Last summer we got 1Gbps internet access when fiber finally came to our curb.
Symmetric 1Gbps down/up is a significant upgrade from the old 400/10Mbps cable connection for about the same cost.
As a small test, I did the below download on my home linux box using wcurl.
This downloads a 773 MiB ISO image file from the local Cloudlfare POP in MSP.
Here the file was already cached at Cloudflare. It downloads at 85.6 MiB per second over a single HTTP/2 TCP connection, this is finished in 9 seconds:
$ wcurl --curl-options -v -O - https://cloudflare.cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.8/amd64/install78.iso > /dev/null
< HTTP/2 200
< content-length: 811106304
< server: cloudflare
< cf-cache-status: HIT
< cf-ray: 9b8e1ca62f05a1fa-MSP
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 773M 100 773M 0 0 85.6M 0 0:00:09 0:00:09 --:--:-- 90.9M
If we ask GenAI to do the math for very old modem times for the least-slow 56k modems that existed it is 32-34 hours:
How long to download 773MiB file on 56k modem?
56k modem speed
Advertised: 56 kbps (56,000 bits/sec)
Real-world max is usually ~53.3 kbps, often a bit less due to line quality and overhead
At 56 kbps:
6,480,000,000 ÷ 56,000 ≈ 115,700 seconds ≈ 32.1 hours
At 53.3 kbps (more realistic):
≈ 33.8 hours
Remember the old days of going to physical stores to buy music and software CDs/DVDs?