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Broadband Users 'Need' At Least 10Mbps To Be Satisfied
Mickeycaskill writes: A new report says broadband users need at least 10Mbps speeds to be satisfied with their connection — especially with regards to online video which is now seen as a staple Internet application. Researchers at Ovum measured both objective data such as speed and coverage alongside customer data to give 30 countries a scorecard. Sweden was deemed to have the best broadband, ahead of Romania and Canada, while the UK and US finished joint-eight with Russia. "Ever since broadband services were launched, there has been discussion on what is the definition of broadband and how much speed do consumers really need?" said co-author Michael Philpott. "In 2015, the answer is at least 10Mbps if you wish to receive a good-quality broadband experience, and a significant number of households, even in well-developed broadband countries, are well shy of this mark."
I'm still getting only 5Mbs down where I live...
Speed doesn't matter as much, at least to me, as a connection that works. Between throttling, DPI, traffic "management", lack of ability to connect to peers, and such the problems I experience with my connection have nothing to do with raw speed. As to raw speed... 10Mbps is acceptable for websites but nowhere near enough for game downloads/P2P/etc.
Try it...
People are full of shit and completely nuts to the point that a speedtest result number matters.
Now maybe 3 people streaming a video at the same time need 10mbps, but that's it and with improving video codecs that will not increase.
The reality is that this is probably a cable co trying to convince people to pay more money....
Even TB transfers can be rsync'd while you are asleep...
You can't stream decent video with 10 Mbits while someone else in your house is trying to play an online game or even web browsing these days.
Worse, I have a 50 Mbit connection with Comcast and you can't stream their Xfinity stuff without buffers and pixelated/blocks showing up. Which I find amusing, that Comcast can't even stream their own shit on their own networks.
I'd say 25Mbits is the least people can use with a mostly usable internet.
And I"m saying Mbits instead of Mbps so people understand we are talking bits, not bytes.
Be seeing you...
Um, why would Canada be anywhere near the top? I mean, big cities will have okay coverage and bandwidth, but we still have absolutely egregious pricing compared with the rest of the developed world. That 10Mbit is going to cost you far more in even the most populous downtown areas than it would in a backwater village in Sweden or France. I guess if you completely ignore prices, we'd have relatively good coverage, but a lot of people won't want to pay for it at the prices we have it at.
Ya still, try it... Lying cunts.
Sounds like AT&T is behind this. Web pages hover 1.5 MB and then there's the behind-the-scene parts of a page you can't easily see which add even more.
I have 5 Mbps and it's fine for everything I do. I'm watching the MLB.TV stream in HD as I type this.
Most users don't need more than 10 Mbits/s averaged over a week, but most users will swear at their ISP at least once a year unless their connection is nearly an order of magnitude higher than that. I just did a full iCloud backup of a 64 GB iPhone 5 for the first time in a year. Had I used a 10 Mbit/s connection, given how much slower upload usually is, I'd expect to have only around 3 Mbit/s upload speed, which would mean the backup would have taken more than half a weekend. That's barely even usable. Forget being satisfied.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I live in an area with 50Mb/s connections available. I pay for 12, because it's plenty for everything I do. I don't really see any reason to have a faster connection frankly. I'm sure with higher quality video streaming that goal will move, but your assertion that 100Mb/s should be the standard is very off for today.
Pretty funny.
You need to PAY for 10Mbits, because that way in reality you'll get about 3Mbits.
If you pay for less than 10, then in practice you get less than 3, which means isBroadbandUserHappy = false.
You have 12 50 Mb/s connections into your house? Jesus! What the heck do you do with all that bandwidth? That has to cost a small fortune.
100Mbps may be a little excessive, but anything less than 50Mbps is starting to become pretty worthless with how many connected devices there are in homes plus the size of game downloads/patches.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
I have 12Mb ADSL in the condo and 50Mb Fiber in the house and there is minimal difference between the two.
A HD video, e.g. 2GB of Mpeg4 lasting 90 minutes, works out at 3 Mbps leaving plenty for others.
Sorry, I live in Australia. :(
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
Streaming is overrated. I live with 3mps down by choice, mostly because I'm cheap. I download videos from streaming sites and watch them all at once. It's great! No ads, no buffering, no proprietary plugins, I can freely skip around without said buffering, and I can save the video if I like it DRM-free. It doesn't go away when I stop paying for a service. I'm also a heavy gamer, but I get good pings, so 3mbps is good enough. I do my bulk downloads and uploads while I sleep and make sure the internet isn't being hogged while I game. Honestly, I don't have a lot of complaints. My friends and coworkers all think I'm weird. They're right, but I think they're weird for putting up with all this other shit that I don't.
On my ADSL2+ connection I usually somewhere around 8-9mbits downstream depending on exactly what my router last synced at (currently getting 9.1mbits) and that is plenty fine for me even when watching YouTube or other video sites. The biggest problem is the poor quality of my copper line to the exchange (blame that on Telstra here in Australia who own the wires)
Which means that the US is not a developed area. But 100Mbps is too high I think, that's standard ethernet speed and if you need more than that at home then you're probably running a pr0n server.
At some point these start to be bragging numbers, where people claim they want more just to have larger numbers. Similar to audiophiles ("I can hear the difference") and high end gamers ("better gibbing experience"). Especially true for people who take that fat pipe and then shove it all onto basic wi-fi.
