What's the point of Gigabit broadband?
broadband · 52 comments · 450 words · read ~2,204 times.
(This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years.)
My yearly contract with my ISP has just come to an end, so it was time to shop around for a better deal. They presented me with the following monthly options:
- Drop to 100Mbps for the same price I'm paying today (£44)
- Keep at 350Mbps for a tenner more (£55)
- Rise to 500Mbps for a fiver more (£49)
- Go to GIGABIT for a lot more (£60)
Mmmmmm GIGABIT...!
Obviously it's classic anchor pricing. And obviously I fell for it. And obviously I negotiated a £50 bill credit for signing a new contract. But I only went with the half-gig option. Even then, I feel like I've bought a sports car and use it to pootle to the village shop and back.
Netflix reckons that 25Mbps is good enough for its 4K service. Even if my wife and I are both watching super-high-def-hdr-surround-sound-smellovision - what do we do with the other 450Mbps?
Once in a while we might download a 60GB video game (!!!). At 350Mbps, that'll take 22 minutes. At 500Mpbs, 16 minutes. That's six whole minutes saved (!!!). Going to 1Gbps means the game is downloaded in 8 minutes. But that's assuming the game company's CDN can sustain that speed. It probably can't.
Now we're in the land on constant video calling, the faster upload that we get is nice. Sadly it's hard to get symmetric speeds in the UK - so we're stuck with "only" 40Mbps up. But, again, even with both of us streaming 720p laptop-cam footage, it's not really taxing the connection.
It's nice when I have to upload a large file to, say, YouTube. But most of my work is now "Cloud Native" so I'm rarely emailing megadocs to my colleagues.
Perhaps VR is the thing which will consume this data? I don't really know much about it - but strapping two 4K monitors to your face, surround audio, and positional metadata doesn't sound like it is going to tax my fibre connection.
I suppose if you're a family of 10, then having 100Mbps each is handy. Delivering Gigabit is essential to the future - and I'm sure something will come along to gobble it all up. But what?
I'm not quite so thick as to say 640k ought to be enough for anybody. But right now I'm struggling to think what I can do to take advantage of this glut of bandwidth.
Any suggestions?
What I've learned from a year of lockdown
Review: Virgin 1Gbps Fibre
Virgin Media preparing to offer symmetrical upload speeds?
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@Edent La la la can't hear you (I'm getting 500 Mbps installed on Thursday and it's exciting because my little rural village is getting fibre)
@Edent I also have a gigabit connection and the biggest difference it made for me was “turning the Internet into my hard drive.” When you can download practically anything within minutes, it’s as if they were already laying around in your computer (conversely, you don’t feel the need to store as many things anymore except perhaps backing up against link rot etc).
We're still on 26Mbps copper. When we moved house in 2012 my "red line" was 12Mbps. What we have is fine, though large game downloads resemble orders arriving tomorrow.
The copper's on a stop-sell, so they tried to give us 150Mbps for a bit more. I baulked and they gave us 300 for the same.
@Edent yes, I definitely agree. Latency, reliability (and upload speed if, as with Openreach fibre, it's not symmetrical) are all more important to me than download speed.
@Edent Also my rural village house has stone walls so I can only get 40Mbs on the WiFi, so I don't know how I'm going to use that bandwidth. But HALF A GIG! And it's cheaper than ADSL
I had Hyperoptic’s Gb for a while and what I noticed switching to other services was the fluidity on Hyperiotic: - latency was ludicrously low on their product - loading any web page was lightening fast . You can browse back n forth with no sense of treacle. The burst use of that 1Gb pays off
@Edent Yeah, getting fibre installed in Jan & opted for 300, I'm thinking over an order of magnitude improvement is enough excitement for now & doubt we'd notice any extra speed
@Edent I would *much* rather have the option of something like 200mb symetrical than 1gig down and some small proportion of that up.
We have 150mb at the moment and I just don't have a use for anything faster. I suspect you are right that one day VR might be the thing that needs the bandwidth, but at the same time, I suspect they will optimise it as much as possible to minimise that dependency, in the same way 2d games do.
@Edent I struggle to even justify more than 80mbps, which is why I'm still on FTTC (FTTP has been installed but costs ~£10/month more for 150mbps).
I am however paying even less than your 2020 prices, probably because I'm a long-term customer and my ISP doesn't seem to have moved me onto their latest packages.
@Edent I do agree, I have 1gb at home and the only thing that hits that is my Xbox. It's fun to see the numbers go up quickly but 500mb would do me and most families fine. Some areas now have 2gb!
@neil @Edent it's the multiuser scenarios and multi*actor* scenarios that make "too much" bandwidth valuable imho. It is about having enough that it's never something you think about or worry about running out of!
My wife and I work from home and both occasionally lob large datasets/media around while also doing videoconferencing. The house has multiple computers which sometimes do backups or download content etc etc. We have enough Mbps that it's never an issue to do anything at any time.
@Edent Word! We're (family of 4) on 100 Mbps and it's plenty for at least 99.9% of the time. Probably simply 100%.
@Edent
We're a family of 4, 2 adults, 2 kids. I'm a homeworker and tech user. The kids are both streamers. Me and my son are gamers.
We're on 350Mb and it's probably overkill for us. Repeating others here I'd easily take a symmetric 150Mb service with reliability and low latency over a faster service.
Just checking now, I can apparently get 1600/115 here, so what's the reason they can't do a 115/115 symmetric service?
@Edent
Contention. We have been promised FFTP for some years now but still no sign of it. We have Fibre to the cabinet and copper to us - but are quite rural so its not going to happen soon. I say contention because we notice it when the 38mb we get stuttering on streaming services occasionally at peak times. 300mb would mean enough capacity in the village to avoid experiencing those.
@Edent We were on 150Mbps but now on 300Mbps. It's probably overkill but I deal with some fairly large sites so had to go higher to get better upload speeds.
@Edent We've just had a flyer from Hyperoptic saying that we can now get fibre to our house. Once, I'd have leapt at the chance, but after 3 and a bit years with 60 Mbit VDSL, I find that it's adequate and that I find more value having a competent service via @aaisp, so I'm waiting to see if OpenReach's FTTP rollout reaches us in the near future.
@Edent I'm in the weird place of being trapped on VDSL (and thus 75 Mbps), and I could juuuuust do with that little extra boost (not to mention the latency improvement), but even I can't imagine what I would do with more than 100–200 Mbps.