Why 50meg?

FleetFanatic

Can somebody explain why?

I mean, I have 10meg, I hammer it with torrents & suchlike. Yeah they are slower in the evening but who cares, no rush for the download to finish etc.

My web browsing is perfect - I mean, you can only load a webpage so fast, bit like downloading, you can only download something as fast as the location it is coming from can supply it anyway.

So, the question remains, WHY?

paulsad

I've only got 2 megs.

FleetFanatic

I remember when I was excited at going from dialup to 1meg.

I don't buy into this 'need 50meg' thing, will the same people also need 100meg when it becomes available?

Despite hammering the connection some days, the slowest I've ever been throttled back to is 5meg. Can't complain.

kwikbreaks

FleetFanatic wrote: »

Why 50meg?

Why not if you can afford it?

Sublime_2

I've only got 3 megs, but will be looking to upgrade to 5 (two matched pairs). Did you put the 10 megs in? Seems morev thans reasonable, but who knows what 50 would do?

Nilrem

Because it allows multiple people to do different things on the line at the same time without causing problems.
For example I can be downloading updates for a reinstalled PC, whilst watching VOD, with my brother downloading something from Steam and my dad plays games without any issues.

It also means that when I buy a game on steam I can play it in a few minutes, as Steam's servers can manage to hit 6MB at times (the max the 50mb line can take), and usually 3-4MB, which means it's downloading almost as fast as my DVD drive can read a disc (I love steam for the fact that it means I never need a disc for one of it's games in my drives).

loupoppins

well, in our area they have just spent thousands upgrading to "superfast broadband" for 97% of households. so all these lucky folks can go from 10 to 40mg.
We are i nthe 3% of households that cant get it.
ANd guess what our speed is?????? 0.25mb!!! sometimes we get to 0.5, but I can only dream of what may be possible with a whole 1MB!
It is so bad I'm thinking of getting mobile broadband as it would be faster.
So yes, I would have to ask why do all these people need to go to 40 , when we cant even get 1!!!

timberflake

As someone else said because it allows multiple devices to be connected at once and all have a good speed. On a normal night my laptop is on downloading, my PS3 is downloading content from the store and my girlfriend will be surfing the net on her ipad.

For example, tonight my laptop was upstairs downloading away, my girlfriend was watching video's on youtube and I was downloading a game from the PSN store, and even though the game was 1gb in size it still only took 5 minutes to download.

Snakeeyes21

loupoppins wrote: »

well, in our area they have just spent thousands upgrading to "superfast broadband" for 97% of households. so all these lucky folks can go from 10 to 40mg.
We are i nthe 3% of households that cant get it.
ANd guess what our speed is?????? 0.25mb!!! sometimes we get to 0.5, but I can only dream of what may be possible with a whole 1MB!
It is so bad I'm thinking of getting mobile broadband as it would be faster.
So yes, I would have to ask why do all these people need to go to 40 , when we cant even get 1!!!

go with mobile broadband, i get 5mb on mine

boliston

50mb/s is not really that fast when you consider that typical office LANS often run at 100mb/s or even 1gb/s.

Mark_In_Hampshire

With the take up and acceleration of things like video streaming, video conferencing and so forth, the need for bandwidth will grow not in a slow linear way but pretty exponentially.

We used to call broadband - well, broadband - because it wasn't narrowband. That term was reserved for dial-up modems.

Here in 2011, I'd venture that 4Mbps is the minimum threshold for something to be called "broadband" and everything below that is narrowband.

Thus, around 20% to 25% of the country cannot actually get broadband at all.

Fast forward to 2020: the minimum speed for something to be reasonably called "broadband" will be 10Mbps at the very least.

In essence - infrastructure isn't about building what we need. By then, it's too late. It is about building what we will need.