Superfast download speeds - who's interested.

[jimtherev]

Had my BT bill yesterday with the usual stuffer on BT services, particularly Infinity Broadband. A claimed 40Mb (or 20Mb, depending on which part of the pamphlet you read...) And I got to thinking: apart from the 'glamour' of superfast speed, how valuable is this to most of us ordinary punters? I'm not talking about people like Mike Bracknell who has a business to run, but people maybe a bit like me, who downloads the odd movie & browses the 'net for kitchen cupboards (for heaven's sake!)

I have a nominal 8 - normally just under 7 which suits well nearly all of the time; if there is a slow connection I put it down to someone else's server.

Just wondering...

[ericlday]

Jim...me like thee 7 to 8 does things quick enough. Interesting to see how many are in real need of superfast speeds.

[SyllogismCheck]

It's a trap. It's not valuable to you, me or the average Joe in the street now but it soon will be.

The reason being that the content expands to fill the bandwidth. Remember back in the 90s how simple most webpages were? The Hotmail homepage, for example, would have taken an age to load at 56kbps if it were the size it is today. It's a case of provide the capacity and they shall fill it!

[piggybank]

I only dream of such speeds. My Internet calls itself by the inapt name "Speedy" and on a good day runs a few times at 30 KBS, but most of the time it is 4KBS. Costs US$80 a month whether I use it or not. Cuts off regularly, yes I want a high speed network.

[rans6andrew]

we pay for (we never get it though!) 8 Mb broadband. At our end there is often 5 computers sharing the line plus a hardware voip phone. We find that watching utube video while using the hardware voip phone and using Skype pc phone and listening to Planet Rock radio online doesn't cause any of the services to drop out, ie real time is maintained. If you try to get too many utube videos at once you can see the picture quality degrade but that needs 4 or 5 at the same time. This may be a "log jam" in our wireless network, I don't know how to see where the bottle neck is.

Just after the schools empty the network speed is at it's slowest. Rather than selling folk 40 or 50Mb broadband it would be better for all if the network was improved to deliver the advertised rate ALL of the time.

Incidentally, when our connection was first set up, the full bandwidth of our line was available for a few days. the provider tested it and consistently made 19Mb but then they throttled it back to about what we pay for at the best. Obviously, over time, more users have signed up in our area and the performance is diluted between us all.

Rans6....

[spannersatcx]

you pay for upto 8mb! That's their getout, upto!

[BOAC]

jim - perhaps the folk with 30kb dial-up would like an improvement?

[Bushfiva]

I've got gigabit fiber, capped at 200Mb, tested at 160Mb. I pay around $50/month. On international traffic I don't see much benefit, but on local stuff things seem to arrive very quickly. It would cost me another $5/month to get the other 800 Mbps, but I don't thing there'd be any noticeable improvement with respect to surfing.

[Mike-Bracknell]

I'm not talking about people like Mike Bracknell who has a business to run, but people maybe a bit like me, who downloads the odd movie & browses the 'net for kitchen cupboards (for heaven's sake!)

Oooh - fame at last :)

I have to say, I do agree with you - once the average punter has downloaded the internet, what next?

The one answer to that of course is on-demand movies/tv etc, but other than that it appears on the surface to be legitimising media piracy via the back door, but that's a discussion for another millennia.

[jimtherev]

Syllogism: see where yer going - Not long since Dos 6.1 on a couple of floppies... tho' even I think that things are better these days. (But having to have at least 2 GB hdd just to run Windows: ridiculous.)

Piggybank and BOAC: fully agree - Kb download speeds are just a bad memory here.

[M.Mouse]

The high speed connection is useful for downloading movies and other massive files. What they don't tell you is that there is a monthly 100Gb download limit (reached very quickly with the high speed download ability) and if you exceed that limit they deliberately throttle the connection to snail's pace for a month!

See here: Discussion about BT Infinity. (http://www.digitalspy.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1224924)

[SpringHeeledJack]

Rather than selling folk 40 or 50Mb broadband it would be better for all if the network was improved to deliver the advertised rate ALL of the time.


That about sums it up for me. I'm on an "up to 8mb download speed" , yet i'm lucky to get a tad above 1mb due to being 2 miles from the telephone exchange and dear old BT throttling the lines. My neighbour upstairs has cable broadband and is getting 20mb's constant..... I'd wager that for most of us it's not much use to have over 5mb's, if it really is that and constant. Gamers and professionals will need superfast connexions, but the mean in the street ? Nah....:hmm:



SHJ

[Mike-Bracknell]

That about sums it up for me. I'm on an "up to 8mb download speed" , yet i'm lucky to get a tad above 1mb due to being 2 miles from the telephone exchange and dear old BT throttling the lines. My neighbour upstairs has cable broadband and is getting 20mb's constant..... I'd wager that for most of us it's not much use to have over 5mb's, if it really is that and constant. Gamers and professionals will need superfast connexions, but the mean in the street ? Nah....:hmm:



SHJ

If only you knew how much that sort of infrastructure would cost to provide, and how inefficient it would be to have it constantly reserved for a single person at all times.

