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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."
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.
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.
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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.
No, I think they mean you need to get 10. Which means, at least around here, that you need to pay for at least 50.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those were some good ol' days. I honestly think Flash advertisements and dumping loads of jpegs/pngs on a website killed efficiency.
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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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.
@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
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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.
There are already several games that are WAY above 10 GB, though.
Witcher 3, if my memory serves right, clocks in over 30 GB.
Final Fantasy 14 with Heavensward clocks in over 20 GB.
I -think- Final Fantasy 13 was an insane 40-50 GB, and with FF15 releasing soon I doubt it will be any smaller.
10 GB for a game just doesn't cut it any longer.
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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.
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
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.
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.
buy a game on steam and that bastard might be 60gb
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...
From what I understand, for gaming the latency (RTT) is more important than the speed of the connection.
When you are actually playing that is true (though it does vary by game, some games use a lot more bandwidth than others).
When you are trying to get into the game it's another matter. Many games require you to be fully up to date before you can even connect to the matchmaking servers and many games can download additional content when connecting to a game.
And if you have multiple gamers in the household having more bandwidth tends to reduce the latency spikes when one gamer is in-map while another is downloading content.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You can get reliable 5 Mb/s... if you pay for it. What you actually are paying for is a shared channel that has a theoretical maximum capacity of 20 Mb/s.
Reliable guaranteed minimum speeds are much more expensive than shared bandwidth. You get what you pay for.
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
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.
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