YouTube broke for 40% of the UK population after rolling out 60 FPS videos

OP is defining a downgrade that 40% of the UK users now have to fall back to 480p since 720p60 won't work and 1080 won't work. OP wants 720p30 back since it s the highest resolution that 40% users were able to use before the change. 480p, seriously?

Why is it broken?

It's clever to push lower quality, but here they push to a lower quality than what was achievable so far before the "upgrade". So from a user standpoint, YouTube have downgraded the service overnight for all low speed connections.

The more frustrating being for users that could sustain 1080p yesterday and are "upgraded"(?) to 720p60 today. Roughly same bandwidth but much lower resolution for what? better frame-rate? Not sure why anyone would prioritize frame-rate over resolution with all our fancy HiDPI screen.

> I do support bringing back the 1080p30 stream though.

Wait, what? Why would 1080p30 be gone?! I don't like 60fps, it looks weird, so now it's either 480p OR I'm forced to watch 60fps?! WTF?!

London is actually one of the bad areas for broadband. Due to the density its not been deemed worthwhile to roll out fibre to home at all and fibre to the curb is often held up by a bunch of factors including there being no room in the local telecoms office for the hardware and difficulties placing the boxes on the street to contain the replacement dslams alongside the other road works. Many rollouts have been held up for many years due to very hard logistics problems.

It has proven much easier to roll out fibre into villages and smaller towns where DSL is no where near as obvious as the solution and there is room to place the equipment easily.

What irks me more than anything is the fact that builders are making big blocks of flats and running normal copper cabling into them. Ones that opened just 5 years ago genuinely had ADSL back to the local telecoms office and only recently got upgraded to DSLAMS in their basements to fibre. It really doesn't save a lot of money to put copper in instead of fibre at this point and to not have planned at the very least VDSL is just quite ridiculous. These types of builds have just made local issues with broadband that much worse.

This is a summary entirely tilted by a very questionable political perspective.

You'll find the same problems elsewhere in Europe dealing with population density and rolling out the infrastructure for this stuff. I know plenty of people in Sweden, France, Germany who struggle with exactly the same issues, despite better headline average speeds etc.

> "hollowing out"; services that get used by the small elite fraction of the country that lives in the right bits of London are good, everything else is quietly ignored.

Fundamentally wrong given that central London is in a large proportion (often > 50% by ward) social housing. Or are the millions of people who live there the "small elite" too? Or perhaps it is the case the high population density urban centres are naturally the easiest place to build infrastructure to benefit the most people.

> BT pay this money to shareholders and then fail to improve speeds. Both parties are apparently happy with this arrangement.

Clearly this isn't true. BT OR has for many years been separated and highly and transparently regulated. Perhaps you would like to explain more your implications of corruption that isn't visible to anyone else?

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/114814/...

Whilst competition has been pretty slow to improve speeds, there are an increasing number of altnets around the UK with small providers running their own FTTP networks. This is even happening in rural locations through organizations like B4RN. I wish it would move faster, but I'm glad that we have some competition - Corbynband would likely have nuked other providers, and I can only imagine the kind of filtering that would get applied to it. Hopefully good ISPs like Andrews & Arnold can stick around.

As an American that is a familiar story, with telcos over the years taking money and not delivering the upgrades promised. We were supposed to have a lot more widespread fiber to the home for instance, and I think we still pay a little more than many other countries.

However by now in 2020, I believe the majority of the US has access to internet over cable tv lines/docsis instead of dsl with speeds more like 100mbps, with up to 1 or 2 gbps available in big metros for $70 a month. I know many rural areas are still underserved, and of course not every household is subscribed to internet service, but it seems to be available in most places.

I’m really surprised internet in the UK seems to be an order of magnitude or more slower for such a large percentage of the population.

Can't have tax-payers money used to improve conditions for normal people - that would be socialism!.

You appear to be using the term access to fibre a bit loosely. The vast majority[0] of the UK only has access to a product called "fibre to the cabinet" (FTTC), which is a poor substitute for what would pass for a fibre connection in most countries.

For those not from the UK, FTTC is a product where they run fibre connections to the local cabinet - however from there it runs over the end users phone line using VDSL2. For historical reasons this line may be aluminium instead of copper, and is often long with lots of splits and joins. As you can expect, this can degrade performance a great deal, and there's basically nothing an end user can do to get this upgraded. For PR reasons, these connections are named "Superfast broadband" and the regulator notes that 95% of the population can get one. However in practice due to old and badly maintained phone lines, real speeds are often much lower than the "minimum 30Mbps" they claim.

0: As per https://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/broadband-statistic... only 8% of the population has access to "real" fibre to their actual premises.

I don't know why the parent was downvoted. It's a reasonably accurate summary of the state of Internet access in much of the UK, and it correctly identifies the misleading emphasis on ADSL-based technologies in the article.

In practice, most UK premises now have at least FTTC available, which can give realistic download speeds of up to 80Mbps depending on how close to the cabinet you are. FTTP is the technology currently being worked on in a lot of areas but will obviously take a long time to become the norm if only because existing housing stock will need new cables to be physically installed. If you're willing to have that disruption and to pay the premium, there are also cable companies that will install dedicated lines for you with much higher speeds even if FTTP isn't yet available in your area using BT's network.

The article is correct and you say it yourself, the majority of the population does not have access to fiber.

Eventually you have to realize that as a person you either have good internet or you don't. The poor experience for the 40% who have no access to fiber and don't live right next to the DSL cabinet is very real. We could debate whether the proportion is closer to 30% or 40% or 50% but that doesn't help with the issue.

