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What Speed is Actually NEEDED Nowadays?

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aesmith:
Hi,

Just posting this after some messing around on Saturday.  At home we use LTE as the main Internet connection, with ADSL as backup (plus a few things preferentially routed over ADSL). ADSL is around 3.5meg download and 800k upload.  On Saturday there was a local LTE outage, taking out Three from both masts within range and incidentally also taking out EE but not O2.

What struck me was how many things simply did not work on the ADSL. For example some BBC news pages would time out.  Three user account login returned an error. Google Drive synch threw the most enormous sulk, even the preferences menu was greyed out.  Deleting all settings it simply wouldn't connect to the Google account. During this time the ADSL wasn't maxed out, although it was carrying traffic. So I am a bit puzzled as to what was actually happening, what were these applications and web pages doing that causes an almost immediate error on a 3.5meg connection?

If this is really the case then it's clearly a change over the last few years as we used to run everything over that same ADSL, with perfectly acceptable performance given the speed.

I would be interested in comments or thoughts.  It would be disappointing if people are now creating web sites and services that simply won't work without at least a five or 10 meg connection. Just locally there are a lot of places in Aberdeenshire where you are lucky to even get 2meg.

Alex Atkin UK:
No, they definitely haven't, I can't even think how you'd do that as a website doesn't know how fast your broadband is.

What DNS server are you using in the router?  Setting it manually to Cloudflare or Google if not already might help, as it could be a glitch with your ISPs DNS server causing this whereas using the Three DNS server was fine.

aesmith:
Cheers.  I was wondering about DNS but I can't see anything that would mess it up.  DNS is served by the router, so all DHCP devices have the router IP as their DNS server.  In turn the router uses the Opendns (now Umbrella) servers 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. As far as I can determine the cached entries held by the router are just host to IP mappings, not routes. Certainly the few traceroutes that I ran all went the correct way, to the DSL router and out to AA, rather than to the LTE router and failing.

I think I need to run some tests if I can agree a downtime window.  Disabling the LTE interface in the router will simulate the fault most accurately.

Thinking about Google Drive Sync - I wonder if it inherently uses Google DNS servers instead of those that the host is configured to use?  I don't at the moment have the router set to over ride that, so any DNS preferences used by any host will bypass the router's cache.

jelv:
Designers can definitely cause issues when using a slow connection.

There's a difference between "doesn't work" and "unusable".

The problem is that website creators have so much crap such as tracking included in the pages that on a slow connection they are unusable (and may time out).

aesmith:
That's a nice distinction and on that basis I'd say BBC news was "unusable" whereas Google Backup & Sync "didn't work".  Actually that Google thing makes me a bit cross, why on earth would they disable the menus even if it was completely disconnected from the Internet?  It just makes all their recommended troubleshooting steps meaningless.

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