bandwidth explosion

[John Larkin]

At work, we signed up with MonkeyBrains for microwave internet
service. We ordered the 50+50 mbit plan. It's actually speed testing
about 350+350.

And at home, a guy from Comcast (our local cable TV pirates) knocked
on the door and proposed to upgrade us for free, faster internet and
more cable TV (including HBO) for about half our current price. They
swapped out the modem today and the internet here is now running about
450+50 mbits. AT&T and Sonic keep leaving flyers on the doorknob
offering us a gigabit.

Sounds like mad competition to give away bandwidth. The backbone fiber
links must be moving astronomical amounts of data. Each county around
here might need a petabit per second.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 1:44:51 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

At work, we signed up with MonkeyBrains for microwave internet
service. We ordered the 50+50 mbit plan. It's actually speed testing
about 350+350.

And at home, a guy from Comcast (our local cable TV pirates) knocked
on the door and proposed to upgrade us for free, faster internet and
more cable TV (including HBO) for about half our current price. They
swapped out the modem today and the internet here is now running about
450+50 mbits. AT&T and Sonic keep leaving flyers on the doorknob
offering us a gigabit.

Sounds like mad competition to give away bandwidth. The backbone fiber
links must be moving astronomical amounts of data. Each county around
here might need a petabit per second.

It was only a few years ago that I was driving to a local store to use the Internet. There is a price to pay for living where the views are beautiful.

--

Rick C.

- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Wed, 17 Jul 2019 22:44:42 -0700) it happened John Larkin
<jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote in
<lg00jeprk72prv8hnua08fhfh9q9rnek30@4ax.com>:

At work, we signed up with MonkeyBrains for microwave internet
service. We ordered the 50+50 mbit plan. It's actually speed testing
about 350+350.

And at home, a guy from Comcast (our local cable TV pirates) knocked
on the door and proposed to upgrade us for free, faster internet and
more cable TV (including HBO) for about half our current price. They
swapped out the modem today and the internet here is now running about
450+50 mbits. AT&T and Sonic keep leaving flyers on the doorknob
offering us a gigabit.

Sounds like mad competition to give away bandwidth. The backbone fiber
links must be moving astronomical amounts of data. Each county around
here might need a petabit per second.

Yes, I got a similar flyer here last week,
'Connect to our optical cable, we are now near you... subscribe...'
Threw it away, do not need that much bandwidth, and I am on 4G wireless now,
so stuff works everywhere in the country.
Even youtube works great...
I will buy a Huawei 5G stick when 5G works here.

What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???

 

On Thursday, 18 July 2019 07:58:10 UTC+1, Jan Panteltje wrote:

> What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???

The reality is that most people use far less than their maximum bandwidth
and the service providers rely on this.

John

 

[Winfield Hill]

jrwalliker@gmail.com wrote...

On Thursday, 18 July 2019 07:58:10 UTC+1, Jan Panteltje wrote:

What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???

The reality is that most people use far less than their
maximum bandwidth and the service providers rely on this.

If we get a fixed amount of stuff, this merely means that
we're connected for a shorter amount of time to get it.


--
Thanks,
- Win

 

On Thursday, 18 July 2019 12:45:11 UTC+1, Winfield Hill wrote:

jrwalliker@gmail.com wrote...

On Thursday, 18 July 2019 07:58:10 UTC+1, Jan Panteltje wrote:

What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???

The reality is that most people use far less than their
maximum bandwidth and the service providers rely on this.

If we get a fixed amount of stuff, this merely means that
we're connected for a shorter amount of time to get it.

A few people will be constantly downloading video - which they
probably never have time to watch. Others will send a few emails
and do a bit of browsing using hardly any capacity.
In an office with a few tens of people the internet usage tends
to be quite peaky with a peak-to-mean ratio of around 10 to 1
during working hours for the offices that I look after. For a
service provider this means that if they only provide enough
backhaul for 10% of the capacity that they sell, hardly anyone
will notice the difference.

Some however don't make even that much provision and they are the
ones that suffer congestion at peak times.

John

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 06:58:00 GMT, Jan Panteltje
<pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Wed, 17 Jul 2019 22:44:42 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote in
lg00jeprk72prv8hnua08fhfh9q9rnek30@4ax.com>:



At work, we signed up with MonkeyBrains for microwave internet
service. We ordered the 50+50 mbit plan. It's actually speed testing
about 350+350.

And at home, a guy from Comcast (our local cable TV pirates) knocked
on the door and proposed to upgrade us for free, faster internet and
more cable TV (including HBO) for about half our current price. They
swapped out the modem today and the internet here is now running about
450+50 mbits. AT&T and Sonic keep leaving flyers on the doorknob
offering us a gigabit.

