Whenever I say that I would love to have Gigabit Internet, or at least 500 Mbit up- and downstream, people tend to ask me “What in the world would you do with such a high bandwidth?!” Let me play you the song of my people…

I have around 20 TB of data that I would like to back up from my local NAS. I would love to have an encrypted backup outside the house. And with The Cloud™ on everyone’s lips, it should be very easy to move your backup up there, right? Right?!

Well… not quite…

I have an upstream bandwidth of 20 Mbit, which is generally about 2 MB per second. This means that I can back up 120 MB per minute, 7200 MB per hour and a whopping 172800 MB – or around 172 GB – per day.

This means, even if I was to upload constantly without doing anything else – which is quite theoretical, as you always need some bandwidth when you use the Internet – it would take about 116,5 days of straight uploading. That number1 is fucking ridiculous.

This is why we need Gigabit Internet, upstream and downstream! Not only one direction!

  1. With 500 Mbit, it would be 62 MB per second, 3,7 GB per minute, 223,2 GB per hour and 5,4 TB a day. With 1000 Mbit / 1 Gbit roughly twice that much. ↩︎