[Gertrude the Wombat]

With that sort of speed all your teenagers could watch separate porno videos in high definition at once, I think that's the target market.

[tailstrikecharles]

Just teenagers? :(

I have proxy servers in US and England (for IP address localization)

So I can watch TV from both regions and access BBC and US 'local only' services.

In addition to 'work' so, yeah..I need all that bandwidth and then some!

Still... it doesnt seem as 'fast' as the day I swapped out a 2400b modem for a 14000! wow :D

[mixture]

rans6andrew,

Rather than selling folk 40 or 50Mb broadband it would be better for all if the network was improved to deliver the advertised rate ALL of the time.

Continue dreaming.

Do you realise how much it would cost an ISP to deliver a 1:1 contention ratio to an average sized DSL customer base ? They would have to charge you more than 2 pennies a month.

[mixture]

M. Mouse.....

and if you exceed that limit they deliberately throttle the connection to snail's pace for a month!

See here: Discussion about BT Infinity.

Are you seriously telling me you are surprised to find this out ???

Predictable. Saw it coming when 21CN etc. was a mere glimmer in BT's eyes.

[The Nr Fairy]

Have they actually got 21CN up and running yet ?

[BOAC]

SHJ - I doubt very much that BT are doing anything like 'throttling' to your line, At 2 miles, the problem will lie either in cruddy 'last mile' wiring from the exchange or inside your house. Is that what you are getting at the master socket? If so you should complain to your ISP. 3mb min is what I would expect there at 2 miles, assuming the cable run is actually 2 and you don't feed via a neighbouring village!

Generally at the moment 5 is 'considered' to be the 'target' for the general public since that as a minimum more or less allows film and TV download. Personally I think we should be trying to have a bit of future-proofing and would look for 20.

Again, those on dial-up........................................

[SpringHeeledJack]

Well the home is fed with a pole for the last 30m, perhaps that has a bearing. I used to get up to 2mb a while back and never did a speed test since then as for my needs it was always sufficient. Next time i'm home i'll do a master socket speed test and see. The reason i assumed throttling was that no matter how many times i repeated the speedtest on different days and times of the day the readings for upload and download were always the same....:confused: This is a big city suburb area, so no out in the sticks shenanegins with wiring.

The neighbour has Virgin cable and it's definitely va va voom :8



SHJ

[The late XV105]

I'd rather sacrifice some download performance and join the queue waiting for synchronous DSL at domestic prices.

As proof of this I yesterday trialled an online backup service in addition to the four level backup I already take.

Performing a pro-rata calculation on the 19 hours it took to backup 2.5GB of data (for much of the time the tool was using the maximum percentage of available 448kbps upload bandwidth that it is designed to do), my photo collection (and only photos, none of the video) would take 119 days of continuous crunching to backup. The videos would take over a year.

Makes a bit of a mockery of the "unlimited storage" that the service offers!

BTW - off on a tangent - one nice part of the backup is that I have access to the files on my HTC Desire; I can download them without affecting backup integrity. Nice not to have to remember to copy documents first that I want to browse during "dead" time on my travels.

[AnthonyGA]

A claimed 40Mb (or 20Mb, depending on which part of the pamphlet you read...) And I got to thinking: apart from the 'glamour' of superfast speed, how valuable is this to most of us ordinary punters?

It's useless to the average person. Currently, 40 Mbps is only useful for downloads of massive files (such as pirated movies or software, which can run into gigabytes of data). DVD-quality video requires about 6 Mbps; Blu-ray-quality video requires about 36 Mbps. But in fact, most streaming video on the Web is streamed at speeds ten times slower, around 300-600 Mbps.

The lack of a need for such high speeds is not the only issue. The other is actually getting this speed in practice. The advertised 40 Mbps is typically only the speed from the nearest telephone central office or cable center to you—but to get any use out of this speed, it has to be guaranteed for the entire path between you and whichever other computer you're communicating with. Most Web sites that offer streaming content or downloads are configured to throttle the download/streaming speeds to some level that prevents a few high-speed users from overloading the network or servers. You'd be hard pressed to find any site that actually allows downloads at 40 Mbps, and even harder pressed to get a path to that site that provides 40 Mbps of throughput from start to finish.

So, at least for now, 40 Mbps is a waste of money. Software and content tend to bloat to use any capacity available, though, so once everyone has 40 Mbps, it will probably become nearly mandatory in order to do anything on the Net. But that is still some years away at the earliest.