Sounds like mad competition to give away bandwidth. The backbone fiber
links must be moving astronomical amounts of data. Each county around
here might need a petabit per second.

Yes, I got a similar flyer here last week,
'Connect to our optical cable, we are now near you... subscribe...'
Threw it away, do not need that much bandwidth, and I am on 4G wireless now,
so stuff works everywhere in the country.
Even youtube works great...
I will buy a Huawei 5G stick when 5G works here.

What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???

Most people won't actually use that bandwidth. Web browsing needs
short bursts. Even movies don't need 500 mbits. So averaged rates
across multiple households will be much lower. But the backbone rates
must still be amazing.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 8:20:52 AM UTC-4, jrwal...@gmail.com wrote:

On Thursday, 18 July 2019 12:45:11 UTC+1, Winfield Hill wrote:
jrwalliker@gmail.com wrote...

On Thursday, 18 July 2019 07:58:10 UTC+1, Jan Panteltje wrote:

What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???

The reality is that most people use far less than their
maximum bandwidth and the service providers rely on this.

If we get a fixed amount of stuff, this merely means that
we're connected for a shorter amount of time to get it.

A few people will be constantly downloading video - which they
probably never have time to watch.

You mean "very few" which is the proportion that actually download video rather than watch it streaming, meaning in real time.

Others will send a few emails
and do a bit of browsing using hardly any capacity.

These days, even emails have embedded videos.

In an office with a few tens of people the internet usage tends
to be quite peaky with a peak-to-mean ratio of around 10 to 1
during working hours for the offices that I look after. For a
service provider this means that if they only provide enough
backhaul for 10% of the capacity that they sell, hardly anyone
will notice the difference.

Isn't that rather a "duh!"... Even the phone company can only connect a small fraction of the number of possible calls which works statistically 99.999% of the time.

Some however don't make even that much provision and they are the
ones that suffer congestion at peak times.

Yeah, well otherwise we would be paying more for the service. You get what you pay for... if you are lucky.

--

Rick C.

+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Bill Gill]

On 7/18/2019 12:44 AM, John Larkin wrote:

At work, we signed up with MonkeyBrains for microwave internet
service. We ordered the 50+50 mbit plan. It's actually speed testing
about 350+350.

And at home, a guy from Comcast (our local cable TV pirates) knocked
on the door and proposed to upgrade us for free, faster internet and
more cable TV (including HBO) for about half our current price. They
swapped out the modem today and the internet here is now running about
450+50 mbits. AT&T and Sonic keep leaving flyers on the doorknob
offering us a gigabit.

Sounds like mad competition to give away bandwidth. The backbone fiber
links must be moving astronomical amounts of data. Each county around
here might need a petabit per second.

I keep getting offers of gigabit ethernet from my cable
provider. I am currently getting about 47 megabit downloads.
I can't imagine what I would need anything faster than that for.
If I had a large family and every individual was streaming
a different program I might be able to use most of it,
but there really aren't that many people that could use it
all.

Bill

 

On Thursday, 18 July 2019 14:21:36 UTC+1, Rick C wrote:

For a
service provider this means that if they only provide enough
backhaul for 10% of the capacity that they sell, hardly anyone
will notice the difference.

Isn't that rather a "duh!"... Even the phone company can only connect
a small fraction of the number of possible calls which works
statistically 99.999% of the time.

Yes, but the original post suggested:
Sounds like mad competition to give away bandwidth. The backbone fiber
links must be moving astronomical amounts of data. Each county around
here might need a petabit per second.


Some however don't make even that much provision and they are the
ones that suffer congestion at peak times.

Yeah, well otherwise we would be paying more for the service. You get what you pay for... if you are lucky.

Yes, so the providers compete to offer higher speed local connections which
cost them very little, knowing that they will not need to spend much extra
on the backhaul links because most customers will not use more data.

John

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 18/07/19 14:38, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 06:58:00 GMT, Jan Panteltje
What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???

Most people won't actually use that bandwidth. Web browsing needs
short bursts. Even movies don't need 500 mbits. So averaged rates
across multiple households will be much lower. But the backbone rates
must still be amazing.

And frequently latency is more important than bandwidth.

High (average) bandwidth with high latency means there
are many bits in the pipe - and those will be wasted
when re-transmission occurs.

Also, many web transactions are small, to get advertising
cookies, and to enable a real-time auction of your eyeballs.

(And then there are the gamers...)

