Check Internet quality on house

[Deleted User]

Gavin83 said:

[Deleted User] said:

MidnightWolf said:

[Deleted User] said:

What you really need to know is if it has fibre to the house. Not fake fibre with the last bit copper.

If it has it then you will get good, reliable speed. Anything else is pot luck. It might say "up to 67mbps" (slow) but in reality you might not even get that.

I wouldn’t call 67mbps “slow”. I was grateful for speeds like that at my old address after years stuck on a ropey ADSL connection at around 5mbps.

It's slow today and getting worse as download sizes increase. The real kicker though is the atrocious upload speeds, which make working from home more difficult. Even OpenReach fibre only goes up to 100mbps on the most expensive tier, not 1000mbps like most other fibre networks. Virgin is little better in that regard.

As OpenReach and Virgin drag their heels it's just going to create even more of a digital divide in the UK. Houses with 1000/1000 fibre are significantly more valuable to me and many others.

99% of people don't care. The majority of those really won't understand what any of it means, as long as it works they're happy. The rest are knowledgeable and realise it really doesn't make any difference. For example with BT (only one I've bothered checking) you can get 150Mb download, 30Mb upload for £30 a month. That's more than enough for almost every home in the UK. Will it be enough in 10 years time? Probably not but we'll have moved on by then and no one needs their connection to be that futureproof.

I'd love to know what you're doing that requires 1000Mb upload speeds. Have you invented teleportation via ethernet or something?

This is old thinking, from before many people worked from home and video games were delivered digitally.

MobileSaver

rigolith said:

Gavin83 said:

I'd love to know what you're doing that requires 1000Mb upload speeds. Have you invented teleportation via ethernet or something?

This is old thinking, from before many people worked from home and video games were delivered digitally.

It's interesting that your "new thinking" didn't have an answer for what you and many others need 1000Mb upload speeds for...

AdrianC

rigolith said:

Gavin83 said:

I'd love to know what you're doing that requires 1000Mb upload speeds. Have you invented teleportation via ethernet or something?

This is old thinking, from before many people worked from home and video games were delivered digitally.

Zoom and the like work just fine over slow connections - anything from a couple of meg upwards. Several members of a household can have simultaneous sessions over a 10meg link reliably.

Here's an article from two months ago suggesting 5meg is a perfectly adequate connection for video gaming, and confirming that latency is the important factor, and to avoid wireless within the property.
https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/how-much-speed-do-i-need-for-online-gaming
Yes, it goes on to discuss download times for first purchasing a game. The largest example it gives is 16GB - or less than half that depending on where you obtain it...  7GB will take an hour and 40 to download over a 10meg connection. 20 minutes over a 50meg link.

But that only has to be downloaded once... If you can't wait 20 minutes for your shiny-shiny, the issue is not the connection.

csgohan4

AdrianC said:

[Deleted User] said:

Gavin83 said:

I'd love to know what you're doing that requires 1000Mb upload speeds. Have you invented teleportation via ethernet or something?

This is old thinking, from before many people worked from home and video games were delivered digitally.

Zoom and the like work just fine over slow connections - anything from a couple of meg upwards. Several members of a household can have simultaneous sessions over a 10meg link reliably.

Here's an article from two months ago suggesting 5meg is a perfectly adequate connection for video gaming, and confirming that latency is the important factor, and to avoid wireless within the property.
https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/how-much-speed-do-i-need-for-online-gaming
Yes, it goes on to discuss download times for first purchasing a game. The largest example it gives is 16GB - or less than half that depending on where you obtain it...  7GB will take an hour and 40 to download over a 10meg connection. 20 minutes over a 50meg link.

But that only has to be downloaded once... If you can't wait 20 minutes for your shiny-shiny, the issue is not the connection.

Alot of AAA games now a days are around 40-60gb+, COD for example. Good luck with doing that on a 5-10meg, spare a few days or a week?

67mbps will be the new standard as <10 meg broadband was 10 years ago

100meg broadband may be the new norm in 10 years when games and movies reach 60-100gb. 

Chandler85

Personally I think the minimum levels of connection should be 30meg, anything less then that can cause issues if you have a large family etc.