10Mbit or 100Mbit to your broadband provider doesn't mean anything if what is overloaded are the interconnects between the broadband provider and the service providers. Starting with Comcast the large broadband providers engaged in deliberate interconnect congestion tactics that eventually forced Netflix and others to make direct payments to restore acceptable service to their customers, The new net neutrality rules are supposed to put an end to this practice but between net neutrality being tied up in courts and the GOP vowing to tear it down, the future is uncertain.
... you insensitive clod!
Oh, and anything less than 10000Mbps and I'm not happy.
10 Mbps is frankly pathetic. 100 Mbit connections should be the minimum...
I don't understand, I have a 10Mbps connection, that's 100Mbits per 10 seconds. What is the difference?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Yes, I know no one requires 10Mb Internet connections to live, but in the context of the title the quotes are unnecessary.
Government regulations and deals with municipalities have resulted in carriers offering "basic" Internet for under $30 per month. These are supposed to provide "broadband" connections for people with low incomes. But the carriers aren't stupid. They cap the speed of these services at about 4 Mbps, knowing that customers won't be satisfied, and will fork over even more of their small incomes for better speeds.
Cable companies have an inherent conflict of interest when it comes to Internet access. Making Netflix work well only erodes their main source of revenue. When there are competing providers dedicated only to Internet, they will provide both a good maximum speed and peering/caching infrastructure to ensure this speed is what users experience in practice.
10 Mbit/s (if it is a real 10, and not an "up to 10") is plenty to stream one video from NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon etc. (unless you are trying for one of the rare 4K streams). But if you have multiple users in the house, you will need to allow for times when they all want something different at the same time.
I'd be happy 99.99% of the time with 40 Mbit/s. If Google fiber ever gets here - I don't think I'd notice whether it was 100Mbit/s or 1Gbit/s more than a couple of times a year.
4Mbps with no monthly data caps would be fair enough, the problem I see often is that they also gouge users with tiny GB limits over which you pay quite a bit more. To be fair, I guess they know many ppl would just constantly download and keep those 4Mbps constantly used.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
If the internet was only plain text and maybe a few gifs...... like it should be.
It all depends on the use-case. I have a 100Mbps (University) connection, and it's fantastic for web, streaming video, etc. -- never had any issues. But if I'm backing up my computer or transferring large data sets, then yeah, it's slow, and I'll just use a patch cable to transfer between two (gigabit) machines (or plug in an external drive).
It all depends on your usage. Netflix 4k claims 7GB/hour, or about 16Mbps ("normal" HD is less than half that).
I feel I should point out that 16Mbps was a Token Ring speed from the late eighties. That's right, HD video could be transmitted with less bandwidth than was available on LANs 25 years ago, and 4K could almost make it if it weren't for the protocol overhead.
People have unrealistic expectations for what they need. It leads to organizations buying enough bandwidth that every user could have 100Mbit to the public Internet if their WAN backbone could support all of that, it's simply not necessary.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I agree. I tend to get frustrated with the speed gets below 100. This is particularly the case when downloading a Playstation game and you stare at that progress indicator waiting to play. :-) If I want to play, I want to play now, not in 30 minutes (games are big these days).
It's not excessive. I have 500 (full duplex), and I'd love to get more.
But I agree that 10Mbps is enough to fit the 'needs' for most people because most general people just go on facebook, checking email, and youtube videos. Plus it's enough for someone to find a job to get better income so that they can afford a better connection if they want. 10Mbps will give you what you need. It's really when you do high-end streaming, playing online, or torrents/backing up online when the bigger is better. To be honest, I grew up downloading gigs of data off of AOL 'cerver' chat rooms on a 56k modem. Not sure how I did it really besides leaving my computer on all night to download. I figure I could do fine nowadays on a 20Mbit connection even though I do a lot online, but eh, it's more cost effective to harass TW for a higher plan and their advertised rates.
So what do these three countries have in common? How about the fact that they are all politically corrupt oligarchies run for the power and profit of the economic/political elite. The proof: the wealth gap (ever expanding) between the rich and everyone else.
Meanwhile, socialist Sweden ranks number one. You know, evil socialism where everyone is enslaved and reduced to pathetic dependency on the state and nothing works because government! Of course Sweden also outranks the US, UK and Russian in health, longevity, education, low poverty, pretty much any measure of quality of life.
Just sayin'.
Why is Snark Required?
I have 100Mbps (down). I don't run a porn server, however I do work from home frequently. All wired 1 GBps in the house, yes I really run a SAN. Being your judgmental and unhappy self, how would you rate my usage? I'm guessing yours is a case of sour apples, since you can't get anything faster than what AT&T offers to the rubes.
Due to a long-illegal "exclusivity contract" my apartments had many years ago, I am stuck at the "max" of 2.4. Sometimes it will get up to 2.8 (not sure how that's possible) but it's total suckage. Three hours to download XCom from Steam, and had to tell my gf "your netflix may time out over the next few hours". What's even more annoying is that the ONLY fiber broadband in all of Oklahoma is just right across the street! But it's a private teleco for a specific suburb, so they can't run a connection across the street since that's not in their CLEC area of service. If my apartments hadn't had this contract many years ago, Cox would have done upkeep on the coax that is actually already ran. But they didn't, so now it's all cut, chopped, and not the right type for their current deployment...and they won't do anything unless the apartments pay for them to run new cable. I even offered that if they buy the cable, I'd run it myself to at least each building and to my apartment but their corporate masters said that's a no-go since I'm not an incorporated business with the "proper insurance".
