We don't normally critique the work of others here, but sometimes a technical narrative starts to drift so far from reality that it’s important to set things straight.
Before I give my take, I recommend you read the original piece. It’s a How-To Geek article titled "Why Gigabit Ethernet is no longer enough for the modern home" - link here. I’m assuming it’s still live; I last accessed it in February 2026.
Now that you've taken a moment to read it, let's dive in...
To be honest, I almost don't know where to start with this. Let’s begin with my own situation to establish some context. My home network would make most small-to-medium business office networks blush:
- 10Gbps Core: I run a 10Gbps "spine" through the center of my network and to specific high-speed endpoints.
- WiFi 6/6E: I have multiple high-performance access points tuned so that near-gigabit speeds over wireless are easily achievable.
- High Density: As I’m writing this, there are 58 devices online, serviced by 7 wireless access points and 17 network switches.
- The Backbone: All of this is fed by a standard gigabit internet connection.
I’m not talking from a position of ignorance - I literally have the "faster than gigabit" home network the author describes. But the suggestion that Gigabit isn't enough anymore, or that these "slow speeds" represent an impending crisis for the average home, is fundamentally disconnected from how networking actually works.
WhyFi?
For a reason that eludes me, the author grabs your attention with a "Gigabit isn't enough" headline, then immediately pivots to complaining about slow WiFi 5 speeds. He notes his mesh system often delivers around 200Mbps.
Yes, in an era where NBN plans are being upgraded to 500Mbps and beyond, 200Mbps is a bottleneck you can feel. However, that isn't an argument that Gigabit isn't enough. It’s an argument that 200Mbps isn't enough.
If your Wi-Fi is bottlenecked at 200Mbps due to interference, distance, or the overhead of a mesh system, upgrading your wired backbone to 10Gbps will result in exactly 0% improvement to your wireless speed.
What speeds are needed
The author suggests that several modern use cases now demand more than Gigabit speeds. Let's pick those apart:
The "less important" Internet connection
The author claims the internet is becoming less important as we move data locally. I’d argue the opposite is true. More services are moving to the cloud than ever. Even with the growing push-back for self-hosting (which I strongly support), the reality is that the internet is a critical, high-bandwidth requirement.
To put "Gigabit" into perspective: A 1Gbps connection can theoretically run 37 concurrent 4K Netflix streams. Unless you are hosting a literal cinema in your living room, Gigabit is not your bottleneck for streaming.
Steam games on the local network
I happen to know a thing or two about this. In my house, we have four gaming desktops, four Steam Decks, a gaming laptop, and a dedicated living room PC.
Even with several of these on my 10Gbps core, the network is rarely the limit. When Steam transfers games locally, it has to compress the data on the "donor" PC and decompress it on the "receiver" PC while simultaneously writing to the disk. On a Steam Deck or a PC with a budget SSD, the CPU and Disk I/O will almost always choke before the 1Gbps network line does.
Moving terabytes around your network because of your NAS
The author mentions moving terabytes of data around for backups. To be blunt: No. Unless you are a professional videographer moving RAW 8K footage from a workstation to a NAS daily, you aren't moving terabytes; you're moving megabytes, frequently.
Even a full system backup of a standard PC (maybe 500GB of actual data) will saturate a Gigabit link and finish in about an hour. For the average home user, this is a background task that happens while they sleep, not a "crisis" requiring a 10Gbps upgrade.
Home media servers
I run these too. A high-bitrate, uncompressed 4K video peaks at about 100-125 Mbps. You could have eight different TVs in your house all watching different 4K movies simultaneously and you still wouldn't hit the ceiling of a single Gigabit cable.
So what do we actually think
If you have extreme high-bandwidth requirements - like running a data-heavy business from home - you already know who you are. For everyone else, I advocate for an opportunistic position.
If you are buying a new router today and the 2.5Gbps version is only a few dollars more, buy it! That’s pragmatic future-proofing. But don't rip out your walls or replace your switches because you're worried about "obsolete" speeds. For 95% of users, the 1Gbps standard is still a massive, empty highway that we haven't even begun to fill.
For now, there's no crisis. Your network is fine.