Exploring the Benefits of Multi-Gig Broadband for Gaming and Content Creation

Early last year, the first widely available multi-gig broadband was announced for the UK market, offering download speeds up to 1.6Gbps over the Openreach FTTP network. As an irredeemable nerd who gets overexcited at the prospect of a download progress bar reaching heretofore unseen speeds, I knew that I had to try it out to see if it actually offered a noticeable improvement over the more readily available 900Mbps BT service I had before. Would there be a tangible benefit for gaming, content creation and downloading Linux ISOs?

To find out, I managed to get in touch with Zen Broadband, who amongst EE and Vodafone are one of the few UK providers offering this package. They offered a spot amongst their early access customers for “Full Fibre Max”. The broadband was installed in early October, so I’ve now been using it for four months – and I’ve got to say, I’m a fan. That’s despite the relatively high monthly cost (£65) and the equipment I needed to pick up to truly make the most of a connection of this magnitude (router, switch, motherboard).

Before I get into the whys, hows and what-fors, it’s probably sensible to address the elephant(s) in the room: yup, pretty much everyone can live with far more affordable broadband, even for 4K streaming or gaming, and of course, far faster broadband exists too – both abroad and right here in the UK, where residents of some lucky communities can get symmetric fibre connections up to 8Gbps (the mind boggles). However, as something that’s in theory a bit more widely available, I think there’s still value in looking at how this decidedly asymmetric 1.6Gbps/ 0.11Gbps connection performs.

Getting set up: multi-gig install procedure

So: multi-gig broadband. To get this installed at a property that previously had FTTP connection up to 900Mbps, you’ll need an Openreach engineer to upgrade the device that turns the fibre-optic cable that comes into your house into a regular ethernet cable that you can attach to your router. It’s called an optical network terminal or ONT in the lingo, and most modern ONTs max out at gigabit speeds – pretty sensible. For faster connections, that’s replaced with a 2.5-gig alternative, which in my experience is a relatively rapid procedure that requires an engineer visit but is otherwise painless.

Critically, the fibre line itself isn’t changed, so there’s no need to drill any fresh holes in the side of your building – just waiting for the engineer to unplug the existing ONT, plug in the new one and wait for it to be activated. For me, this took the better part of an hour from start to finish, with most of the time spent just waiting for the ONT to be remotely activated.

Choose your Zen router: Eero Pro 6E vs Max 7

As I went with Zen as an ISP, I had a choice of two new routers: the Eero Pro 6E, which is included in the price of the broadband, or the Eero Max 7, which costs an extra £10 a month. I went for the 6E, and that proved to be mistake – and it’s the only thing I’d really ding Zen for in what was otherwise a seamless, deeply personalised and gentle swap from my previous providers BT.

Here’s the thing: the Eero Pro 6E is a lovely bit of kit, providing fast and wide-ranging WiFi 6E – including that all-important 6GHz spectrum in addition to the usual 2.4GHz and 5GHz – but it doesn’t allow you to access the full 1.6Gbps connection via ethernet. That’s because the router only has two ethernet ports, a 2.5-gig port that must go to the ONT, and a one-gig port that can go to your PC, console, router or switch.

That feels like a massive failure for a router provided alongside a multi-gig connection, as the people that are spending this much on internet probably know the importance of a wired connection to maximise speeds and reliability. Sure, WiFi 6E can go beyond gigabit speeds, but it still felt galling to know I wasn’t able to get the full-fat connection on my gaming PC!

Thankfully, Zen very nicely sent over the Pro 7 so I could compare the two devices, and the WiFi 7 option is definitely worth the extra £240 (£10 x 24 months) given that it retails for £600 by itself. As well as boasting higher maximum wireless speeds, this router comes with what I would consider to be a suitable number of ethernet ports for multi-gig broadband: four, two of which are 10-gig, with the other two being 2.5-gig. That means you can use one of the 2.5-gig ports for your incoming internet, while keeping two 10-gig ports for extremely fast local transfers – eg for connecting a gaming/work PC and a NAS.