10 would be fine if it was up and down, but they'll give you 10 down and 1 up, and that's not enough up for uploading youtube videos and streaming things. I know that's a minority of users, granny probably isn't going to need to do that, but plenty of other people would at some point.
Likewise, I had a choice between 100Mb and 20Mb. The cost was the same, but the 100Mb came with a data cap of 50GB/month so I chose the 20Mb and have never regretted it.
"Sweden finished first .. Romania was second .. The average broadband speed in the UK is 23Mbp"
..
More like 8Mbp, and if you want fibre, you can't have it because it isn't installed in the local exchange
@Anonymous Coward: "I have 5 Mbps and it's fine for everything I do. I'm watching the MLB.TV stream in HD as I type this."
It must be some kind of magic mbps that's faster then the old fashioned kind. I wonder how MLB.TV would cope with the average terrestrial football watching audience.
Which means that the US is not a developed area. But 100Mbps is too high I think, that's standard ethernet speed and if you need more than that at home then you're probably running a pr0n server.
Spoken like someone who has never used a 100Mbps internet connection.
I'm fortunate to live somewhere where I do have 100Mbps (down)[0], and it is invaluable. I run two VoIP phone lines, digital video streaming from a variety of services, we play online games, and as I work from home, I can checkout large code trees from SCM in reasonable amounts of time, and sling around multi-gigabyte VMs between home and work (I tend to prefer to generate and validate the VMs locally, and then upload them to their destination server when the need arises). And best of all, I can do all of these at the same time -- I'd have to push things really hard to see any degradation when my wife is watching Netflix or someone is talking on the phone.
The only bad thing is how asymmetrical the upload speed is -- it's only 6Mbps. That I conceivably can saturate pretty easily. Fortunately, in our typical use cases our upload needs tend to be fairly asymmetric as well -- the only two major areas where our network gets impacted is when I'm moving those VMs around between home and internal deployment servers, or when we're watching video via Slingbox from outside the network. It impacts work much more than pleasure. Not much I can do about it unfortunately, without going for some crazy priced business class connection that my employer won't pay for.
Then again, I have over 20 devices on our network (via GigE and 802.11ac). We're pretty heavy users, but with nary a pr0n server in sight.
Yaz
---
[0] - A strange thing seems to have happened recently. Earlier this year, my ISP cancelled offering 100Mbps service, but grandfathered in anyone who was already a customer. Their new highest tier offering at the time was only 60Mbps (for the same price as 100Mbps used to be, at that). Since then, however, they've introduced a new 120Mbps service. I've run multiple speed tests through a few different services, and I seem to be maxing out downloading at 120Mbps as of late. Still only 6Mbps up unfortunately.
4K can be streamed it in under 16Mbps no problem. I have seen great looking 4K @ 11Mbps, and that's with 448Kbps 7.1 audio and HDR. And with some of the latest/upcoming HEVC encoders, it looks like ~8Mbps 4K is very doable.
Problem is 4K isn't nearly as important as 10 bit color and HDR - I'd take 1080p 10bit Rec.2020 w/ HDR over basic 4K any day. Anyway, the point is if you have at least 15Mbps you will be able to do high end 4K streaming, no problem. And you can eke by with less.
2.5 gigabits down and 1 up
Yeah, you can. Everyone else in your house will be waiting ages just for a website to load.
(SWE) I have 2.5 GIGABITS and I think that is too slow. And how could someone live with 12 50 megabits.
4K can be streamed it in under 16Mbps no problem. I have seen great looking 4K @ 11Mbps, and that's with 448Kbps 7.1 audio and HDR. And with some of the latest/upcoming HEVC encoders, it looks like ~8Mbps 4K is very doable.
People testing HEVC, including Netflix, seems to disagree with this. They don't even think it is realistic to get it down to 10-12 Mbps over the next 2 years.
"If the 40% efficiency improvements do indeed come true for HEVC, years from now we might see 4K streaming bitrates at the 10-12Mbps level, but it would not be for a very long time." -- http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2015/01/4k-streaming-bandwidth-problem.html
I've had 1 Gb/s university connection for 15+ years and it's true that the public Internet doesn't benefit much. If anything, it seems the large sites have been optimized for a billion wireless phone customers and do not actually serve content well to a desktop like mine.
On the other hand, it's nice to be able to do bulk transfers for work stuff and saturate that 1 Gb/s link. We've moved the real big stuff onto servers that have 10 Gb/s links to the backbone, and it is very nice to see transfers saturating the near-line RAID arrays at 500+ MB/s.
Except that's not how TCP/IP (or adaptive streaming) on a shared network works. Come back when you learn a bit more about it, and don't feel the need to be an AC.
One can exaggerate to make a point, but this is getting ridiculous.
How in the world is 2.5 gigabits too slow. There are barely any services in the internet which can saturate that kind of bandwidth.
