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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 have 5 Mbps and it's fine for everything I do. I'm watching the MLB.TV stream in HD as I type this.
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.
You have got to be kidding...
A video uses like 2-4mbps (YES mbps).
Online gaming cares about latency, throughput is NOTHING.
If a streaming provider glitches that badly, it means that they don't know how to do video streaming. It isn't rocket science. You ensure that you buffer enough to keep playback going, starting at a bit rate that is lower than your connection's average speed initially so that you can buffer ahead. You then transparently switch to a higher quality stream (if available) after you've built up at least half a minute of buffer. And if you detect that the buffer is shrinking, you begin buffering progressively lower-quality streams until it stops shrinking. If the network performance problem goes away, you can always switch back to the high-quality stream and (if the performance is dramatically better than expected) opportunistically replace chunks of the lower-quality buffered data with higher-quality versions, beginning with the oldest content, in an attempt to avoid the user ever seeing the lower-quality version.
The problem is not the speed of the connection. The problem is pencil pushers at the content providers who try to micromanage the amount of data that they provide, giving you the bare minimum amount of cached data necessary, so that when you stop watching, they won't have wasted any data sending you content that you didn't watch. This approach is ineffective, and results in constant glitches if the network connection speed is variable. Unfortunately, that approach is all too common.
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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?
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
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[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.