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 14:55:11 +0100, Tom Gardner
<spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 18/07/19 14:38, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 06:58:00 GMT, Jan Panteltje
What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???

Most people won't actually use that bandwidth. Web browsing needs
short bursts. Even movies don't need 500 mbits. So averaged rates
across multiple households will be much lower. But the backbone rates
must still be amazing.

And frequently latency is more important than bandwidth.

High (average) bandwidth with high latency means there
are many bits in the pipe - and those will be wasted
when re-transmission occurs.

Also, many web transactions are small, to get advertising
cookies, and to enable a real-time auction of your eyeballs.

(And then there are the gamers...)

Going from, say, 30 mb to several hundred makes a nice difference when
browsing. It's shocking to me that I can fill a screen with stuff from
France in about a second.

I load a lot of pdf's too, and they are dramatically faster now.

I wish I knew how the Internet actually works. Apparently not many
people really do.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Joerg]

On 2019-07-18 06:38, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 06:58:00 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Wed, 17 Jul 2019 22:44:42 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote in
lg00jeprk72prv8hnua08fhfh9q9rnek30@4ax.com>:



At work, we signed up with MonkeyBrains for microwave internet
service. We ordered the 50+50 mbit plan. It's actually speed testing
about 350+350.

And at home, a guy from Comcast (our local cable TV pirates) knocked
on the door and proposed to upgrade us for free, faster internet and
more cable TV (including HBO) for about half our current price. They
swapped out the modem today and the internet here is now running about
450+50 mbits. AT&T and Sonic keep leaving flyers on the doorknob
offering us a gigabit.

End of last year a guy from Comcast rang the door bell. He said we can
now have 1Gbit/sec Internet. "Whoa, we'd never need that. What's the
lowest tier"? ... "But that's only 60Mbit/sec" ... "We'll take it!".
Bundled with landline phone it costs less than AT&T at more than 10x the
speed (they only have DSL here).

Sounds like mad competition to give away bandwidth. The backbone fiber
links must be moving astronomical amounts of data. Each county around
here might need a petabit per second.

Yes, I got a similar flyer here last week,
'Connect to our optical cable, we are now near you... subscribe...'
Threw it away, do not need that much bandwidth, and I am on 4G wireless now,
so stuff works everywhere in the country.
Even youtube works great...
I will buy a Huawei 5G stick when 5G works here.

What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???

Most people won't actually use that bandwidth. Web browsing needs
short bursts. Even movies don't need 500 mbits. So averaged rates
across multiple households will be much lower. But the backbone rates
must still be amazing.

They rely on that. Also, way down in the fine print there is a "monthly
acceptable data usage" number. Ours was 150GBytse at AT&T and now
1TByte/month. We never get close but I was told that hardcore streamers do.

For me it is the same with phone data. Reluctantly I now have a smart
phone but on the cheapest plan I could cobble together. Unlimited call,
500 texts, then a 30day pay-go 1GB data package. I need maybe 15-30mins
phone per month, 30-50 texts and last time I used a whopping 0.003GB of
the 1GB data package.

What I noted with all providers so far is that sometimes Youtube videos
completely stall out. Maybe they don't like Youtube because they want to
sell their own services.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 9:48:31 AM UTC-4, jrwal...@gmail.com wrote:

On Thursday, 18 July 2019 14:21:36 UTC+1, Rick C wrote:

For a
service provider this means that if they only provide enough
backhaul for 10% of the capacity that they sell, hardly anyone
will notice the difference.

Isn't that rather a "duh!"... Even the phone company can only connect
a small fraction of the number of possible calls which works
statistically 99.999% of the time.

Yes, but the original post suggested:
Sounds like mad competition to give away bandwidth. The backbone fiber
links must be moving astronomical amounts of data. Each county around
here might need a petabit per second.


Some however don't make even that much provision and they are the
ones that suffer congestion at peak times.

Yeah, well otherwise we would be paying more for the service. You get what you pay for... if you are lucky.


Yes, so the providers compete to offer higher speed local connections which
cost them very little, knowing that they will not need to spend much extra
on the backhaul links because most customers will not use more data.

John

I guess I am saying that has not changed. It was always like that and I expect the number is less than 10%. Most of the time most people are not even online. When they are their use is very sporadic unless they are streaming which typically is less than 10 Mbps.

But you are right, they can advertise more bandwidth to the consumer like advertising 25 cup holders in an SUV, sounds nice even if they are never used.

As someone has pointed out, what is more important is the latency. The response of the connection needs to feel snappy. Again, I think most networks fulfill that easily.

