Would faster internet or computer improve your experience?

If you build it, they will come.

If the capacity can be used, they will figure out how to use it.
It's always been this way.

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And btw...you need a faster computer to appreciate a faster internet.
You can put as much bandwidth as you want for your connection,
if you don't have the hardware to take advantage of it, then it's a waste.

Any portion can be the bottleneck...it's all of it working together.

 

Both my Macbook and my desktop PC are over 6 years old, so this isn't really something that excites me right now.

However, when I'm in the market for a new machine down the road, I'm sure the thought of taking advantage of that bandwidth would be tempting.

 

We can stream on the Xbox while I play World of Warcraft without any problems, so I don't really see how faster Internet would benefit me at this point in time. I could always use a faster computer My gaming rig is about 4 years old with some creative upgrades; I could definitely go for a new one. My laptop is less than a year old, and it's pretty nice.

I need faster Internet on my phone. I have a 3G phone and I'm looking forward to upgrading to 4G.

 

Gigabit interwebs? Oh, the places I'd go...

My current connection is 5/0.8. It's stuck at that speed because I need a static IP at home. Only one ISP here offers static IP addresses, and they only offer them through DSL. The DSL infrastructure here is controlled by the incumbent provider, who hasn't seen fit to upgrade the network in my neighbourhood yet. No word on when they'll finally get around to it.

I'm an IT guy in 2013. I have a cell phone that rivals some desktops in terms of power. I have two laptops, a desktop, a tablet, two phones and two video game consoles on my local network (and I'm probably forgetting something). I sit here in my home office, where I can remotely join my office network, and from there play with servers around the globe that are capable of truly staggering feats of computing. But my home internet connection is stuck in 2003. It's downright perverse.

1 gig at home is a bit overkill for most anyone right now, but that won't always be true. Netflix recently rolled out "Super HD" streaming which uses around 5 mbps. The next big thing is going to be 4k digital; there are already televisions capable of displaying this resolution. They're uber-expensive niche products right now, but so were 1080p televisions when they first came out. 4k will require something on the order of 16x the amount of data over 1080p so that's going to be nearly 100 mbps. In addition to that other forms of connectivity are moving over to digital. IP telephony is set to really take off in the next five years or so, which requires not a lot of bandwidth but does need low latency. If people are streaming television and music and games on the same connection, the pipe has to be big enough to allow for all of that without slowing down the VoIP packets.

Basically, everything's moving online and streaming is really the big new thing right now. Data needs are increasing to accommodate that. It's not that long ago that my 5mbps connection would have been considered blazing fast, but it's already quite outdated. 15-30 mbps is common these days. How long will it be before that's considered obsolete too?