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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."
10 Mbps is frankly pathetic. 100 Mbit connections should be the minimum standard in developed areas.
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.
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.
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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.
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. :(
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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)
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.
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.
What about the ones that want to shove GREAT BIG DICKS in your mouth, anus, nostrils and earlobes?
... you insensitive clod!
Oh, and anything less than 10000Mbps and I'm not happy.
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.
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'.
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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.
"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.
2.5 gigabits down and 1 up
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dog whistle racism. Sweden lacks African-Americans, and is nearly 100% white, which obviously contributes to their success in your addled bigoted brain.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
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?"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
Funny, Russia and the UK also lack African-Americans, whats your point?
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.
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Almost any connection (e.g., 28k8) is better than no connection.
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