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[Weaver]

Burakkucat asked today if I would notice the difference between 400Mbps and 350Mbps. That's a very good point indeed.

The obvious answer is, ‘no, most of the time’. However, I am an odd creature, I download a lot of programs from Netflix and Amazon overnight, set them going and leave them. I try to do as much downloading as possible within the AA (‘units’ users) super-cheap time band of 0200-0559 BST when download is 1 TB per unit (£3.90 iirc). I know from experience that when the connection is running relatively well, I can download 11 episodes of x from Amazon or 16 episodes of y from Netflix. If the effective download rate drops by 15% say then I do notice that as I then get my estimation wrong and can blow the 4 hour time band. I also like to do heavy downloading when I am not going to be disturbing Mrs Weaver who is trying to work.

My sister said she couldn't tell any difference when she went from Demon Internet dialup with 50kbps, plus very effective MPPC PPP data compression where stuff was compressible, so it could be more than double that at times, to 500kbps ADSL with no compression. Wikipedia claims MPPC could in theory hit 8:1 compression. But the web is often dominated by images unless they are cached, as they should be.

Anyway, she couldn't tell what all the DSL fuss was about, although it was a lot cheaper than dialup effectively!

[Ronski]

Weaver, I was just reading a thread on Think BroadBand, thought you may find the posts by Northsky interesting.

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/fibre/f/4590557-is-there-a-limit-to-the-number-of-fttc-cabs-per-pcp.html?vc=1

[Chrysalis]

On my FTTC line without any QoS or speed cap set in steam if I download a steam game it will cause heavy packet loss on the line.

The reason been the steam client is designed to effectively cause a DoS on your service if you download something, up to 32 download threads from low RTT servers.

However with a higher burst speed the negative affect would be significantly reduced.  Steam threads can be reduced with a command in the steam console but its not persistent and would need to be re executed everytime steam is launched.

On everyday browsing, streaming, I think there would be no difference noticed whatsoever especially at such high speeds from 350 to 400mbit.
On downloads often you will be RTT/RWIN limited and for things like single threaded http/ftp downloads you would often not even reach line capacity.
PSN xbox live, I have never seen be able to reach those sort of speeds.
Also if using wifi, wifi would probably be a bottleneck.
Which leaves torrents, gog, steam, heavy multiple users contention on a single line, that sort of thing.

Now on quality connectivity FTP can definitely saturate 400mbit single threaded, but I usually only see that on business class connectivity, usually between datacentres or leased lines.

[Chrysalis]

Weaver, I was just reading a thread on Think BroadBand, thought you may find the posts by Northsky interesting.

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/fibre/f/4590557-is-there-a-limit-to-the-number-of-fttc-cabs-per-pcp.html?vc=1

BT no doubt has been anti capital expenditure, picking the cheapest option nearly all the time.  But they are also fighting a very heavy handed regulator.  These FTTP startups are not regulated by ofcom.