A network engineer professional is overseeing our town's installation of fibre, and was explaining how much faster it was.

I pointed out that it wasn't a silver bullet as you had to pay the provider for a certain bandwidth. For example, I explained, I have 20Mbps copper for about €30 per month, and 30mbps fibre cost about the same, however it wasn't going to be ten times faster. 200Mbps would cost you €70 pm so there was a price.

He strongly disagreed and said the reduced latency meant 30 fibre was twice as fast as 30 copper.

Now, I get that reduced ping times and latency mean time to first byte is faster, however if I'm downloading a 1gb file, 30 is 30 right?

I'm not sure how it affects streaming, however was he right, or talking rubbish?

A network engineer professional is overseeing our town's installation of fibre and was explaining how much faster it was.

I pointed out that it wasn't a silver bullet as you had to pay the provider for a certain bandwidth. For example, I explained, I have 20 Mbit/s copper for about €30 per month, and 30 Mbit/s fibre cost about the same, however it wasn't going to be ten times faster. 200 Mbit/s would cost you €70 pm so there was a price.

He strongly disagreed and said the reduced latency meant 30 Mbit/s fibre was twice as fast as 30 Mbit/s copper.

Now, I get that reduced ping times and latency mean time to the first byte is faster, however if I'm downloading a 1 gigabyte file, 30 Mbit/s is 30 Mbit/s, right?

I'm not sure how it affects streaming, however was he right, or talking rubbish?