If you operate a server, things are different—but then your problem is getting 40 Mbps or other high speeds for upload, and not just download. Synchronous connections that allow high upload speeds are no more expensive for the telco than asynchronous plans that provide fast download and slow upload, but providers know that anyone who wants high upload speeds is running a server, and so they gouge such users in pricing in consequence. A guaranteed 2 Mbps in both directions will usually cost you many times more than a 40 Mbps down and .25 Mbps up connection.

I have a nominal 8 Mbps ADSL connection (1 Mbps up). I easily get this speed in transfers between my PC and telco test servers or speed-measurement sites, so the bandwidth really is there most of the time. But most of the useful sites to which I connect (YouTube, sites with heavy download content, etc.) are either throttled to prevent me from getting that full speed, or are separated from me by intermediate nodes that will not pass a full 8 Mbps with any regularity. It's nice when I get it, but I don't often get it. A speed of 40 Mbps would of course be even less likely to ever run at full speed in real-world situations.

[Gertrude the Wombat]

separated from me by intermediate nodes that will not pass a full 8 Mbps with any regularity
Once Upon A Time, according to a guy I knew who ran part of LINX, two ISPs could be connected at an interchange by a 10M link deliberately so as to throttle traffic between the two to what was agreed in their contract. I imagine that more sophisticated methods are used these days!

[M.Mouse]

Are you seriously telling me you are surprised to find this out ???

Errrr......no.

[mixture]

two ISPs could be connected at an interchange by a 10M link deliberately so as to throttle traffic between the two to what was agreed in their contract. I imagine that more sophisticated methods are used these days!

Smallest port on the LINX these days is 100Mb, although there's obviously nothing stopping ISPs implementing rate limiting or packet shaping on their own kit.

You'd be hard pressed to find any site that actually allows downloads at 40 Mbps, and even harder pressed to get a path to that site that provides 40 Mbps of throughput from start to finish.

Hmmm.... let's see....for a start, anything on the Akamai network shouldn't be a problem.... :ok:

[AnthonyGA]

Hmmm.... let's see....for a start, anything on the Akamai network shouldn't be a problem....

I'd be surprised if even they allow 40 Mbps per connection. There aren't too many applications that require it. And bandwidth providers are notoriously stingy; they don't give bandwidth away. Someone who needs 40 Mbps per connection will have to pay dearly for it, even though it may cost almost nothing to the provider.

[mixture]

In London alone, Akamai have near enough 200Gbps of peering interconnect capacity. Add private peering and large ISP mirrors onto that, and you'll see what I'm getting at. Similar figures in Amsterdam and Frankfurt. North America figures are probably at least double that. They are one of the best connected networks in the world.

Apple are an Akamai customer. Find a nice big patch to download from their site and see what you get. In all likelyhood, any contention or restrictions in download speed will be to do with your direct upstream or their transit connections rather than Akamai restricting you.

On a test server that's rate-limited to 100Mbps, I have no problem achieving 100Mb downloads from Akamai any time day or night.

[IO540]

I have fairly recently moved from a 256k/512k (up/down) connection to a 448k/8192k connection (real downlink speed about 6000k) and cannot see much difference - except on file downloads and only then from some servers. General web operation is little different.

I would move to the next speed up ("20mbits/sec") but only to get the ~1000k UPlink speed - useful if you are running a web server on ADSL ;)

Against that, the old 256k/512k connection was uncapped, the 448k/8192k is capped at 20GB/month, and so is the faster one.

[Mike-Bracknell]

On a test server that's rate-limited to 100Mbps, I have no problem achieving 100Mb downloads from Akamai any time day or night.

Hmmm....can you offer me cheap COLO? :8

[mixture]

can you offer me cheap COLO?

Suspect it was tongue in cheek, but seeing as I've gone as far as reading your post, it doesn't take long to reply.....

There is space yes. But I suspect the question would be how much space, what for and how cheap. Might always be able to point you in the right direction.

PM if you like.... don't want to annoy the mods with business-like discussions in public.

[AnthonyGA]

On a test server that's rate-limited to 100Mbps, I have no problem achieving 100Mb downloads from Akamai any time day or night.

Either you or the other end of the connection is paying for that. Akamai isn't giving anything away.

[mixture]

Akamai isn't giving anything away

Akamai are a Content Distribution Network. It's their job to give stuff away.

The operation of their network is funded by their clients. Their pricing structure is NDA, however I suspect you'll find it isn't too dissimilar to other CDNs where they charge their clients by data volume (i.e per GB) whilst they aim to only connect their network to the outside world via largely settlement-free peering, thereby providing them with a healthy profit margin.

you ... paying for that

Although I've outlined Akamai's position above, obviously I (or anyone else) needs visibility to their network in order to be able to download. However if those people are connected via settlement-free peering or even paid peering at a public exchange then not much is being paid for access to that data.

How little I pay is beyond the scope of this forum.... :E