Superfast download speeds - who's interested.
 

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...

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

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!

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.

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....

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

rans6andrew,

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.

M. Mouse.....

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.

Have they actually got 21CN up and running yet ?

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........................................

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