Depends on the size of household. At my place in the late afternoon, there may be three video streams be running into different rooms, and I guess that's ok even with 12Mbps, but 30Mbps is better specially considering you need something closer to 10Mbps for a single decent quality 1080p stream.
What excuse does the US government have for not having the fastest broadband in the world? I mean here we are with the streets paved with gold and gold can conduct electricity and therefore data at great speeds. So maybe we are not really number one and by the way the streets in front of my home are not made of gold. They are old, decaying asphalt with pot holes.
You need somewhere between 20-50Mbps of dedicated bandwidth for a smooth decent quality compressed stream. Netflix requires UltraHD streamers to have 100Mbps broadband.
As someone who had upgraded from 15mbs to 20mbs. I can still say less than 10mbs is good enough for a lot of people. 1 mbs is still enough for browsing and low resolution video. 10mbs you can stream high resolution video. 20mbs is so more people in your household and browse and watch streaming high res video.
Having the later. 15mbs did work, but but we got a few mid-stream buffering during peak usage. So for the price difference adding an additional 5mbs was considered worth it.
In my Area which is rural, we can only go up to 50mbs. However the price for that is very high, and not really worth it even with me being VPN to work, and family watching HD. and browsing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's indeed very interesting, specially to compare USA and Russia. People argued that relatively poor average adoption of broadband has to do with the fact that USA is a huge country with most population centers in the coastal areas, while the middle states are rural with low population density and very high population dispersion. Well, guess what, Russia is in the same boat, only worse. Only 110 million Russians are living in the European Russia, resulting in population density below 30 people per sq km, which is already lower than USA average or European. And once you count the Asian part of Russia, the population density is below 10 per square km.
I need at the bare minimum 250mbps symmetrical and 17TB bandwidth per month.
Captcha knows what I'm talking about. accedes
I disagree. I recall hearing that an UltraHD stream of decent quality requires 20-50Mbps. Netflix is already offering a pilot UltraHD service, but the specifically require that you have 100Mbps connection.
So I personally think, one way or another the geekdom and nerddom will move onto 100Mbps broadband eventually. At the same time, I fail to see a genuine "must have" application for the gigabit broadband in most homes.
I don't really see how the UK can be in the same boat as the US. I live in rural south west UK and have reliable unlimited 50/10 fiber for £50/month, no traffic shaping or anything.
Previously in a small town elsewhere in the south west i had reliable unlimited 16/1 adsl2 broadband for £15/month, also no traffic shaping.
These were the best i could find of many, many, many options i had for choosing broadband providers.
I live in Italy and ... sigh, 10Mbps could be a dream for most of people living outside big cities.
By now, JUST (few neighborhood) Milan is reached by the fastest network available here: 300Mbps ...
The basic plan, here, is 7Mbps Download / 384kbps upload ... Video Streaming WHAT ?
Fortunately, although in a rural area, I'm reached by a 10Mbps down / 1Mbps UP ... and, if I try to stream (SD-quality video), I :( .
can't surf or download anything else
Some small towns are not reached by the broadband either...
The vast majority of users are never satisfied with any amount of bandwidth for long.
Give them 10 today and they'll be complaining that they don't have 100 as soon as they see someone else that does.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
To be honest I've lost track of who said what due to our stupid revolving door leadership, but I seem to recall a little while ago that the choice was '25Mbit in 5 years' or '100Mbit in 8 years for a lot more cost'.
I was hoping for the 25Mbit choice because it would be fast enough to move the bottleneck elsewhere, but people were scathing and condescending about being so 'backwards' and 'outdated'.
Looks like I was right.
But 100Mbps is too high I think, that's standard ethernet speed
No. "standard" ethernet speed is 10Mbps. On fat yellow coax.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I run two VoIP phone lines
Amazing. You do realise you don't need more than 128Kbits/sec for that, don't you?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
In general what I have seen in the US is either very good broadband from cable companies who generally provide decent speed. Or you have lousy DSL or Wireless broadband which tends to barely provide anything close to actual broadband speed. Its really embarrassing what some call broadband. Some people are still dependent on dial up which in today's complex web pages, and streaming video services cannot provide enough speed for any reasonably good experience. Even cellular data services are not very robust in speed on a average basis. You have plenty of variables in 4G speed and some areas still only have 3G speed. We have infrastructure in place to provide better to rural areas in the US. But nobody wants to even spend a little to provide service to customers spread out so much. Satellite and cellular are their only options other then a few wireless providers and they do not provide really good speeds. Unfortunately only the trunk lines have been fiber improved and yet the regional and local lines remain old copper. I don't see any interest in investment in technology to solve those rural areas.
Bittorrent.
He answers in pounds, which conveniently^Wconfusingly is a unit of force and mass at the same time.
I have about 3.5 Mbps and I can watch MLB.TV as well. Gets choppy if my kid jumps onto Netflix or Youtube though.
Jesus Christ
I can tell you that users stop complaining when they get *consistent* 1.3Mb/s down and 2Mb up. This may be surprising until you consider that uploading is mostly interactive, real-time activity such as sending photos, movies, documents where downloads are usually browsing and streaming.
For my household 100Mb/s is the sweet spot. We had problems with 50 when everyone was streaming, and anything more than 100 is cost prohibited. But 100 is just perfect, no complaints about speed and under $100 bucks a month.