Both Eero routers were quite novel to me in that they don’t allow you to set them up using a web browser; instead you use an Android or iOS app. This simplifies certain things considerably – setup is particularly easy and rapid, and it’s great having notifications when new devices join your network – but you do have fewer options than most traditional routers I’ve used over the years. Ultimately, I haven’t ever needed to use those more advanced options, nor have I felt the need to install custom firmware, but it’s worth knowing that the whole setup is much more firmly locked down than your average TP-Link, Asus or Netduma router. Of course, there are plenty of other WiFi 7 routers available that I haven’t tested, so it’s worth doing your own research on that front.

Making the most of a multi-gig connection

With my router situation solved and a stable 1.6Gbps download, 110Mbps upload and 7ms of ping registering on speed tests, it was time to work out what I would actually use this much bandwidth for. Sure, you can download an entire 845MB Nvidia graphics driver in four seconds, but you could have done that in about seven seconds on a 900Mbps connection, so what’s the hurry?

The real differences come with substantially bigger downloads. The current Digital Foundry CPU benchmark suite accounts for just over 1.3TB, so the download time for that moves from around 3 hours and 15 minutes to an hour and 48 minutes. That’s a critical speed-up when, for example, it’s embargo day and you need to redo all of your tests on one CPU in your lineup, but the SSD you’ve been using now refuses to boot and you need to quickly reinstall everything on another drive… ask me how I know!

Beyond this, you really need multiple computers to reliably max out a multi-gig connection – and ideally, some roommates or family members that like to download their content rather than stream, as even 25mbps connections are capable of streaming 4K videos. Like the RTX 4090 effectively solves the issue of rasterised rendering, having broadband of this speed effectively solves multi-user streaming. You’d have to have a huge family unit to really notice any slowdowns at all, and in most cases you’ll be hitting the limits of the servers you’re downloading from rather than your connection.

Sharing the load: multi-gig switches

While some routers like the Eero Max 7 have plenty of ethernet ports, others like the Eero Pro 6E do not – so often you’ll want a second router or an unmanaged network switch to give multiple computers the ability to access the full potential of a multi-gig connection. It may not surprise you to learn that I have about a dozen computers in various states of repair in my office, so having a switch made the most sense to keep multiple computers connected at once without having to resort to WiFi – something that isn’t included on all of our test systems.

D-Link were kind enough to send over their DMS-106XT, an unmanaged switch designed for gaming (we know this because it has an RGB light bar and a cool wedge-shaped metal design). It’s genuinely the nicest-looking switch I’ve ever used, and of course like all unmanaged switches it works effectively without any need for configuration – just plug in your router or a NAS via the 10-gig link and five more devices via its 2.5-gig ports, and you’re off to the races.

However, there are some extra features that are similarly set-and-forget. There’s a turbo mode switch on the back which enables a port-based priority mode (ports one and six can effectively claim as much bandwidth as they want at the expense of other devices; port two gets second dibs and the remaining ports whatever scraps remain). There’s also a button to toggle the RGB off if you want a more sedate look.

The switch has worked silently and reliably for months now, and at as low as £105 on sale it’s quite reasonably priced for the 22.5 gigabytes of potential throughput you’re getting.

Multi-gig and gaming routers: Netgear XR1000 and Netduma R3

I also experimented with using a few secondary routers to see if they were worth using instead of the Eero, though ultimately I decided against it. The Netgear XR1000 is a router that I’ve been using since 2022, providing some quite unique gaming features including a ping heatmap that blocks access to badly-performing or geographically distant game servers, ensuring your Counter-Strike matches will be lost by you and your teammates rather than because of network conditions. There’s also a rather excellent implementation of QoS, a feature which prioritises gaming and other real-time traffic over downloads, preventing bufferbloat – where your connection to a game server goes all screwy when someone starts downloading something.

The Netduma R3 is an even more advanced version of the same idea, a device designed from the ground up to be a gaming router with some new capabilities like “Hybrid VPN” – essentially a way to easily connect multiple devices to an OpenVPN or WireGuard VPN, an ad blocker and “Steady Ping”, which increases your ping to make it more stable – a bit like capping your game at a specific frame-rate. These are nice features that work as promised, and are easier to access than on the XR1000 with a modern-feeling UI.

However, the R3’s hardware doesn’t seem quite as fast or reliable as the XR1000 it ostensibly replaces, and I found its wireless signal strength and speeds were noticeably worse – likely as it’s an AX3000 router versus the AX5400 of the XR1000. It also lacks USB functionality versus the XR1000, which could use it as a network share. Finally, it