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Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

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Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#31
I don't think I need Gb internet.

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.

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#32
post #7

I live very far from any major town(10 miles from post office, 15 miles from a high school, 20 miles from a major retail outlet). Our current internet is $35 for a 5Mb connection and the best I can currently get is $70 for a 10Mb connection. But sometime next year I will have fiber available to me. IIRC, it'll be something like $60 for a 250Mb connection and $110 for a 1Gb. It'll be interesting to see how fiber trans…

There is a weird dynamic in the US where many rural areas have garbage level internet access ... and some pockets have insanely high levels of service. 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…

Sometimes, a higher quality of internet service can be attributed to 1. Household is in-between two major cities, 2. Household is close to major highway (lower cost of building and maintaining infra), 3. Household is in the vicinity of a highly valued facility (E.g. military), 4. Telco designated the area as a higher priority on the subsidized list.

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#33

Bah, should have had mobile in the title. I have gigabit fiber at the house and its fast enough that I have no idea what to do with that much bandwidth.

There isn't anything to do with that much bandwidth.

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.

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#35
post #31

I don't think I need Gb internet. 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.

Trust me, once you get a 1Gbps network connection, you will love it. It's not that Netflix would be faster, but watching wget or curl reach massive speeds is just awesome :-)

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#36
post #31

I don't think I need Gb internet. 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.

We have 60Mb and most of the time that's just plenty. I would like a little faster speeds when I download a new Linux image or something, but even then, it only takes a few minutes.

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#37
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahahahahaha. 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.

Just count yourself lucky that you don't have an Exchange Only (EO) line, that doesn't have a cabinet and runs directly to the exchange.. I'm in Whitechapel (Zone 1) and get 8/1

There is an ongoing programme to upgrade EO lines to have their mini-cabinet so they can get vDSL. You are an inadvertent casualty of "unbundling". To promote competition the Exchange is allowed to have equipment from other providers in it (most exchanges have only one or two other FTTC providers, many have none) and that _could_ be ADSL and so the interference from VDSL _could_ break that, violating the unbundling rules, so, they just don't offer VDSL.

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

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#38
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a weird dynamic in the US where many rural areas have garbage level internet access ... and some pockets have insanely high levels of service. 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…

With the amount of money Americans have spent on internet everyone could have 100 gigabit by now. 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.

> The real question is how telcos have managed to spend all of their income.

It is returned to investors.

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#39
post #6

Interesting, but purely US focused. Anybody have good data on progress in the rest of the world?

I'm in Japan, paying 980 yen ($11) a month for a gigabit connection for the first year. After that it's 4000 yen (~$45) a month. Progress is good here :)

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#40
post #31

I don't think I need Gb internet. 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.

It's a chicken/egg problem. No one is going to develop mass-market services that require users to have a gbit internet hookup if there are hardly any potential customers. Which leads people to think they don't need gbit internet because there is nothing that requires that kind of speed.

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.

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