This seems purely driven by profit. Retrofitting cell towers has a ROI that is inverse to density of customers willing to pay (broadcast distance is limited). Whereas if fiber has already been run and good Ethernet cables already laid, increasing total bandwidth for wired connections has a cost ~proportional to paying customers.
Faster internet is coming, but only for a few
41–50 of 60 posts
Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few
#42I 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.
I concur with the sibling comments. I had 30Mbps and it was "good enough", but I know have gigabit at home and its reached the point where its actually quicker for me to work from home when dealing with large production database dumps and trial-and-error Docker pull and build than it is to work at the office.
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.
Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few
#43I 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.
Netflix probably didn't change. Even if you pay extra for their Ultra HD mode that will fit down 30Mbps without trouble. If you have kids this upgrade should mean now your family can watch 3-4 videos at once even in Ultra HD.
Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few
#44I 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 :-)
> watching wget or curl reach massive speeds is just awesome
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.
Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few
#45I 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 fo…
There's a limit though, is what I'm saying. My hearing and vision are getting worse, not better, as I get older and there's diminishing returns on increased bandwidth in terms of utility.
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?
Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few
#46I 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 fo…
Yeah No. Exponential curves always mean you've zoomed in too far on the chart. There will be a plateau, and the exponential bit of the curve tells you essentially nothing about where that plateau will be. In the case of home Internet the plateau is likely somewhere in the 100Mbps ballpark. It's probably more than 10Mbps and it's probably less than 1Gbps.
- 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.
Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few
#47This article is stupid. Urban and suburban dwellers are not “the few”, they are the overwhelming majority of the population.
Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :-)
> watching wget or curl reach massive speeds is just awesome 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 s…
Other than the joy, Gbps is useful for households with more than one person streaming netflix or other services at the same time, or slower game update downloads. For devs, this is useful when pulling docker images or os images.
Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
There's a limit though, is what I'm saying. My hearing and vision are getting worse, not better, as I get older and there's diminishing returns on increased bandwidth in terms of utility. 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…
For streaming VR? I agree, I was upgraded from 30Mbps to 60Mbps and I really couldn't care less. The annoying bottleneck is on the other side, which regularly caps to 10Mbps or less.
1Gbps sounds great for an office, though; kinda sick of having shared 50Mbps connections where some stream HD videos just to listen to music.
Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
UK Has good coverage except in rural areas, and in some rural areas they've done their own FTTP (B4RN for example). 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/tow…
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.
Sounds like a pretty local issue, and while it's true that there are spots like that (Mudchute in the Docklands is also awful) a lot of the areas with FTTC are pretty stable ... just look at TBB broadband stats for real speed tests.
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.