I don’t know why this comment is getting downvoted. I agree that the numbers in the article are not representative of the reality in the UK. Entry-level broadband for most people is around 30Mbps minimum.

To say that 4.5Mbps is typical is completely incorrect.

> but there are some very low end providers who will do ADSL/2+ for ~£10,

Where are you finding those please? I'm currently paying £18 for TalkTalk and I'm looking to switch to something cheaper.

Underground wires are the preferred choice for most of the EU as far as I know (at least in western Europe). There are also much smaller countries in the EU that provide far better internet than what's available in the UK, apparently. There must be some other reason.

> There seems to be a strong (legislative? legal? political?) aversion to easily replaceable overhead wires

I live in the UK with only overhead wires on my street (probably 60-80 years old copper wiring). Those wires are eyesores, and also break regularly since tree branches cut them in storms. Given Openreach's incentives, forget about these wires ever being replaced by fibre.

Those entrenched cables are mostly DOCSIS 3 cables over which broadband speeds can be achieved. BT has traditionally provided telephony through overhead wires and those are where the problems usually lie.

Around here at least, the fibre I've seen in new builds isn't OpenReach, it's OFNL.

But fellow city dweller here. I'm stuck on Virgin Media coax where I live, despite being about two streets and direct line of site from the BT exchange.

16mb ADSL2 is the best OpenReach can give me as a consumer.

> I live in the city centre and I don't even have fibre. Meanwhile all the new corrupt housing developments all get "fibre" as a perk for buying a house on land that floods.

In what fashion do you call this corruption?

I don’t know much about Spain or Italy, and I agree that Germany uses a lot of copper cables. But France and Poland? Esp. in Poland it most towns you have fiber, all new buildings have had fiber for ages. I currently pay 15–20€ / month for 1Gbps in a like 5th biggest city in Poland (not center, but not far either). In a couple of places in France I’ve stayed longer the internet was good as well (though I don’t recall the prices or exact speed details) — cities including Paris and towns. Granted this is all anecdotal and my bubble, etc.

Oh there is. The government.

Capitalism.

There is nothing wrong with integrated intel graphics. They may suck for complex 3d and gaming, but have video decode units which are very well supported.

Like 24, 25 or 30 fps. Well below eye's Nyquist rate. Everything above that looks like garbage unless there was special care taken to look good or real reason to shoot at higher fps. Upsampling to 60fps seems like even worse idea because it usually introduces soap opera-like effect.

Thanks, never would have found that.

The 90%+ number is "fibre internet" not "Fibre to the Home". Most of it is "Fibre to the cabinet" (Cable, VDSL and G.Fast connections are the most common FTTC in the UK). Just saying thats where the number comes from and why said it included cable,fttc and "true fibre" in the numbers.

I also depend on the internet for my work too (And for my home entertainment - Games, NF, Amazon Prime, YT, etc etc etc). The reason I used 4G over fixed line is because at the time I was living in a rental place caring for my parents and my shithole of a landlord refused to allow me to have my own fixed line installed. It was eaiser to just use 4G then deal with the battle as I was only going to be living there for 12 months max.

Total complete downtime on 4G over the 12 months I depended on it for me was 2 days (1 of which was a nationwide outage - I forget the reason for the other day. I did have someone drive into the local mast - that was fixed within a week iirc but during that time I still had a connection, just a bit slower then normal). I've had similar downtime (days per year) on my fixed line providers over the past 20 years I've been paying for my own connection. (I had someone drive into my local phone cabinet back in 2016 which took it out completely https://i.imgur.com/CBiLSV7.jpg that took Openreach a week to fix)

The reason I stopped using 4G for my day to day internet is because I moved back and I could get a faster connection via fixed line.

The reason I say to try 4G is because a decent 2nd hand 4G router is going to cost less then £25 on Ebay and Three's pay as you go mobile broadband costs at most £35 for a month (No comittment pay as you go - but if your inital tests work out well for you then you can commit to a longer contract and lower the monthly bill) so even if it sucks for you you are only out £60 but if you wanted to try for even less you can just buy their 4GB payg sim for £10 and do a speed test on your own phone (though I don't think Three allow tethering on that plan - but doing a speed test on your phone will give you a rough idea of the speed you should be getting).

You can use your own phone as a modem however you are gonna be limited by the phones USB/WiFi speed and its a bit more of a pain in the ass to set up somehting like OpenWRT to share your phones connection with the rest of your house and when you leave the house with your phone your house loses internet connectivity - but using your phone would be a decent speed test for you before dropping the coin on a 4G Modem/router.

But I will say try before you commit to a 12 month contract because even though I was getting 100Mbps at the rental place on 4G when I go to my friends place I only get 70~ but as its wireless you can try the modem is differnt places around your home to see where you get the best speed. In the Rental place I was on the first floor and I placed the router on the window sil closest to the mast (There are websites that will list the towers around you.)

EDIT: The reason I say Three is because they were the best network for me at the time, you might have better luck with one of the other networks. But that is why you test with their no contract options first before commiting to a cheaper contract.

EDIT2: For me, my local mast was not over subscribed so I had no issues even during peak times but that is location dependant - mobile providers have been upgrading their backhaul in recent years (mainly in prep for 5G) so honestly it is worth reconsidering. I know I would be if I was stuck with a ADSL line (That or be planning to move. Connectivity is the new "good transport links" when house shopping, The house might be beautiful and a nice location and at an awesome price, but if the net is shit I aint moving in.)