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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."

6 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. Re:10 Mbits isn't enough by beelsebob · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you can't stream over 50Mb/s, you're not getting 50Mb/s. BluRay video is between 16 and 32Mb/s.

    As always, the cable company is screwing you with "up to" 50Mb/s, rather than the actual advertised speed.

  2. Re:10 Mbits isn't enough by viking80 · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you have 50Mbs you will not have any problems with decent video while playing a game. If you do, the problems must be somewhere else. Your hardware or network congestion/configuration, or many of you family members is watching porn in 4k 3D without your knowledge.

    Netflix bitrate for 4k video is 15.6Mbps. Games are mostly under 0.5Mbps. If you run a game server, you may need more than 0.5Mbps.

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    don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
  3. Re:Strange by JMJimmy · · Score: 5, Informative

    I agree with game downloads, p2p I do not because everything is streamed nowadays that is legal...So lets bring back real copies of data, then p2p will be there.

    Like the THEMIS Day IR 100m Global Mosaic torrent, at 42GB is streamed? Or the Internet Census 2012 at 569.43GB? Torrents are not just movies - there are some really interesting public domain datasets out there. Try academictorrents.com

    Let's think about a game download, you have say 10GB of data for a game...

    At 10mbps that will take slightly longer than 2 hours....

    At 50mbps it will take 27 minutes....

    Are you really gonna sit at your computer waiting 27 minutes to download a game (that you could download overnight) or can you not go outside? How many times a year will you do this, 5 times? How when averaging 5 times over a year can you not just wait overnight?

    If I only downloaded my games once it would be 9.05 times per month, every month since 2006, and that's being very generous. That is *just* games, not datasets/video/etc. I *average* 10GB/day through all my various online activities (only counting downloads and not including 2am-8am) a 50mbps connection would save me 47 hours of waiting per month, whether that's active waiting or not that's a LOT of time.

  4. Re:10 Mbits isn't enough by Sique · · Score: 3, Informative

    As someone who does streaming for a living: Protocol overhead (including the container for the raw stream) is between 10 and 25 percent. Not 300 as you claim. If your connection has an MTU of 1492 (typical for IPv4 tunneled via IPv6), the IP packet header is less than 0,3% of the payload. With IPSec tunneling you typically have 1408 bytes left, and the overhead is still less than 7%.

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    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  5. Re:10 Mbits isn't enough by Dahamma · · Score: 3, Informative

    Protocol overhead is roughly 3x that of the data packet due to the OSI onion type design

    That's absurd. HTTP overhead for a large download is about 3%, not 3x! So for that 12mbps stream you need about 12.4mbps bandwidth.

    Your data packet is wrapped up in 6 different IP envelopes, which is why it gets so bloated.

    That doesn't even make any sense. You clearly saw an OSI diagram once but have never actually learned a thing about TCP/IP.

    Besides, 1080p can be done reasonably @ 4Mbps, and at near BD quality @ 9Mbps. 12Mbps is PLENTY for either of those if you are not sharing the connection with a lot of other operations (and even if you are, any decent streaming service is adaptive so you will at worst just see a bit lower quality video while the connection is competing with other uses).

  6. Re:10 Mbps by hodet · · Score: 1, Informative

    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.