In the age of flashy marketing and speed test screenshots, it’s become trendy to chase the mythical 1Gbps broadband package as if it's the holy grail of connectivity. But here's the cold truth: more bandwidth does not mean better latency or network stability. In fact, offering massive bandwidths to users, especially on shared infrastructure like fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), can actually make the network worse for everyone.

Let’s unpack this, piece by piece.

📉 1Gbps | The Illusion of Performance

When an ISP offers 1Gbps to a consumer, it sounds incredible on paper. But that number only measures how quickly your line could download something — it says nothing about latency, jitter, or upstream congestion.

And here’s the kicker: to boost that shiny downlink figure, the network infrastructure — especially the Optical Line Terminal (OLT) — often sacrifices the uplink path. That means less bandwidth is allocated for your data going back to the Internet (e.g. video calls, uploads, VoIP), which ironically results in worse real-time experience.

In technical terms:

🔽 Downlink = Overprovisioned to impress
🔼 Uplink = Underprovisioned to compensate

You win the Speedtest.net race... and lose the Teams meeting. 🤦

📍 Distance Matters | The Further from the Data Centre, the Worse the Impact

Broadband infrastructure is shared. The bandwidth you use affects your neighbours and vice versa — that’s the reality of aggregation.

Now, imagine this:

A 1Gbps subscriber is 100km away from the data centre.
Their traffic traverses several hops, backhauls, and shared fibre segments.

By allowing full gigabit flows so far from the source, we trigger:

😬 Uplink saturation
😬 Packet buffering and delay
😬 OLT CPU load
😬 Uplink path congestion across aggregation nodes

Compare that to capping the speed at a more reasonable 500Mbps or even 200Mbps — suddenly the shared pipes don’t get clogged, buffers don’t fill, and everyone on that route enjoys smoother performance.

This is why network planning must be based on worst-case scenarios, not best-case marketing slogans.

🧠 Engineering for Experience, Not Ego

A network isn’t a race car. It’s a public road system. If every car gets a V12 engine, the highways will clog, the off-ramps will jam, and the emergency lanes will be useless. Just like traffic, networks must be engineered for:

🚧 Peak hour performance
📊 Aggregate load
📍 Distance and hop count
🔁 Return path integrity

Engineers must strike a balance between:

Customer expectations
Infrastructure limitations
Future growth
Stability under duress (like power failures, fibre breaks, or upstream congestion)

🛠️ The Smarter Solution: Engineering with Precision

Rather than overselling raw speed, smart ISPs and MSPs — like those using Fusion’s SD-WAN — focus on:

📶 Real-time performance (latency, jitter, packet loss)
⚙️ Path control and failover
🚥 Bandwidth shaping that optimises quality of experience, not vanity metrics
🌐 Location-aware policy enforcement
📊 Active telemetry and congestion awareness

With this approach, the end-user sees better video quality, fewer dropped calls, and more reliable uptime — even if their "speed" is half of what the guy next door has.

✅ Wrapping Up

1Gbps is not bad in isolation. But unstructured deployment without context or constraint turns it into a problem. Especially on shared broadband infrastructure.

As broadband rolls out deeper into communities and rural areas, the key isn’t to pump more speed — it’s to build smarter, prioritise stability, and design around shared, real-world usage.

If you want a stable, consistent Internet experience — don’t chase the speed. Chase the engineering. 💡🔧

🚫💡 The Big Bandwidth Myth | Why More Isn’t Always Better