All this head-scratching about what users "need" bothers me. It's focusing on the minimum. Which seems to imply that broadband providers can focus on some minimal level of service and then stop investing in infrastructure or really get away with throttling and caps under the guise of limiting you to "what you need".
IMHO, providers should be focusing on some (ultimately arbitrary, yes) number that better represents the growth curve of usage and speeds. Infrastructure investment in networks should be continual until actual consumption trends show a flat line and throttling and capping looks like a wasted investment because it doesn't return any value because the network has the headspace to accommodate what everyone wants to do.
the speed matters a lot in today's world as the website that opens first sells first. some website have a optimized layout like www.coverscart.com which helpsthem load faster.
But 100Mbps is too high I think, that's standard ethernet speed and if you need more than that at home then you're probably running a pr0n server.
Yes, and 640K is enough for everyone.
I have 1000Mbps (yes, 1Gigabit) internet connection. Yes, it is more bandwidth than the homeplug (600Mbps or so) that links my room PC to my internet gateway router. BUT, that means the wifi that connects to the router directly would not suffer no matter how hard I downloads from my PC, and vice versa. And getting a HD movie, or a full game, or the latest 1GB patch for whatever, in a few minutes really spoils you.
I can get a 20/20 dedicated connection for $20+sale-tax, no hidden fees, no cap, no installation cost, transit provider is Level 3. Midwest USA!
If I could get 5 Mb/s out of Comcast and have it RELIABLE I'd be way better off than I am now with 20+Mb/s to Comcast servers and VPN connections dropping 5 times a day.
Yesterday I gave up and tethered up my cell phone. It was slower, but rock solid.
Comcast tech: "Go to speedtest.net -- what does it say?"
Which means that the US is not a developed area. But 100Mbps is too high I think, that's standard ethernet speed and if you need more than that at home then you're probably running a pr0n server.
At some point these start to be bragging numbers, where people claim they want more just to have larger numbers. Similar to audiophiles ("I can hear the difference") and high end gamers ("better gibbing experience"). Especially true for people who take that fat pipe and then shove it all onto basic wi-fi.
100Mbps is "standard ethernet speed"? Perhaps last decade...
Arguably "standard ethernet" would be 10Mbps (historically, at least!), but these days gigabit ethernet would be what most of us consider "standard".
Bittorrent.
Only with many, many popular torrents, and then you run into the problem that you need very fast disks to keep up with the 600MB/sec read+write. I work with a lot of systems that transfer a lot of data, and the trick is balancing all the hardware so it can all keep up with the speeds.
At my work, we're just installing a 100Gbps connection to the Internet, and all that means is that we now have to upgrade everything else to be able to take advantage of it.
I have 100Mbps (down). I don't run a porn server, however I do work from home frequently. All wired 1 GBps in the house, yes I really run a SAN. Being your judgmental and unhappy self, how would you rate my usage?
First, I run a 10Gbps backbone that my SAN and ESX hosts are connected to, and 1Gbps to all other locations. So, you're nothing special.
I have FiOS up to 500/500 available where I live, but only pay for 35/35 because other than the occasional game download, nothing takes so long that I even notice. I can play games, stream movies, remote desktop, etc., and it's hard to tell which sessions are local and which go out over the Internet.
Got "Shadow of Mordor" fro Linux (bought directly from Feral, to reward behavior I approve of, like porting). 42GB, and on the connection we had (allegedly 10Mbps, in practice ~7.5Mbps) it took over two days to download. And Netflix/Youtube/etc. got slow when a big download was happening. So we just this weekend bumped up to 35Mbit (seems to get around 40Mbit in practice). It's already better when two people are trying to watch different streams.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
10Mbps is pretty good and would satisfy many people today, so long as it is symmetric. 10Mbps or even 100Mbps is worthless when upload speeds don't exceed 2Mbps.
That said, today's satisfaction with 10Mbps is going to become tomorrow's dissatisfaction as requirements continue to grow. The growing 4K market will demand higher bandwidth even with the likes of UltraFlix promising 4K in as little as 4Mbps.
I tend to get frustrated with the speed gets below 100. This is particularly the case when downloading a Playstation game and you stare at that progress indicator waiting to play. :-) If I want to play, I want to play now, not in 30 minutes (games are big these days).
I only allocate 10Mbps to my Steam downloads, and it's not unusual for a game to take 10 hours to download (40GB games aren't unusual, as you say). Even with 100Mbps, it would take an hour and saturate the link.
If you want to play now, you're going to need at least 1Gbps...that 100Mbps isn't going to cut it.
So you let sabnzbdplus queue them up however it wants to. It's only the connection to outside that is slow; the connection from the fileserver to the clients ought to easily be able to handle however many streams as you have.
It sounds like a lot of people in this discussion are doing streaming wrong. Streaming is for LANs, not Internet. On the Internet: downloading makes all your problems go away. Once you're using this better tech, then 10Mbps doesn't really seem slow.
Woah now, the GP didn't say anything about race. The measurements the GP provided are objectively measured. Sweden has 14.3% foreign-born population, which is low. But the GP isn't drawing any correlation between race and measurements of health, longevity, education, and low poverty in Sweden.
So why are you trying to claim correlation?
We need more low definition video. Actually.. what I mean is we need more video that can automatically scale back to low definition when necessary.
