Fastest ever broadband
 

BBC News - 'Fastest ever' broadband passes speed test

Apart from private networks what would the use be of such speed ? A friend who lives in Korea boasts of 100mpbs up/down on his provider, yet if websites/portals/whatever are 'normal' speed, then that's the fastest that you could perform transfers of information isn't it ? I'm too ashamed to tell of my up and down speeds :O



SHJ

Large businesses, governments, scientists with large concrete tubes under the Swiss countryside, and provider trunk links.

Absolutely no use for home individuals. I've used a symmetric 1Gb connection into my laptop fed off a 10Gb switch.... I can tell you that you soon find you can't do anything about speeding up transatlantic data, you can't do anything about servers you're trying to access having insufficient capacity (or rate-limiting you), you don't need that much bandwidth for streaming.....

Basically, for most people a proper 10 or 20Mb, even asymmetric service would be more than enough as long as its not the heavily contended rate-limited packet-shaped rubbish stuff you get now. But for that, people would have to agree to pay more and the providers would have to stop this stupid race to the bottom on pricing.

Quality not quantity I say (service, not headline speeds)

The main advantage of a 100Mbit connection is if you've got other family members also trying to use 20Mbit. It simply means that the contention is never on the bit of the internet over which you've got any control.

+ wotsit's law which says in x years you WILL need 1gb 'cos all the servers will be doing that, films will be downloaded in super-3D-HD-4K whatever, digital cameras will be emailing pics at 100mb - and that is why BT's FTTC is such a waste of money as it just will not go there - and x is not a very large number! Predictions are 100mb as mean speed by 2020.

They'll no doubt still send people scummy letters saying "up to 100Mb" knowing well they'll get nowhere near that in reality. :cool:

The fastest US service is in Kansas City, MO, and I think Austin, TX. Google has about 100 MB/sec. Time Warner, a US cable provider, now offers 80 MB/sec in MCI (Kansas City), to try and fend off the advance of Google into it's customer base.

I hear Google are now paying to kit out Starbucks outlets with high-speed WiFi

That's why a router doing proper QoS is very important :ok:

I had a 3mbit/s ADSL connection and now have an 80mbit/s FTTC connection, and the difference isn't night and day when you have your QoS correct for the majority of tasks. I agree with Mixture that quality is very important.