Lets be honest, the wording on the Internet speeds is farcical as well, what was once considered really good maybe "superfast" should now be considered normal.  But instead they try to get even faster sounding words for what in some countries would be a basic service (Japan, South Korea etc).

Where I live, which is a large village (2k+ people here), Openreach offer FTTC etc, but the last mile, is actually a full 4+ miles, and the guaranteed speed is 1.3meg, it is pathetic.  My previous address in a busy suburb of Manchester, managed to get a guaranteed speed of 4meg.  I know a lot of people who just use 4g round here, we have 5g as well.

Openreach (a BT company remember) have taken billions out in profit but has failed to improve their network, ultimately we need the likes of Starlink, 5g etc to solve the problem privatising Openreach has caused.

AdrianC

csgohan4 said:

Alot of AAA games now a days are around 40-60gb+, COD for example. Good luck with doing that on a 5-10meg, spare a few days or a week?

9 and a half hours for 40GB at 10meg.
https://downloadtimecalculator.com/

Overnight, or through the day while at school or work.

Less than two hours at 50meg.

To put that 40GB into perspective, that's about the capacity of a BluRay disc, or 10 DVDs, or nearly 60 CDs. Software these days suffers VERY badly from bloat.

MidnightWolf

AdrianC said:

rigolith said:

Gavin83 said:

I'd love to know what you're doing that requires 1000Mb upload speeds. Have you invented teleportation via ethernet or something?

This is old thinking, from before many people worked from home and video games were delivered digitally.

Zoom and the like work just fine over slow connections - anything from a couple of meg upwards. Several members of a household can have simultaneous sessions over a 10meg link reliably.

Here's an article from two months ago suggesting 5meg is a perfectly adequate connection for video gaming, and confirming that latency is the important factor, and to avoid wireless within the property.
https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/how-much-speed-do-i-need-for-online-gaming
Yes, it goes on to discuss download times for first purchasing a game. The largest example it gives is 16GB - or less than half that depending on where you obtain it...  7GB will take an hour and 40 to download over a 10meg connection. 20 minutes over a 50meg link.

But that only has to be downloaded once... If you can't wait 20 minutes for your shiny-shiny, the issue is not the connection.

But it isn’t just a one-time download. Most games will receive updates, often on a monthly basis, and they can easily be 4GB+. A bit of a pain (first world problems, I know) if you sit down to play and then you’ve got to wait a couple of hours first.

AdrianC

MidnightWolf said:

But it isn’t just a one-time download. Most games will receive updates, often on a monthly basis, and they can easily be 4GB+. A bit of a pain (first world problems, I know) if you sit down to play and then you’ve got to wait a couple of hours first.

And they don't download in the background if the console's left on?

csgohan4

For the PC it is not doable.. especially if you are using it. You cannot d/l while playing it is unplayable

But a 67mbps connection will alleviate this and I think is the sweet spot for a lot of people

[Deleted User]

MobileSaver said:

rigolith said:

Gavin83 said:

I'd love to know what you're doing that requires 1000Mb upload speeds. Have you invented teleportation via ethernet or something?

This is old thinking, from before many people worked from home and video games were delivered digitally.

It's interesting that your "new thinking" didn't have an answer for what you and many others need 1000Mb upload speeds for...

I work from home. Regularly handle large files over the VPN. Current connection is 67/20 and it grinds to a crawl when saving big files. Not just for me, for everyone in the house.

That's what people forget, these are not single user internet connections. You don't want your Netflix stuttering because someone is downloading a patch.

These days mid range phones shoot 4k video, and people want to upload it to YouTube etc.

I also use cloud storage for personal backup, got a few terabytes up there and it took months and months to upload. When I am working on a project the overnight backups are often still running when I start work in the morning.

The really frustrating part is that with OpenReach you have to pay for the top speed to get just 100mbps upload. I'd much rather have 500/500, if I couldn't get 1000/1000.

Gigabit in both directions means you just don't have to think about it. No contention issues with half a dozen users. Future proof. Trust OpenReach to drag their heels and move as slowly as possible on this. Meanwhile Japan has 10,000/10,000 as the baseline in most cities now, with 20,000/20,000 available in some areas.