Don't get me wrong.. I would prefer multi-gigabit fiber available free from everywhere and all the time. But.. sometimes you just don't have a great connection.
I used to watch Real Video* over a 28.8k dialup modem FCOL! I'm not expecting theatre quality HD out of two tin cans and a string but it would be nice to at least get a non-pausing low quality view when the cable modem or cellular is being flakey.
* - for you youngungs Real Media was the name of a company that was among the first to do audio and video codecs that worked over the internet
Quick reality check: What do people actually need and want? Deutsche Glasfaser is currently preparing to develop fiber where I live. In order to start development, 40% of the households in a given area need to subscribe by the deadline. If the threshold of 40% isn't reached, the offer is cancelled and there is no buildout. During the initial development, the installation is free and there is a discounted offer on internet service: Symmetric 100Mbps and a phone line for 35EUR/month (ca. $40), with a minimum 2 years subscription. Optionally you can upgrade to 200Mbps symmetric at an additional 10EUR/month. With 14 days left until the deadline, which has already been extended by three months, the subscriber count stands at 27% of households, up by 1% since a month ago. This is in a prosperous semi-rural city 20km outside of Düsseldorf (a suburb of Düsseldorf, by American standards).
Broadband users need to feel they have a choice and are not getting ripped off in order to feel satisfied.
www.itjerk.com
Of course they didn't say anything outright. That's what dog whistle racism IS. You don't actually say it, you just imply it, and the listener fills in the dots. African-Americans depress social conditions across the board in America, remove them from the statistics and the USA is right up there with Sweden and the other white countries.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I was setting up company networks in the 90's. I could tell you then that NOBODY wanted to use the network until we had 10mbs. It is the threshold for most people. This is not new news. It is rather old news that has caught up to the world wide internet.
Consider a modern 4.5 person family. 4 1080p streams at 20mbs fills that quite nicely.
No sir I dont like it.
Imagine if Intel stopped CPU research and said "current speeds are faster than what most people need." They make faster processors regardless of current use cases. Which is interesting because they have very little competition (ala Comcast) and could probably get away with not making faster processors.
anything less than 50Mbps is starting to become pretty worthless
It would take a family of 10 simultaneously watching different HD Netflix streams to saturate a 50Mbps connection. At a certain point (according to the article, that point is around 10Mb) it becomes "impossible" to actually consume that much bandwidth. A 10-20 Mb service with proper QoS to account for gaming and other latency sensitive activities and a well thought out update regime to cover game updates should take care of 99% of the average user's internet needs.
I realize that 10Mb doesn't fit with consumers' "I want this, and I want it now" mentality, but calling less than 50Mb "worthless" for your average consumer is a bit of a stretch.
I have 500 (full duplex)
What do you you ACTUALLY do with that much bandwidth? I mean yeah, being able to download a full HD movie in minutes is nice, but seriously...
I'm in the city limits. I pay for 6 and get 1.5, and it isn't going to improve.
I hope they hurry up with that municipal residential fiber.
So you want Hillary Clinton to come and satisfy you? Your tastes are disturbing.
He said nothing of the sort. He didn't even allude to anything of the sort. You are the one whose brain immediately sprang to your racist conclusion. It's not a case of "dog whistle racism" but "DNS-and-BIND is a racist idiotism". Thanks for letting us know just how messed up your brain is.
5Mbps is plenty for most people as long as they actually get 5Mbps all the time. The problem is that most providers only sell the maximum speed but can't provide this during peak hours. AT&T received billions of taxpayer dollars to install rural broadband but pocketed the money and only used the pre-existing DSL infrastructure instead. They upped the last mile connection to 3Mbps without upgrading the backbone so they technically achieved the required speed for the grants but only at 4am on a Wednesday with a full moon during a power outage.
You are trying to solve the wrong problem. Just because your connection is too slow to realtime stream HD, does that mean you have a SD screen? If, in fact, your screen is low res, ok, then you have solved it correctly. But I don't think that's the case.
If you're watching your video on 1990s-or-later monitor (or a 200x-or-later "television"), then you still want high definition, and poor connectivity isn't really a barrier to that. Just let it download however long it takes to download. No matter how bad your Internet connection is, local storage and extremely-fast connections between that storage and your monitor is possible. So just let the hour of 1080p video take 4 hours to download, if that's how long it takes. Then watch it. Everyone wins.
Everyone wins, except those who insist that you stream in real time. Well, maybe they have an unrealistic and technologically backwards attitude. Tech is for solving problems, not creating them.
Realtime is usually an unnecessary burden. Sure: maybe not always unnecessary. Perhaps people in slow-Internet areas will have to pay a shitload of money for connectivity for, say, spoiler-proof sports streams. I am not discounting those people -- I'm just happy I'm not one of them. ;-) But for the other 95% of video uses cases, realtime is nearly worthless. Not that it's bad, but it's not something you need or is worth going to a lot of trouble to keep. And it's definitely not worth sacrificing resolution!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This is like saying room air conditioners are just as good as central air because you are the only user....Households often have more than one person....
Good-bye
We are neck deep into an Information Age, these are not crazy speeds. Every home should have 1 GB SYMMETRICAL for $50/mo by now.
