Is this the best deal for Fibre Opic BB up to 30MB ?

kwikbreaks

JWhite wrote: »

What is an acceptable speed do you think for basic stuff so that you are not waiting up to 30 secs to download a web site ?

Here's a long winded but still incomplete description of how the web page will be shown....

Each web page consists of a number of elements - the basic html text, style sheets, javascript, and pictures being the main ones.

First off the html will be downloaded and that is not normally large - 150kB would be big unless badly coded. Once that is downloaded the browser will download the other elements defined in the html and start to render what it can of the page. Usually the pictures complete downloading last.

With most sites there are elements such as the style sheets, javascript, and logos which are common to most pages and once downloaded these will be reused from the browser cache instead of being downloaded again. This means that even with a slow connection you should start seeing something well before 30 seconds although the pictures in the page may still be sharpening up (if the encoding was progressive) or building line by line after the text is in place. During that time the page may jump around a little if the image sizes were omitted from the html.

Page sizes vary widely. I saved this page just now and it is just over half a MB but most of that are elements present in all pages in the site so wouldn't have been downloaded again after the first time. Even if they all were the page data at 0.5MB or 4Mb could still all be downloaded in 8 seconds on a 512Kbps connection. It would take longer as it isn't a continuous download and there are lots of individual requests involved but most of that is offset because it doesn't all need downloading.

When broadband first appeared in the UK it was at 512Kbps and that was quite a reasonable experience at the time. As sppeds have increased content sizes have grown but as I said over most of the year I'm using 3G and it is perfectly adequate for me despite the highest I've ever seen on a speedtest being 4Mbps.

jrawle

You should consider upload speeds as well as download. If you are going to be uploading photos, videos, documents to online storage, etc. this is very important.

Virgin's upload speeds are rather poor, and it's very difficult to find out exactly what they are from their website as they don't want people to know. On the 60 Mb/s download product you may only get 3 Mb/s upload.

By contrast, with FTTC (e.g. BT Infinity) you get up to 9.5 Mb/s upload with the 38 Mb/s download package, and up to 19 Mb/s upload with the 76 Mb/s package.

Put another way, e-mailing a 4 MB photo on Virgin will take over 10 seconds, but on FTTC may take less than 2 seconds.

Leodogger

jrawle wrote: »

You should consider upload speeds as well as download. If you are going to be uploading photos, videos, documents to online storage, etc. this is very important.

Virgin's upload speeds are rather poor, and it's very difficult to find out exactly what they are from their website as they don't want people to know. On the 60 Mb/s download product you may only get 3 Mb/s upload.

By contrast, with FTTC (e.g. BT Infinity) you get up to 9.5 Mb/s upload with the 38 Mb/s download package, and up to 19 Mb/s upload with the 76 Mb/s package.

Put another way, e-mailing a 4 MB photo on Virgin will take over 10 seconds, but on FTTC may take less than 2 seconds.

As I don't understand the upload and download limits of what I use, I think my best option would be as my daughter suggests and go for a 16mb Unlimited Broadband package (BT says (if you can believe them) that the average speed at that property under this package would be 13mb download speed) and if this does not prove fast enough for me, it will be easy to upgrade to a faster speed without extra cost implication for upgrading (only the extra cost of the package I want to move to), rather than trying to downgrade within the contract period, although obviously I am not going to be unhappy with the bigger speed package but I want to see if reducing the speed at a lower cost will be acceptable to me.

As for TV, we have decided we will have so much work to do when we move in, we won't have time to watch TV so will give paid subscription TV a miss to start with for a few months ! :rotfl: