4 reasons multi-gig Ethernet doesn’t matter for most people

In this internet-centric world, your connection speed matters. Having a slow connection can be at best annoying, with dropouts, slow downloads and dodgy video calls, and at worst crippling and extremely frustrating. Gaming, streaming and communication have all been revolutionized by the ever-improving speed of our internet connections, and ultra-fast internet is increasingly being recognized by governments and ISPs as a priority to deliver to customers. That said, there are diminishing returns here, and for most people, splashing the cash to upgrade to a multi-gig setup isn’t worth the time, hassle, or cost.

4 You’re not using it

Even the biggest downloads might not be improved by your new connection

For the vast majority of people, you’re extremely unlikely to make use of a multi-gig connection. Streaming in 4K, gaming, running multiple video calls or even downloading most files are unlikely to struggle on a gigabit connection. Most activities online won’t make any use of this kind of speed, and your experience isn’t going to change for most things due to a higher speed. Most of the experiences you have online, whether its video calling, gaming or even browsing the internet, are often restricted more by latency than bandwidth. This isn’t going to be noticably improved by switching to a multi-gig connetion, certainly not in any way that a single Gigabit line wouldn’t. You’ll also notice limitations on many of your downloads, as not all servers will support multi-gig downloads for customers. Even the likes of Steam won’t necessarily allow you to max out your connection with a download and even if you could, the time to download a 100GB game is going to move from ~13 minutes (maximizing a 1Gbps connection) to ~5 minutes (maximizing a 2.5Gbps connection). The difference is hardly going to be life changing.

While there’s some argument for a higher bandwidth connection, especially in a shared or very busy household, a single Gigabit is more than enough for most here, without the significant cost downsides that a multi-gig connection can bring.

Now you could make use of this kind of connection if you’re using a large internal NAS or similar, and that might be one use case where we could support multi-gig internally. But again for most people, the benefits of upgrading to multi-gig hardware are going to be minimal while the implementation costs are high.

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3 Your hardware can’t support it

Prepare to uncover unexpected bottlenecks in your network

Even if you have upgraded your network to a full multi-gig setup, you’ll likely quickly find that hardware bottlenecks elsewhere prevent your devices from making full use of your connection. Your laptops and TVs are likely only equipped with interfaces that support 1Gbps, and while Wi-Fi 6E and 7 can support multi-gig speeds, you’ll again need to ensure that all your devices are modern and support these relatively new standards. Most motherboards also don’t support multi-gig ethernet, so you’ll need separate PCI network cards for any desktop computers.

Adoption here is improving, and newer devices are now shipping with better Wi-Fi and Ethernet interfaces, but budget devices especially are unlikely to see these universally any time soon. It’s also easy to underestimate the hardware upgrades you’ll need, as even if you do upgrade your entire network setup and add network cards to your PCs, you may not have the CPU horsepower and disk speeds to actually download files or games making use of a multi-gig connection. SSDs are less of a problem these days, but downloading a file at those kind of speeds places a significant load on a laptop, tablet or even desktop PC, and you may quickly find that your hardware itself is the bottleneck.

You’ll also need to note that you may need to update your Ethernet cabling, and will be unable to make use of technologies like powerline to get internet into the most remote corners of your home (at least, not without sacrificing the speeds you’re paying for).

2 It’s expensive

Hardware vendors and your ISP will charge you dearly

Even if your ISP does support a multi-gigabit connection, it’s an expensive prospect, and most ISPs charge dearly for their power user customers. This is in addition to some of the hidden costs associated with running a multi-gig internet setup, like the extra power requirements for new routers, switches and access points which will likely draw more power. We’ve talked about some of the power downsides of having a homelab previously, and this isn’t going to be a huge number, even in Europe (where energy costs are higher), but it’s something to consider as your internet setup will be running all day, every day.

Consumer ISP contracts also often differ from business lines, which offer guaranteed speeds with some type of service level agreement in space, ensuring your speeds are constant at all times. While you may be paying for a multi-gig connection, you’re unlikely to be guaranteed it, and may see significant fluctuations in speed during peak times. While obviously having fluctuations in a 2.5Gbps connection is better than fluctuations in a 1Gbps connection, it isn’t ideal considering how much you’re likely to be paying just to get online.

You may be tempted to think “it’s expensive now, but I’ll be future proofed when 2.5Gbps or 10Gbps does become mainstream”, but personally, I see this as a fallacy. When the future comes, it’ll be cheap and available quickly, in the same way that the jump from 10Mbps to 100Mpbs and then subsequently to 1Gbps happened. Sure, ISPs still haven’t caught up, but it’s pretty difficult to buy 10/100 consumer hardware nowadays (unless you’re really buying budget switches.)

1 It’s a waste of time

Put your attention into something more valuable (and fun)

A final point against multi-gig ethernet is that it’s a waste of time. Getting yourself set up is going to require some effort, and probably a decent amount of debugging why you’re not seeing the connection speeds you’d hoped for. Whether you’re installing new hardware, upgrading devices or figuring out bottlenecks, all of this is time (and money) that could be spent on better, more valuable things. Having a home lab or more complex networking setup can be rewarding, but it can also be a frustrating time sink, and we’d suggest that there are better value projects you could put your effort towards that might yield significantly more noticeable and ultimately enjoyable benefits.

Multi-gig Ethernet is cool, but it’s also a frustrating mess of bottlenecks, performance issues and poor support, and once set up that cool factor quickly diminishes.

Multi-gig Ethernet will come eventually, but it’s not worth paying a high price for

Just like 10Mpbs, and 1000Mpbs, and even 1Gbps, eventually we will move to multi-gig internet. Whether we need it or not, it seems inevitable that we’ll continue marching forward with technology and eventually it’ll be just as economical to include 2.5Gbps connections or similar on hardware as 1Gbps. That’s not a bad thing, more speed is really always good. What’s not good is the costs involved with implementing it now, and the benefits in 2024 do not outweigh the costs for most people. Unless you’ve got a very specific use case, like needing to move and transfer extremely large files like RAW video between multiple machines, or operating on large files over a network, then it’s likely not worth implementing in your home.