Good-bye
We want it because we know it can be done trivially and the ISPs are holding back. We want it because its feasible, it doesnt have to be entirely practical.
Good-bye
I tend to agree with you that the ISPs could be doing better, but I think you and I have different definitions of trivial. A 5X increase to the average US broadband speed doesn't seem like something that can be done trivially.
There are many ISPs but nearly all of them rely on BT openreach and many of them also rely on BT wholesale. So what you get depends largely on what the BT network looks like in your area. It can vary massively between areas of similar development levels. Either you are quoting advertised rather than actual rates or you got lucky with the areas you chose to live in.
If you are on a small phone exchange then most of the ISPs will be relying on BT wholesale and congestion and/or caps are likely. If you are a long way from the exchange or the wiring happens to be of crap quality then your ADSL speeds will suck.
The recent introduction of FTTC+VDSL services (presumabblly what you are reffering to when you say "fiber") has improved things for many people but it isn't deployed everywhere yet. can still be problematic in the case of long or shitty wiring from cabinet to user and in some areas there have been oversubscription issues (when installing FTTC equipment openreach assumes that there will be initally only a small number of users on a given cabinet, this isn't always true). There was also an issue where interference concerns prevented installation of VDSL equipment in the exchange thereby preventing people on "exchange only" lines from getting VDSL though I belive BT are working on inserting cabinets to solve that one.
If you live in a virgin media area you have the option of using their network, unfortunately using their network means you are stuck with them as an ISP. Upstream speeds also suck.
There have also been a few upstarts offering very fast service to the lucky few but afaict having a negligable impact on the overall picture.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
On what logic do you base this, or did you pull that number from your arse?
Good-bye
But Verizon said you don't need that much....
I just went from 5 to 60. it is very nice, now we can have two HD video streams, my work going on over VPN, my VOIP phone, and maybe a browser or two going in the house without issue. On 5 that was too much. I could get 100 but so far 60 handles everything. What is not mentioned is 1 GB fiber to every house does nothing if the other end of the connection sucks.
It was half arse-pulling and half knowing how to type into google.
https://www.google.com/search?q=us+average+broadband+speed&oq=us+average+broadband+speed&aqs=chrome..69i57.6984j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=0&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?... Both of those come up with around 10Mb (using nice round numbers). My original comment was related to someone saying 50Mb was becoming pretty much useless, so I went with that.
dagnbbit, my first link got eaten. https://www.google.com/search?...
Considering that the FCC changed the definition of "broadband" to 25mbps, I think the article needs updating. Maybe 10mbps "high speed" (bullshit marketing term) is enough for general usage, but "broadband" is an official term governed by the FCC. 10mbps simply doesn't meet this requirement, therefor it isn't even broadband.
Source: https://www.fcc.gov/document/f...
I have 5 Mbps too. It works fine for streaming Netflix, Amazon, HBO.... Now, I watch in 720, not 1080, but on a 40" TV from 10 feet away the physics of perception are such that it's not going to be perceptibly better beyond 720. Definitely a better signal that the 1080i I get from satellite. In both cases there's post-processing through a pretty good Onkyo receiver, granted.
I have about 3.5 Mbps and I can watch MLB.TV as well. Gets choppy if my kid jumps onto Netflix or Youtube though.
This sounds like a dick competition where you are measuring to see who has the smallest one. You appear to be the winner.
I have 26Mbps so I can watch 4K Netflix and Ultraflix.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Amazing. You do realise you don't need more than 128Kbits/sec for that, don't you?
You do realize I listed of at least five OTHER things that I use on top of that?
VoIP can be sensitive to jitter, and it's not that hard to add transmission latency when you're also piling a whole lot of other, higher bandwidth streams through the pipe, like video, or putting large VMs into the cloud, the quality can easily suffer.
But please, go ahead and try to watch Netflix while a family member is on a VoIP call on your ISDN line. I look forward to hearing how well that works out for you.
Yaz
Sweden has a very high public expenditure quota, which is /not/ equivalent to being socialist. I'ts also a huge country in area, with a lot of natural wealth (WOOD) inhabited by a very small number of people. There's some things that just work out well when you scale them down, but can't be projected to completely unrelated scenarios. Comparing Sweden to the UK, even the US is just ... well off.
Right. Modern families don't watch the same shows anymore, probably don't even eat meals together.
where? I'm in the midwest.
Cheap storage VM.
Jim Bob, is that you?
Cheap storage VM.
I have 5 Mbps and it's fine for everything I do. I'm watching the MLB.TV stream in HD as I type this.
Agreed. We typically do web and 2 Netflix streams, and may YouTube on top of that. Haven't had any issues with the 5-8Mbps connections we've had the last couple years, and I don't really feel like raising my costs for something of negligible benefits.
And yes, when broadband (cable/dsl) internet come out I was willing to get it and go to higher tiers of services because I used it - ISO downloads, etc - but as the tiers have gotten faster, our usage hasn't really changed. Yes, I still do ISO downloads, and all of that and we've added YouTube/NetFlix, but it's still basically the same. So now I go to the mid-grade which is about the same price as the top grade when it first came out ($40-$60/month). Eventually we'll probably drop to the lower tiers as the speeds increase.
