Faster internet is coming, but only for a few
axios.com
axios.com
I recently upgraded from 30Mb to 75Mb. I don't really notice a big difference. Very little I did before needed a full 30 Mb connection. Is Netflix higher quality now? I can't tell.
I doubt I'd upgrade again anytime soon. I've reached a point where my internet speed's bits per second has exceeded my ability to consume data.
I don't get any joy out of that. I mean, yay, it's a big number. So what? My file still arrived in an instant. Whether it takes 1 second or 0.1 seconds is of no difference to how my life goes.
If I were a heavy bittorrent user, maybe that would help? But most of the content I want is on legal means now, Netflix and Prime TV. And even if I wanted to pirate something, at 75Mb I can get it fast enough.
Just like there was no need for most people to have >10Mbit internet without the likes of Netflix or Youtube existing, and no way for those sites to survive if everyone is using a 56k modem.
Give me streaming audio at the absolute quality limits at 8Mb, 32Mb, 80Mb- I won't be able to hear a difference. My internet bandwidth is beyond my ears capabilities.
I've seen 4K and 8K TVs recently- I can't tell the difference. (I'm far more interested in contrast ratios, frankly). If I can stream video at 4K, my bandwidth will have exceeded my eyes capabilities. Why would I want to pay more for 8K hardware and bandwidth if I get nothing other than smug satisfaction?
At a certain point, there isn't any benefit to each human to having more bandwidth. And me? I think I've reached my limit at only 75Mb. 1Gb would be neat, but what for?
1Gbps sounds great for an office, though; kinda sick of having shared 50Mbps connections where some stream HD videos just to listen to music.
- The most important change was NOT the bandwidth increase from 56kbps to low megabit speeds. The most important thing is Always On which for most people arrived at the same time. Omnipresent Network Access changes how and why people use the network. I lived in a house that had 24/7 56kbps Internet access in the mid-1990s and it was basically the _same_ as now [except video was much poorer quality] because it was _Always On_. People who had to wait maybe a minute for Dial-up had a completely different experience because dialing up is a thing you do, like watching TV, whereas being connected 24/7 is an inherent thing like being able to understand Spanish. It felt weird _not_ having the Network if I was away. That feeling finally went away when I got a smartphone years later.
- All the applications already existed. Youtube is a refined version of technologies that already existed back in the 1990s. It's video on web pages. Yes it's much higher quality video, and it's better integrated and so on, but those are refinements, the basic idea wasn't created when enough people had "high speed" Internet access, the idea is decades old. If your hypothetical killer app for gigabit home Internet was going to appear it already would have done so, at least twenty years ago.
I consider gb internet to be the same.
I'm probably stay at IRC level of bandwidth. Of course i will Switch to gb speeds because some ISP gonna sell it half my dsl line to 'grow'.
Its simply a case of when you have it, you find ways to use it, but boy is it one of the small pleasures in life to do a dist-upgrade in about 15 minutes.
I've considered switching to another ISP, but the service is so reliable and I only occasionally want faster download speeds. I also like that I don't have to deal with cyclic deals like cable and DSL providers do, I just pay a flat $40/month.
The saddest part is that the sales rep insisted that we’d need a modem, I’m sure because the majority of their service areas have been left on DSL.
Try a few 4K YouTube videos and see what happens.
It'll be interesting to see how fiber transforms rural areas compared to areas that don't get it.
Somehow some random telcos have found a way (presumably government subsidies (I don't think that is bad)) to provide some amazing service, while others wallow in absolute trashy telco service.
I know folks with consistently low latency 1Gb service that is just amazing, and folks where the local telco literally left lines lying across their lawn providing terrible service claiming they'd get back to it and never did.
I worked with one rural telco provider who had datacenter grade switches running 1G sfps (they could have run 10G sfps on all of the ports if they chose to do so) ... one port per household. I talked to the guy running the show there for a while and he said they just had this massive budget so "why not?". He noted almost none of the houses used their service to its fullest extent with the exception of some local teens ;)
So when the upgrades do finally roll around, it's not incremental -- it leapfrogs 2 decades or whatever of technology upgrades. A single upgrade places you far ahead of your peers, creating the dynamic you describe (and yet, your peers aren't actually that far behind, if they wanted to catch up)
The same thing occurs with third-world countries getting first-world tech; they get it sporadically, and so see large jumps of change instead of slow, incremental shifts; this also gives a bit of an advantage, as they don't have stale infrastructure from the incremental change, and so can make much more extensive use of the new tech. For example, China skipped credit cards and went directly to mobile payments -- and with only cash to compete, mobile took over entirely.
