Rural broadband speeds - 10mbps... how bad?

[Condi]

Ashfordian said:

Data speeds are only going to get faster, especially with 5G which could make the need for wired broadband obsolete for most users.

Many parts of the countryside will no doubt end up getting 5G faster than they can install fibre, although there has been significant investment into rural fibre. My mum's village in the arse end of nowhere gets better internet than I do in a town of 25,000 people because there were grants and schemes to connect rural villages directly to fibre, whereas we are still on copper at 60Mbps


OP - anything above about 10-15Mb should be fine for day to day use, although you might have to downgrade your movie watching from 4k to HD. Where it is more frustrating is when doing large uploads or downloads, especially if you use cloud based storage, or download big updates for games/programs. I wouldn't necessarily discount a house based on 10Mb internet, as long as you can get true 10Mb, and not it says you can get 10Mb but actually end up with less than 1Mb because your house is 2 miles from the cabinet.

[biggles330d]

We're quite rural and get about 10-12mb and to be honest never have any issue with Teams, Netflix, general work stuff etc. Emails and browsing is no issue at all.

Ok, only two of us and hardly the most demanding use, but I honestly wonder what on earth anyone is doing in a domestic situation that needs 100mb+, never mind 600mb!

[Sheepshanks]

MarkL73 said:

We are on the verge of discounting properties based on this issue, but don't want to do that. If we are overreacting based on the perception we need more speed than we are actually using now anyway.

Often there's some local campaign in rural areas to get the broadband upgraded, sometimes supported by the local council - might be worth checking if that's on the cards if you're otherwise set on a place.

My boss lives in a tiny hamlet and was relying on some kind of point-to-point radio broadband system, but they got upgraded to fibre pretty early on in the fibre roll out, and he got FTTH when at time most people were getting FTTC.


There's also the Government stuff on rural broadband: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/buildi...

Edited by Sheepshanks on Thursday 28th March 17:43

[Muppet007]

MarkL73 said:

is starlink a viable solution? I really need a good solid connection – people talking about zoom calls going fuzzy isn't really going to work!
I am uploading to YouTube on an almost daily basis and conducting things like online podcast, that obviously require a reasonable connection speed.

I've worked from home for 2 years using starlink.
For calls, Teams etc its fine if you use Onedrive to present from as the upload speed is not great (18-25mb). Download is fine.
It takes a little bit of forward planning if presenting, but otherwise its fine. I could not survive without it.

[Road2Ruin]

biggles330d said:

We're quite rural and get about 10-12mb and to be honest never have any issue with Teams, Netflix, general work stuff etc. Emails and browsing is no issue at all.

Ok, only two of us and hardly the most demanding use, but I honestly wonder what on earth anyone is doing in a domestic situation that needs 100mb+, never mind 600mb!

Indeed. There is a lot of OMG only 11Mbps, how will we cope. When in reality that will handle a lot. HD stream are around 5Mbps, but can be lower. 4K will not work, but I don't recall the last time I watched one, and when I did, I couldn't say it wad any better than HD. Teams can be anywhere between 1.5 - 5 Mbps and audio streams are very low. Even doing all of that at the same time shouldn't cause a problem.

[xeny]

MarkL73 said:

Interesting – I assume because satellites are up in space, it doesn't really matter whereabouts in the UK you are, as long as you can see the sky you're going to get a decent signal?

Not quite - depends on the distribution of satellites and the inclination of their orbits relative to the equator. Not much point having satellites orbiting top to bottom as there are not enough customers at the poles. So they orbit at up to 50 or 60 degrees to the equator, and you get coverage up to that latitude.

Take a look at https://satellitemap.space/ and you'll see the issue with the UK. You're in a better situation if you can put the dish on a pole so it can see a more of the sky. Bottom of a deep valley will make things trickier.

[xeny]

biggles330d said:

but I honestly wonder what on earth anyone is doing in a domestic situation that needs 100mb+, never mind 600mb!

For most people very little, but to an extent it often isn't that expensive for an ISP to offer more bandwidth, so they'll use it as a convenient upsell to get a better profit margin.

Part way through Covid we did some pretty extensive analysis of what ~200 people (top tier research scientists, who definitely were working - our publications rate was measurably higher) WFH had WRT broadband and how happy they were with it.

The biggest driver we found for broadband faster than 100 or so Mbit was people wanting to download large game updates which sometimes run into the 100s of GB.

I acknowledge that if you need/want to work on high res 2D or especially 3D assets then you either want the fastest broadband you can get, or do all the work on a machine already in a colo, but that isn't most domestic broadband customers.

[98elise]

PushedDover said:

MarkL73 said:

is starlink a viable solution? I really need a good solid connection – people talking about zoom calls going fuzzy isn't really going to work!
I am uploading to YouTube on an almost daily basis and conducting things like online podcast, that obviously require a reasonable connection speed.

Yes,

We use on our vessels, and its a game changer.

This.