And yes, we use WiFI and gigabit ethernet in the house - both of which are faster than our Internet connection.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I think you meant Gb and not GB. At those speeds I think there will start to be bottlenecks along the way that will also need to be addressed. When I said Jesus Christ I meant in the context of "Must be nice to have those kinds of problems". I am all for more...me and my measly 3.5Mb/s and 512Kbps up. This is quite normal for many people and if we really want to go into the "Information Age" as you put it, we need to start thinking about raising the floor for all instead of having speeds that only a small number of people can take advantage of.
Lets mostly get to 10 right? My heart will not bleed for the anyone with 500Mb/sec (full duplex no doubt).
The guy with the smallest one is most likely to think in that context.
your getting 100mb down, but your uploading VM's to work on a 6mb connection.
I have about 20 devices on my network, with 4 vpn's running (2 for work, one for my server, one for my netflix). I never have issues with my 15 down 1.5 up. I would take more upstream, but I don't see the need for additional downstream.
I also run my linux desktop from home using x2go, video is choppy, but audio is fine.
Cheap storage VM.
It works great with the right router. I can pop over and set you up with some QoS.
Cheap storage VM.
Well played sir. Mod that up "funny".
Up north some.
Funny, Russia and the UK also lack African-Americans, whats your point?
When I download a game for my PS4 I get over 100 Mb/s just for that (I'd like it to be faster but since it never seems to happen I'm guessing that the problem isn't on my side). Also, I have a family of heavy Internet users lots of Youtube and online games, also Steam downloads tend to be a lot faster), and whatever they do should not affect me, nor should my usage affect them. Finally, sorry for the bad writing in the above text. Using Slashdot on mobile is so bad that I'd rather spend my time writing this paragraph of explanation than to actually try edit the text above.
My ISP does offer 2 Gb/s (the fibre modem has two 1 Gb/s connections) but that's starting to get ridiculous. A mentioned above, at those speeds the problem are usually with other parts of chain, like your local hardware's ability to actually process the data at that rate.
One thing that illustrates this is that after I upgraded to 500, I realised that my existing router wasn't actually able to handle more than about 250 Mb/s, so I went and bought a more professional router and all of a sudden I could saturate the link.
But would prefer one of the three 100 Gbps nodes on the UW campus if I can get it. Will settle for the campus wide 40 Gbps.
Mbps are for last century.
Adapt.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
10 Mbps on my 40 Gbps campus wide backbone is like asking me to crawl like a snail when I'm usually a cheetah.
1 Gbps should be the minimum. Even that feels slow.
Embrace the future.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I work with a lot of systems that transfer a lot of data, and the trick is balancing all the hardware so it can all keep up with the speeds.
Yes, I imagine "not having obvious bottlenecks" is a most clever and creative trick.
No, I am a video streaming architect. You are an AC who clearly has no clue (or balls).
If you stream a "16Mbps" video with a modern adaptive bitrate design (which ALL major streaming services use - HLS, Smooth Streaming, MPEG-DASH, etc), and someone else tries to load a website via the same Internet connection, each one of those TCP connections opened by a web browser to download HTML, images, etc, will compete with that TCP connection downloading video. The video won't block the other sockets, but it also won't be able to keep up with 16Mbps. But that's ok, because adaptive streaming will.... adapt - and switch seamlessly to a lower bitrate. You could decide to enable QOS on your router or manually mess with things to change the behavior, but on a shared connection with a decent streaming service, I wouldn't bother - let things work as they will and everyone will share the connection pretty equally by nature of the SHARED NETWORK.
I'm sure most of the terms I mentioned here went way over your head, but hey, that's what Google is for. A bit of work and you might be able to learn something today, if that's possible.
Almost any connection (e.g., 28k8) is better than no connection.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
thank you for illustrating my point good sir. I'm sure if he replied, he would indeed write he weighs in at 250lb, not counting the weight of the neckbeard as it is held up by the fartwind comming out of fat nigger asshole as he is sticking his tongue in. While you or I would understand that he is an overweight fattie, another person like him would pretend to be overly obtuse and annoy everyone by pretending to not understand what he meant. I mean, are we talking about lbf or lbm here? what the hell is a pound? pound what? pound the scale? pound a cake? pound a smelly asshole?
Your post is funny, and made me look up lbm and lbf, and I learved something and laughed ensemble (using some fucking classy cultured french here). that makes you funny in a sharp and cool way. his response is what makes him a fat neckbeard loser with nigger shit on his tongue. ,comma,. and the funny thing is, he'll probably stay that way, rotting his life away, and even master the craft of being an annoying loser more as he gets older. then he will eventually fuck a couple of ugly fucking girls over 20 years of time, marry the second one, have an unhappy marriage and an ugly litter of ugly creatures who will be raised in an unhappy home, and as he gets more fat and more hairy and more unhappy with his life and wife, he will start going to titty bars, then hookers, in secret, then in the open, and will just eventually drops in the unhappy pool of shit that is his life. But, myman.mp4, your short comment was absolutely gold, and I mean it with no sarcasm. I read with scores and moderation turned off, but for the holy god Jesus of the godly rancid nigger asshole land, I wish more comments like that were around slashdot like back in the good old days before I started just posting to make fun of people and actually contributed to the discussion. it was a good conversation back then. now i just want to load up on milk and spill the beans into these newly hip sladditors' mouths. fucking comma,