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Author Topic: How much speed do users need?  (Read 4040 times)

broadstairs

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How much speed do users need?
« on: January 17, 2022, 10:57:33 AM »

Just come to the end this morning of my free months trial of the 500mbps, to be honest I don't notice any difference on my normal things I do, obviously I might if I download very large files but that does not happen very often, speed test show ~150mbps down and ~30mbps down from my lan attached desktop. Quite happy with that speed.

Stuart
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maxheadroom

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #1 on: January 17, 2022, 01:37:41 PM »

Just come to the end this morning of my free months trial of the 500mbps, to be honest I don't notice any difference on my normal things I do, obviously I might if I download very large files but that does not happen very often, speed test show ~150mbps down and ~30mbps down from my lan attached desktop. Quite happy with that speed.

Stuart

To be honest i have never understood why the average internet user needs such high speeds i get 60+ Mbps all the time and with 3 of us in the house streaming, gaming and  using the internet we have never seen any problems at all why would the average user need 150 - 500 Mbps, i understand in the future we will probably need these speeds but for now i imagine 30Mbps would be enough for the majority  of all internet users.

« Last Edit: January 17, 2022, 01:40:51 PM by maxheadroom »
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Edinburgh_lad

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #2 on: January 17, 2022, 02:04:45 PM »

To be honest i have never understood why the average internet user needs such high speeds i get 60+ Mbps all the time and with 3 of us in the house streaming, gaming and  using the internet we have never seen any problems at all why would the average user need 150 - 500 Mbps, i understand in the future we will probably need these speeds but for now i imagine 30Mbps would be enough for the majority  of all internet users.



That's the minimum required for these services. If you have more users within the household streaming, gaming, downloading etc., then it becomes clear why you need more speed.

Finally, full HD is last century's standard. These days, we're talking 4k.

So, I'm afraid 30 Mbps is ok if you want to just browse the Internet and are a single user that watches an occasional BBC iPlayer video. Whether that's the majority or not would need to be confirmed by a study. Certainly for an average family, that's not enough. 

It's also clear that the infrastructure for the Internet for the majority in this country is poor.

« Last Edit: January 17, 2022, 02:07:15 PM by Edinburgh_lad »
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maxheadroom

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #3 on: January 17, 2022, 03:07:07 PM »

That's the minimum required for these services. If you have more users within the household streaming, gaming, downloading etc., then it becomes clear why you need more speed.

Finally, full HD is last century's standard. These days, we're talking 4k.

So, I'm afraid 30 Mbps is ok if you want to just browse the Internet and are a single user that watches an occasional BBC iPlayer video. Whether that's the majority or not would need to be confirmed by a study. Certainly for an average family, that's not enough. 

It's also clear that the infrastructure for the Internet for the majority in this country is poor.

As it says below 4K uses 25 Mbps minimum  so in theory if your family streams 4k and uses other high bandwidth stuff at the same time then maybe 30Mbps would not be enough but i bet 90% of the population don't use 4K at the moment  and have no intention in the near future (i don't know anyone that has a 4K TV)  60 Mbps  would be fine even if they did use 4K maybe 100 Kbps for a house that uses a lot of 4K and other stuff but is there really any need for 500 Kbps.


UHD you'll need 25Mbps minimum, but we recommend a connection of 50Mbps to cover all scenarios
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j0hn

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #4 on: January 17, 2022, 03:40:08 PM »

i don't know anyone that has a 4K TV

That's extremely unlikely.
It's more likely that you just don't know they have a 4k tv.

Without a doubt I know more people with a 4k tv than I do without 1. Most of my family and immediate friends have more than 1 4k tv.

Very few TV's for sale aren't 4k and that has been the case for a few years now.
Looking at Currys and John Lewis the only 1080p televisions are under 43" and the choice is very limited.
Anything above that size is only available in 4k.

It's also clear that the infrastructure for the Internet for the majority in this country is poor.

That isn't clear at all.
Over 65% of the population has access to gigabit broadband.
Over 96% have access to 30Mb/s+

https://labs2.thinkbroadband.com/local/uk
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maxheadroom

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #5 on: January 17, 2022, 03:55:25 PM »

Quote
That's extremely unlikely.
It's more likely that you just don't know they have a 4k tv.

I only recently got Netflix (due to covid) when i was considering which streaming service to sign up to i asked people at work what they used and not one used 4K non of my or the wifes  family does either maybe i shouldn't have said "i don't know anyone that has a 4K TV" and i should have said i don't know anyone that uses 4K streaming.

Even if  the household streams UHD i still think 60Mbps would be enough for the average home as i doubt many houses stream UHD all day long and as i  said above  as we use more bandwidth we are going to have to move towards 100 Mbps  at the moment few of us can get anything higher than what FTTC will provide.
« Last Edit: January 17, 2022, 04:04:53 PM by maxheadroom »
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Ronski

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #6 on: January 17, 2022, 03:59:05 PM »

I'm on 350/30, if I went lower than 350 I'd have a much lower upload speed, often you have go high download speed to get a semi decent upload.
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maxheadroom

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #7 on: January 17, 2022, 04:06:25 PM »

I'm on 350/30, if I went lower than 350 I'd have a much lower upload speed, often you have go high download speed to get a semi decent upload.

Its all about what you use your connection for my upload is 10 Mbps and that allows me to do what i do comfortably how many average internet users need more than 10 Mbps upload?
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broadstairs

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #8 on: January 17, 2022, 04:18:36 PM »

We have had Netflix for some time now and never had a problem on vdsl but I did get 60mbps down. I went full fibre so as to get away from line issues.

Stuart
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Ronski

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #9 on: January 17, 2022, 05:50:39 PM »

Its all about what you use your connection for my upload is 10 Mbps and that allows me to do what i do comfortably how many average internet users need more than 10 Mbps upload?