As to the original claim, I think a petabit per second is not so hard to achieve. We had a big push for bandwidth that led to the dot com bubble almost 20 years ago and things have only gotten faster and cheaper since then. So much fiber, so little time.

--

Rick C.

-- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Thu, 18 Jul 2019 07:17:40 -0700) it happened John Larkin
<jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote in
<miv0je539gupbbqf5dt6n7fjrgjc0jrbmt@4ax.com>:

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 14:55:11 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 18/07/19 14:38, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 06:58:00 GMT, Jan Panteltje
What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???

Most people won't actually use that bandwidth. Web browsing needs
short bursts. Even movies don't need 500 mbits. So averaged rates
across multiple households will be much lower. But the backbone rates
must still be amazing.

And frequently latency is more important than bandwidth.

High (average) bandwidth with high latency means there
are many bits in the pipe - and those will be wasted
when re-transmission occurs.

Also, many web transactions are small, to get advertising
cookies, and to enable a real-time auction of your eyeballs.

(And then there are the gamers...)

Going from, say, 30 mb to several hundred makes a nice difference when
browsing. It's shocking to me that I can fill a screen with stuff from
France in about a second.

I load a lot of pdf's too, and they are dramatically faster now.

Sure,
I downloaded (via 4G modem) a complete Linux based distro this week (xinutop),
took a few minutes.
Surprised me, and at least on my PC I can download that in the background if I like,
got latest Debian too that way last month..
Speed is not so important for that.

I wish I knew how the Internet actually works. Apparently not many
people really do.

I figured that out when I was having the servers at home..
It is actually simple, name servers are like a phonebook lookup for the IP number.
Some things are encrypted these days but for the rest the principle is the same as any LAN.
To navigate and see what's happening you need to know a few Linux commands,
like for example:
whois
host
traceroute
ping
etc etc
And run some network monitor, I use 'snort'.
Firewalls, Linux has iptables for that.
Know about ports,
and the most important tool in Linux: netcat
Really netcat is the coolest thing I have.
It makes it so easy to set up a link to anywhere in the world with TCP or UDP,
just from the command line or from a script.
man netcat.
Probably forgot some other stuff, but it is simple.

What I do not like is all that Java crap in browsers, THAT makes things unneeded complex
and slow.
cookies crap...
I use an ad blocker, some sites stop you and want it disabled, too bad I just go elsewhere.
Freedom.

Think I am drifting of topic...

Oh, and use 'wget' to get the files, not the browser.

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 10:17:51 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 14:55:11 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 18/07/19 14:38, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 06:58:00 GMT, Jan Panteltje
What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???

Most people won't actually use that bandwidth. Web browsing needs
short bursts. Even movies don't need 500 mbits. So averaged rates
across multiple households will be much lower. But the backbone rates
must still be amazing.

And frequently latency is more important than bandwidth.

High (average) bandwidth with high latency means there
are many bits in the pipe - and those will be wasted
when re-transmission occurs.

Also, many web transactions are small, to get advertising
cookies, and to enable a real-time auction of your eyeballs.

(And then there are the gamers...)

Going from, say, 30 mb to several hundred makes a nice difference when
browsing. It's shocking to me that I can fill a screen with stuff from
France in about a second.

I load a lot of pdf's too, and they are dramatically faster now.

I wish I knew how the Internet actually works. Apparently not many
people really do.

Huh??? It's simply IP with very high data rates over fiber. What so hard to understand about that? Terrestrial round trip times are pretty fast with fiber. Satcomms not so much.

--

Rick C.

-+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 15:10:03 GMT, Jan Panteltje
<pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Thu, 18 Jul 2019 07:17:40 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote in
miv0je539gupbbqf5dt6n7fjrgjc0jrbmt@4ax.com>:

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 14:55:11 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 18/07/19 14:38, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 06:58:00 GMT, Jan Panteltje
What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???

Most people won't actually use that bandwidth. Web browsing needs
short bursts. Even movies don't need 500 mbits. So averaged rates
across multiple households will be much lower. But the backbone rates
must still be amazing.

And frequently latency is more important than bandwidth.

High (average) bandwidth with high latency means there
are many bits in the pipe - and those will be wasted
when re-transmission occurs.

Also, many web transactions are small, to get advertising
cookies, and to enable a real-time auction of your eyeballs.

(And then there are the gamers...)

Going from, say, 30 mb to several hundred makes a nice difference when
browsing. It's shocking to me that I can fill a screen with stuff from
France in about a second.

I load a lot of pdf's too, and they are dramatically faster now.


Sure,
I downloaded (via 4G modem) a complete Linux based distro this week (xinutop),
took a few minutes.
Surprised me, and at least on my PC I can download that in the background if I like,
got latest Debian too that way last month..
Speed is not so important for that.


I wish I knew how the Internet actually works. Apparently not many
people really do.

I figured that out when I was having the servers at home..
It is actually simple, name servers are like a phonebook lookup for the IP number.
Some things are encrypted these days but for the rest the principle is the same as any LAN.
To navigate and see what's happening you need to know a few Linux commands,
like for example:
whois
host
traceroute
ping
etc etc
And run some network monitor, I use 'snort'.
Firewalls, Linux has iptables for that.
Know about ports,
and the most important tool in Linux: netcat
Really netcat is the coolest thing I have.
It makes it so easy to set up a link to anywhere in the world with TCP or UDP,
just from the command line or from a script.
man netcat.
Probably forgot some other stuff, but it is simple.

There must be millions of miles of multi-gigabit fibers all over the
world and under the oceans. Gigantic switching and routing centers
somewhere. I don't think it's simple.

I've been told that roughly a dozen people really understand the
system, and that I've met one of them. Nice guy, but he doesn't talk
about what he really does.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 18/07/19 16:10, Jan Panteltje wrote:

What I do not like is all that Java crap in browsers, THAT makes things unneeded complex
and slow.
cookies crap...
I use an ad blocker, some sites stop you and want it disabled, too bad I just go elsewhere.
Freedom.

There is very little Java in browser nowadays.

There is a lot of JavaScript, but that is very
/very/ different.

The two languages have completely different paradigms
and objectives; the only thing they have in common is
some syntax (which is irrelevant) and part of their name.

Yes, it is worth running adblockers and NoScript - but
note the *Script*.

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 08:10:50 -0500, Bill Gill <billnews2@cox.net>
wrote:

On 7/18/2019 12:44 AM, John Larkin wrote:


At work, we signed up with MonkeyBrains for microwave internet
service. We ordered the 50+50 mbit plan. It's actually speed testing
about 350+350.

And at home, a guy from Comcast (our local cable TV pirates) knocked
on the door and proposed to upgrade us for free, faster internet and
more cable TV (including HBO) for about half our current price. They
swapped out the modem today and the internet here is now running about
450+50 mbits. AT&T and Sonic keep leaving flyers on the doorknob
offering us a gigabit.

Sounds like mad competition to give away bandwidth. The backbone fiber
links must be moving astronomical amounts of data. Each county around
here might need a petabit per second.


I keep getting offers of gigabit ethernet from my cable
provider. I am currently getting about 47 megabit downloads.
I can't imagine what I would need anything faster than that for.
If I had a large family and every individual was streaming
a different program I might be able to use most of it,
but there really aren't that many people that could use it
all.

Bill

Datasheet PDFs are usually below 1 mbyte, so load fast. 50 real
megabits is about all anyone really needs.

Remember data books? When we moved the company about 12 years ago, we
filled a dumpster with data books.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[amdx]

On 7/18/2019 8:38 AM, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 06:58:00 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Wed, 17 Jul 2019 22:44:42 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote in
lg00jeprk72prv8hnua08fhfh9q9rnek30@4ax.com>:



At work, we signed up with MonkeyBrains for microwave internet
service. We ordered the 50+50 mbit plan. It's actually speed testing
about 350+350.

And at home, a guy from Comcast (our local cable TV pirates) knocked
on the door and proposed to upgrade us for free, faster internet and
more cable TV (including HBO) for about half our current price. They
swapped out the modem today and the internet here is now running about
450+50 mbits. AT&T and Sonic keep leaving flyers on the doorknob
offering us a gigabit.

Sounds like mad competition to give away bandwidth. The backbone fiber
links must be moving astronomical amounts of data. Each county around
here might need a petabit per second.

Yes, I got a similar flyer here last week,
'Connect to our optical cable, we are now near you... subscribe...'
Threw it away, do not need that much bandwidth, and I am on 4G wireless now,
so stuff works everywhere in the country.
Even youtube works great...
I will buy a Huawei 5G stick when 5G works here.

What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???

Most people won't actually use that bandwidth. Web browsing needs
short bursts. Even movies don't need 500 mbits. So averaged rates
across multiple households will be much lower. But the backbone rates
must still be amazing.

I can stream live TV from 3 Firesticks and still watch a youtube video
on my computer without any buffering issue with my 60Mbps service.
I wonder if I over spent 30Mbps was $5 less per month.

Mikek