Posted by tymscar 11/1/2025
It's been a problem for _years_. Basically the wifi card switches to another channel to see if anyone wants to do airdrop every so often. It's a bit of a joke to be honest that Apple still haven't fixed this.
In simple terms, far away = more work to communicate = more airtime = less throughput.
It probably only matters with multiple devices.
32GB isn't very big these days. In terms of cost, a decent cheeseburger costs more than a 32GB flash card does.
A few months ago I needed a friend to send me a 32GB file. This took over 8 hours to accomplish with his 10Mbps upstream. 8 hours! I felt like it was 1996 again and I was downloading Slackware disksets with a dialup modem.
We needed to set up a resumable way to get his computer to send that file to my computer, and be semi-formal about it because 8 hours presents a lot of time for stuff to break.
But if we had gigabit speeds, instead? We could have moved that file in less than 5 minutes. That'd have been no big deal, with no need to be formal at all: If a 5-minute file transfer dies for some reason, then it's simple enough to just start it over again.
- Games (400GB for Ark, 235GB for Call of Duty, 190GB for God of War)
- LLMs (e.g. DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp at 690GB or Kimi-K2 at 1030GB unquantized)
- Blockchains (Bitcoin blockchain approaching 700GB)
- Deep learning datasets (1.1PB for Anna's Archive, 240TB for LAION-5B at low resolution)
- Backups
- Online video processing/storage
- Piracy (Torrenting)
Of course you can download those things on a slower connection, but I imagine that it would be a lot nicer if it went faster.
Ark is a strange case. It compresses very very well. Most of it ends up with compression ratios of around 80%.
> Total size on disk is 628.32 GiB and total download size is 171.42 GiB.
From SteamDB's summary of Ark's content depots.
This still doesn’t guarantee however that you will achieve this speed to any random host on the internet - their pipe to Cloudflare/Netflix may very well be fat and optimized but it doesn’t guarantee their pipe to a random small hosting provider doesn’t go over a 56k modem somewhere (I jest.. but only a bit).
Test to where you want to exchange high speed traffic.
Or even just work stuff, I've had to shift around several TB of 3D assets for my job while working from home.
Because it's a utility and there's a wide world of use cases out there.
For electrical maybe someone wants to charge an electric car fully overnight, or use a welder in their garage. Or use some big appliance in their kitchen.
For Internet maybe they make videos, games or other types of data-heavy content and need to be able to upload and download it.
Why not? Life’s too short anyways, and playing around with tech is one of those things that bring me joy.
It wasn't that long ago "internet" at home is literally just one person using it.
Or they seed large datasets for other researchers.
Some people can manage with slow network speeds at home, even though 100 Gbps single mode fiber is perfectly doable nowadays. And it's reasonable, because new SSDs do almost 120 Gbps.
1 Gbps made sense 20 years ago when single hard disks had similar performance. For some weird reason LAN speeds did not improve at the same rate as the disks did.
But then again, I guess many could also still manage with 100 Mbps connectivity at home. Still enough for 4k video, web browsing and most other "ordinary" use cases.
When it comes to wired, sending data 15cm is a very different problem than sending it 100M reliably - that and consumer demand for >1Gbps wasn't there which made the consumer equipment expensive because no mass market to drive it down, M.2 entirely removes the cable.
I figured 10Gbps would be the standard by now (and was way off) and yet its not even the default on high end motherboards - 2.5Gbps is becoming a lot more common though.
All the new MacBook Pros come with 64Gbps wired networking.
With an adapter you can also connect 100GbE, but that’s not very special.
It is very slowly improving, but by far the fastest widely used services I've seen are a few gacha games and Steam both downloading their updates. Which is rather sad.
Windows Update is slow, macOS update is abysmally slow, both iOS and Android stores also bottleneck somewhere. Most cloud storage services are just as bad. Most of these can't even utilise half a gigabit efficiently.
Actual speed on a 1Gbit port is something like 940Mbps according to experience (I believe the theoretical max there is 970).
My typical speed test results are around 104Mb/s. Before being upgraded, on the 50Mb/s package I was getting 52Mb/s.
My suspicion is that fibre network operator (OpenServe in South Africa) applies rate limits which are technically a little above what their customers are paying for, perhaps to avoid complaints from people who don’t understand overheads.
The poster above is claiming to see a physically impossible speed on 1gig networking.
And on that ISP side of things, it's a software-defined limit; it's just a field in a database or a config file that can be tuned to be whatever they want it to be.
But the fellow up there says that they got 1.2Gbps through a Mikrotik Hex S: https://mikrotik.com/product/hex_s
And that's just not possible*. The E60iUGS Mikrotik Hex S's own hardware Ethernet interfaces are 1000BASE-T, and it's simply not possible to squeeze more than 1.0Gbps through a 1000BASE-T interface. (It does also have an SFP port that it has one of is branded as "1.25Gbps," but reality is that it, too, is limited to no more than 1.0Gbps of data transfer.)
*: Except... the 2025 version of the Hex S, E60iUGS, does have a 2.5Gbps SFP port that could be used as an ISP connection, and a much-improved internal fabric compared to the previous version. But the rest of its ports are just 1Gbps, which suggests a hard 1Gbps limit for any single connected LAN device.
Except... Mikrotik's RouterOS allows hardware to be configured in many, many ways -- including using LACP to aggregate ports together. With the 2025 Hex S, an amalgamation could be created that would allow a single client computer to get >1Gbps from an ISP. It might even be possible to be similarly-clever with the previous version of the Hex S. But neither version will be able to do end-to-end >1Gbps without very deliberate and rather unusual effort.
"Silicon Valley of Europe", my a*s.