10gb file and you needed to send it back, it would take you 3 hours to do that. (With a functionally useless connection otherwise while downloading and uploading the file)
Downloading a popular game like baldurs gate 3 would take just under 9 hours.
Downloading it twice (to play with your spouse or kids) + updates, and then watching Netflix (which will cut into your download speed) while you wait for it download would toil away a weekend.
Nevermind the fact that slow Internet literally wastes away your life as you spend more micro moments just staring at blank and partially loaded websites.