15Mbps too slow for Broadband?

Dan-Dan

I think at 10 mpbs you might struggle to stream two films at the same time without the odd bit of buffering

AdrianC

Dan-Dan wrote: »

I think at 10 mpbs you might struggle to stream two films at the same time without the odd bit of buffering

At 2meg, we can reliably watch streaming TV without buffering. Not in HD, obviously...

Dan-Dan

AdrianC wrote: »

At 2meg, we can reliably watch streaming TV without buffering. Not in HD, obviously...

Depends on many factors if the OP can watch two streaming films at the same time, none of which any of us can possibly know with info given

davidmcn

Jim75 wrote: »

I've been told after doing some searching that the Broadband speed should be around 13-20Mbps (a guaranteed 10Mbps).

I'm not majorly bothered at this, as we don't normally download lots of stuff and at the most our family could be watching 2 streamed videos.

Do others think this Broadband speed is a big risk?

I suppose it depends what speed you're used to - and you haven't told us that!

AdrianC

Dan-Dan wrote: »

Depends on many factors if the OP can watch two streaming films at the same time, none of which any of us can possibly know with info given

True. All we can do is give our own personal experience.

Which is all I did...

teddysmum

We have 6 with Sky(was 5 with O2) and live in a city,about a mile from the exchange.


This speed is ample for my husband, who watches a lot of Youtube and I (general surfing, Spotify and the odd Youtube). We don't have fibre available, yet (though the exchange is enabled) and probably won't take when it is available.


We rarely have buffering and Spotify may have two or three drop outs per year.

Jim75

Thanks to everyone for their responses. Really interesting to hear what others are getting speed wise and what they can do within those speeds.

TrickyTree83

As someone previously stated speed isn't always the golden number but you've been conditioned through sales tactics to think that it is.

It's been a while since I was involved in tinkering with lines but as I recall there's many other things that affect the state of your internet connection.

- Type of internet line (ADSL or similar, Cable/Fibre)
- Contention ratio (i.e. number of other lines you're sharing with)
- If on ADSL or similar things like line attenuation and what MTU the line is capable of dealing with (MTU = maximum transmission unit)
- Throttling, do the ISP's available to you do this?
- Even the ISP itself can cause you to have a poor internet connection even on an advertised 50Mb+ depending on where they route you and where you typically access internet resource (known as "hops")

All sorts of technical mumbo jumo to those who are never told about it.

As a rather extreme example, you could find that your 15Mb connection is an ADSL line with a contention ratio of 50:1 and is sharing with less than 50 people in reality - therefore your real contention ratio is more like 25:1 (close if not already Business level ratio). This would be better than a 50Mb line in a town/city genuinely sharing with as many people as it can. Think of it like a motorway where the number of lanes is the number of Mb you have available to you, but the speed limit is the latency on your line. 5,000 Mb won't do you any favours if your latency is above 100ms, whereas if you have a 15Mb line and your latency is ~10ms then you're laughing.

Also if you lived in an area where there were lots of school children you'll find that around 5pm the quality of your connection drops significantly and it's possible your ISP could throttle your connection speed to allow everyone to use the internet at a reasonable speed all at the same time.

I'm sure there's people who know more about this subject matter than me, I used to tinker when I was a gaming teenager to get the minimum latency I could on the line my parents were willing to pay for

AdrianC

Latency's relevance varies massively, depending on what you're doing.

It's the amount of time for something sent from A to B to get there. 10ms is 1/100th of a second. 100ms is 1/10th of a second. But that's different to speed... In the motorway analogy, high latency is more akin to a set of traffic lights on the sliproad.

For gaming, for online telephony - latency is much more important than speed.
For downloading large files, or streaming video - speed is more important than latency.

Grenage

AdrianC wrote: »

At 2meg, we can reliably watch streaming TV without buffering. Not in HD, obviously...

With bluray movies exceeding 40Mbps, one could argue that nobody is really getting a HD experience with streaming. The difference between a BD and Netflix is quite obvious on my parent's TV.

I would be happy with 15Mb for browsing the web and the odd small download; I would want 40+ minimum if I was a heavy gamer or had a family big on media consumption.