If you live in a bigger city, especially in the United States chances are a local internet service provider (or ISP) has tried to sell you "blazing fast fiber gigabit internet". Yes, 1,000 Mbps or 1 Gbps is really fast and it sounds really cool. But, is it worth the high price? Let's take a look.

https://youtu.be/3QCDj7Njv_4

Shortfalls of Cable

For most people, your internet comes from a local cable provider like Spectrum or Comcast. Because there is not enough bandwidth or space in the physical cable for TV, phone, and internet to pass through the download speeds, like when opening this post or watching Netflix, has to be capped at around 500 Mbps. Since most consumers are downloading more than uploading, like posting a picture on Facebook, uploads speeds typically capped at 20 Mbps or less. If your a DSL or satellite customer your connection suffers from the same issues.

Fiber

Before getting to gigabit internet let's talk about the core technology which as allowed this fast speed to come to your front door.

Currently, the only way to get gigabit internet to your house is by using a fiber-optic network. At the time of writing this, fiber-optic networks are being rolled out to larger cities by big telecom companies. Fiber is a glass wire insulated by plastic that uses light to move data back and forth. Fiber is great because it has more bandwidth, or has space to send more data back and forth than a copper cable wire.

Fiber cables are used as the backbone of the World Wide Web. An example being the fiber optic cables that wrap around the oceans connecting whole continents and islands to the internet.

Through fiber, telecom companies can offer higher data speeds, such as gigabit, without the rest of the network suffering.

However, there is a drawback. Fiber is incredibly expensive. Rolling out fiber entails running a 100% fiber connection from the internet service providers hub all the way into your house. That's a lot of fiber cable which is not cheap. Because it's not affordable for the internet company they, most likely, are not going to make it affordable for you, at least at first.

What Can You Expect with 1000 Mbps Up and Down?

Mbps (Megabit per second)Download Movie: 3GB (or 3,000 Mb)Download file: 1GB (or 1,000 Mb)25 Mbps16 Min5 Min and 20 Sec100 Mbps4 Min1 Min and 20 Sec200 Mbps2 Min40 Sec500 Mbps48 Seconds16 Sec1,000 Mbps (1 Gbps)24 Seconds8 Sec

This chart shows how long it would take to download a 3GB movie and a 1GB file.

With a gigabit connection, you can download a movie that's 3GB in size in about 24 seconds which is about 3.5 minutes faster than with a 100Mbps connection. A 1 GB file can download in about 8 seconds which would take a little more than a minute with a 100 Mbps connection. Then you should be able to upload those same files and get roughly the same times. That's a huge time saver.

But, note that the download times listed in the chart are theoretical. It does not take into account real-world variables. Essentially you will never actually reach those times.

Which now gets us to our original question: is gigabit fiber internet worth it?

The short answer is no. Let me explain.

If you have the option for gigabit internet in your neighborhood your internet provider may have played it up a bit with the advertising. Let's talk about my two issues with fiber.

1. False Internet Speeds

As of now when you subscribe to gigabit internet chances are you won't actually get that speed...