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."

Comments

10 Mbits isn't enough

[Nyder]

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.

Re:10 Mbits isn't enough

[beelsebob]

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.

Re:10 Mbits isn't enough

[Sable Drakon]

If someone doesn't know the difference between Mbps and MBps, they need to find a new geek news site.

Re:10 Mbits isn't enough

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:10 Mbits isn't enough

[viking80]

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.

Re:10 Mbits isn't enough

[Sique]

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%.

Re:10 Mbits isn't enough

[Dahamma]

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).

Re:10 Mbps

[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.

That's still way too slow for a peak speed

[dgatwood]

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.

First post!

[therufus]

Sorry, I live in Australia. :(

Re:Strange

[JMJimmy]

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.

"the UK and US finished joint-eight with Russia"

[Required Snark]

You're all geeking out abut the wrong part. The fact that the US, UK and Russia are in a dead heat for eighth place is pathetic.

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'.

Re:10 Mbps

[Yaztromo]

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.

Re:10 Mbps

[spire3661]

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.