I'm well aware of that, we use it Netflic, RDP, Cloud backup, Chia farming, Nicehash, Helium Mining, Amazon TV/Music, Youtube etc. etc.

When I was on VDSL, and only had 6Mbps upload, the cloud backup was swamping the upload connection, which in turn causing issues browsing the internet, as its a two way conversation.
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #10 on: January 17, 2022, 08:28:40 PM »

Its all about what you use your connection for my upload is 10 Mbps and that allows me to do what i do comfortably how many average internet users need more than 10 Mbps upload?

Arguably, almost everyone, they just might not realise it yet because they haven't had the worst happen and lost all their precious memories.

Most people don't make backups, but they should.  I've lost so many photos to CD-R bit rot and HDD failures over the years, I already have about a grand of backup drives now and absolutely do plan to use cloud storage to at least backup "some" of it to a third location, but its not remotely practical to do if I have to limit it to 10Mbit so it doesn't interfere with other Internet traffic.

I lost a PHP script I'd been working on for weeks recently because I accidentally overwrote it with something else.  Unfortunately the HDD backup was too recent and it was gone there too.  If I had intermediate automated backups to the cloud, it could have saved me starting from scratch.  Though to be fair, the files are small enough I can probably do that right now, but for larger files not so much.

Plus I've seen plenty of comments about people who had to kick everyone off the Internet during their business zoom calls, or when they kids were remote learning, because it couldn't handle more than one at the same time.

The fact that only those of us into networking understand how transformative this could be, doesn't mean everyone else wont realise it once its actually available.  On the networking forums I'm seeing more and more people dabbling with a home VPN so they can remote in when away from home, where ideally you want as much upload at home as you have download at your remote location.

The big problem with broadband speeds is you don't KNOW it will improve your quality of life until you actually upgrade, and people look at the extra cost and go "meh, its fine as it is".
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Weaver

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #11 on: January 18, 2022, 04:33:14 AM »

The reason I would use 900 Mbps+ services is the upstream, whatever that might be, for doing backups. Doing a backup of one of my iPads takes >40 mins currently, a real pain. Doing iOS downloads is a nuisance too, although speed of such a download might be server-end limited? What speed do you get when doing an o/s download on a 900Mbps+ connection?
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adrianw

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #12 on: January 18, 2022, 11:34:26 AM »

What you can afford, get and what you are doing has a strong influence on the speed you want.

I live on my own, so have at most on 4K stream running. Much more often it is audio. OS downloads etc go fast enough and for most purposes 80/20 FTTC is fine.

But.
I have a remote TrueNAS box which I keep up to date with ZFS snapshot replication. FTTC 80/20 at each end. Well, 60/20 and unstable at the remote end.
During the long "no meet" restrictions something happened and I lost a remote 3TB dataset and had to replicate it from scratch.
Sending 3TB of data over a 20Mb/s link took about a month. Thank heavens that zfs send can nowadays be restarted as I suffered several line drops.
I would have loved to have had reliable high speed ideally symmetrical FTTP at each end.

A working life in IT has made me paranoiac about backups.
Everything important is kept on a NAS.
ZFS RAID provides some resilience against hardware failure. Lost a 2TB disk yesterday which went bad fast. Its peers have been spinning for 5.5 years and only powered off 35 times. Resilvering a replacement took about 8 hours.
ZFS snapshots give some opportunity to recover from "oops, wrong file" accidents. Active but low volume datasets are snapshotted hourly, less active but intermittently high volume ones daily in the dead of night.

Everything on that NAS is replicated to another local one, as soon as the snapshot is taken.

Everything but scratchable media etc is replicated to the remote NAS, and also copied monthly to a rotating pair of external disks.

Photographs also get backed up to Dropbox.

Around 500 GB of really important stuff is backed up to rsync.net. Worth keeping an eye out for their special offers.
My 1050 GB Geo-Redundant storage costs me $315 a year.

Faster uploads would be wonderful!
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craigski

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #13 on: January 18, 2022, 11:37:37 AM »

What speed do you get when doing an o/s download on a 900Mbps+ connection?

~105MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) reported in Chrome when I just downloaded a 5GB windows ISO from Microsoft, which is actually faster than copying the same ISO from my external 2.5" HDD USB drive.

~40MB/s downloading Ubuntu ISO.

You do need a fast/modern PC/laptop to get the full speed, as Chrome (or I assume any other browser) is quite intensive on CPU for fast downloads, and a SSD drive.

I'm pretty sure a 900Mb/s connection today is cheaper than a 1Mb/s ADSL (BT Openworld Stingray modem  :) ) 25 years ago, if you take inflation into account?
« Last Edit: January 18, 2022, 11:39:40 AM by craigski »
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Chrysalis

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Re: How much speed do users need?
« Reply #14 on: January 18, 2022, 11:47:48 AM »

To be honest i have never understood why the average internet user needs such high speeds i get 60+ Mbps all the time and with 3 of us in the house streaming, gaming and  using the internet we have never seen any problems at all why would the average user need 150 - 500 Mbps, i understand in the future we will probably need these speeds but for now i imagine 30Mbps would be enough for the majority  of all internet users.



For me its to prevent my line choking when i am downloading games.  So essentially its about been able to consume multiple content at once and without even needing to bother with QoS as well.

If I am only downloading a game its ok, if I am only streaming a movie its ok.  If I am only streaming a football match its ok, If I am only streaming a youtube video its ok.  But if I do a bunch of these things at the same time it can be a problem, especially if downloading a game.  Not to mention games are absolutely huge now days, the last game I downloaded is 94gigs in size.

Now I live alone, imagine these problems if you are a family sharing a DSL connection or shared internet in multiple occupancy building, multiple kids, adults etc.
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