And so when these rural counties finally see an upgrade.. they see rapid full fiber coverage. There's simply no competing technology in the area, since its so far behind, and fiber keeps the county prepped for the next 20 years of no upgrades..
The real question is how telcos have managed to spend all of their income. I know mine Frontier spends it all on interest payments for the service areas they’ve bought.
It is returned to investors.
There's a big "full fibre" push from various different providers (Hyperoptic (FTTB), GigaClear, CityFibre, BT OpenReach).
Most densely populated areas have the choice of FTTC (the infrastructure is ALL BT OpenReach, however you have a choice of providers who piggy back on this), and in bigger cities/towns Virgin Cable up to 380Mbps down 37Mbps up.
Pricing is very competitive, because even with areas that are all BT FTTC lots of providers use their infrastructure and OfCom regulates how much OpenReach are allowed to charge.
I have a truly unlimited cable package for £50 a month, 384 down 37 up.
Openreach is utter shit outside of very very lucky areas. I live in London (zone 6) and we get 30/8 (after fighting with BT support for two months to fix it from 22/1). If you're not covered by VM and win the postcode lottery as to not have it drop constantly, you're lucky to get "tolerable" speeds.
He uses a 4G router with a Three unlimited SIM.
He has both connected because we do a lot of FPS PC gaming and the latency on 4G is too poor to game so he switches to his ADSL connection to play games and then uses 4G to download/stream.
It would be technically easy to give you VDSL, it would just break a rule that was put in place to ensure competition for ADSL service, which you now don't care about because even that close to the Exchange it's only giving you 8/1
Anecdotal ... I've lived in two completely separate areas of the UK and been connected to 3 different FTTC cabs ... none of them were problematic.
Is this true for LEO projects such as Starlink and OneWeb? I thought the latency characteristics were much more reasonable there. Or is this speaking about bandwidth? The wording is a bit vague.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellat...
London to NY via space should be faster than through the ocean fiber, though it won't have a steady RTT over minutes, as the satellites pass overhead.
Look at fig 7 on [1].
Those companies were using Geosynchronous satellites so that dishes could point at a single spot in the sky. Unfortunately, geosynchronous orbit is at a height of 35,786 km. That means almost 120ms just to reach the satellite, plus another 120ms to get the signal back down to earth, then your request hitting the real internet and another 240ms to get back to you over the same two satellite hops.
SpaceX's Starlink will be <1000 km up in low earth orbit, so somewhere under 5ms away at speed of light. For any transmission across an ocean, Starlink will be much faster (so you just know high speed trading companies will be big customers). How much bandwidth it offers remains to be seen.
It's like a car engine: it's better to have 3.0L than 1.2L, because when you need the power, you will get it.
I got my first 10 Mb/s connection around 2000. At the time I found it to be as fast as I could possibly want. I mean, it's the same speed as the local network at the computer club just a few years prior.
Now I have gigabit (2 Gb/s actually, but I can't be bothered to configure network bonding), and I couldn't imagine going back to anything slower.
It's another space where there's a consumer product and consumers have been taught that the bigger number is better, so you advertise a 1000Mbps service and consumers think it's worth more than your competitor's 500Mbps when in reality although those numbers are "true" they're irrelevant.
Eventually consumers get jaded and learn to ignore the number, the way you'll see nobody cares when you tell them your "hi res" audio is 96kHz at 24 bits - CD audio with 44.1kHz at 16 bits was more than enough, more isn't better for ordinary users so they eventually learned to ignore it‡.
I had Gbps Internet access in 1998, and in 2015 I was buying new service for my new home. Should I buy the cheap 40Mbps package? A bit extra for 80Mbps? Or spend a lot more for 1Gbps? And I knew, which most consumers don't, that it didn't matter, 40Mbps is fine, once in a while 80Mbps would be slightly better (maybe a new video game downloads in 10 minutes rather than 20 minutes) and 1Gbps would just make some numbers bigger that I'd show off once in a while but make no actual concrete difference. So I bought the 40Mbps service, no regrets.
The main practical things 1Gbps will do for you is avoid buffer bloat since there's less need for a buffer, but you could also do that by just buying hardware that doesn't have buffer bloat.
‡ If you are a recording studio you might actually want 24-bit, and maybe at a pinch even 96kHz, but ordinary consumers needn't care. Likewise somewhere like a school definitely wants 1Gbps networking, but my mother needn't care.