Starlink makes broadband available everywhere.you have power. Its a bit more than normal BB, but a small price to pay if a dream home depends on it.

Amazon are planning a similar network, so competition should keep prices reasonable.

[Ken_Code]

MarkL73 said:

is starlink a viable solution? I really need a good solid connection – people talking about zoom calls going fuzzy isn't really going to work!
I am uploading to YouTube on an almost daily basis and conducting things like online podcast, that obviously require a reasonable connection speed.

Starlink has been brilliant for us. No drops, steady 100mb/s.

[ATG]

Road2Ruin said:

biggles330d said:

We're quite rural and get about 10-12mb and to be honest never have any issue with Teams, Netflix, general work stuff etc. Emails and browsing is no issue at all.

Ok, only two of us and hardly the most demanding use, but I honestly wonder what on earth anyone is doing in a domestic situation that needs 100mb+, never mind 600mb!

Indeed. There is a lot of OMG only 11Mbps, how will we cope. When in reality that will handle a lot. HD stream are around 5Mbps, but can be lower. 4K will not work, but I don't recall the last time I watched one, and when I did, I couldn't say it wad any better than HD. Teams can be anywhere between 1.5 - 5 Mbps and audio streams are very low. Even doing all of that at the same time shouldn't cause a problem.

A lot of this ^

I live in the sticks ... up a hill, mile outside a small village that is itself 10 miles from a town of any size. When we moved here we started out with a massive 2Mb broadband connection. Stable with fast pings, though. That was fine for a remote desktop connection to the office. Used to use 4G for large downloads.

Then they rolled out FTTP to all the remote houses around here. Hahahaha. Hahahaha. God knows why. Maybe sheep like Netflix? Anyway, I now have vastly more bandwidth than I need, and indeed more than my old switches and APs can cope with.

[Ken_Code]

ATG said:

A lot of this ^

I live in the sticks ... up a hill, mile outside a small village that is itself 10 miles from a town of any size. When we moved here we started out with a massive 2Mb broadband connection. Stable with fast pings, though. That was fine for a remote desktop connection to the office. Used to use 4G for large downloads.

Then they rolled out FTTP to all the remote houses around here. Hahahaha. Hahahaha. God knows why. Maybe sheep like Netflix? Anyway, I now have vastly more bandwidth than I need, and indeed more than my old switches and APs can cope with.

I managed for years with a (rock steady) 10Mb/s, and it was absolutely fine. Email, HD video, software downloads and so on all worked perfectly well.

I’m not really sure why I paid for anything other than the lowest rate when we got fibre installed. 300mb/s is utterly pointless.

[Muppet007]

Ken_Code said:

I managed for years with a (rock steady) 10Mb/s, and it was absolutely fine. Email, HD video, software downloads and so on all worked perfectly well.

I’m not really sure why I paid for anything other than the lowest rate when we got fibre installed. 300mb/s is utterly pointless.

Disagree with that. Some of our demos are 100gb each and with multiple builds to test in a week, faster the better.

If your a gamer, faster is good when games are coming in at 100s and 100s of gbs

Edit... phone fingers

Edited by Muppet007 on Thursday 28th March 20:13

[xeny]

Muppet007 said:

Disagree with that. Some.ofnour demos are 100gb each adlnd with multiple builds to test in a week, faster the better.

If your a gamer, faster is good when games are coming in at 100s and 100s of gbs

At some point in the speed vs size of what you are working on equation, it is less painful to remote to a box with decent bandwidth.

[OutInTheShed]

Part of me thinks if you can't live with 10Mb/s, you're probably an incurable townie.

Our internet is generally 25+Mb/s, but it can get slow on a wet day in the tourist season.
We also get the odd winter event where it all goes slow, quite often during/after a 'named storm'.
Also if you get proper rural, internet speed can be a bit moot when your power goes off.

We're fairly chilled about it, if catch-up TV goes slow, we'll watch something recorded off Freeshat.
That used to happen more than it has this winter.

A few people I know who need internet for their work have Starlink. And generators.

[miniman]

Really depends on where you go - we are rural and have 600mb up and down FTTP.

[Sheets Tabuer]

Never have an issue, my Internet never goes above 20Mb, I do teams kid does ps5 and the mrs watches netflix. Kid complains his game is laggy but I couldn't care less

[Ken_Code]

Muppet007 said:

Disagree with that. Some.ofnour demos are 100gb each adlnd with multiple builds to test in a week, faster the better.

If your a gamer, faster is good when games are coming in at 100s and 100s of gbs

Being able to download a game twenty minutes faster should I ever need to download games isn’t really worth the monthly cost.

[Actual]

FMOB said:

In the end got BT out to look at the telephone wiring to the BT master socket, turns out an extension had been wired in before the master socket that wrecked the performance. That was sorted and got 18Mbps, things settled down at 38Mbps.

Going back to when ADSL was first available I think it was an 8 Mbps service but I was getting much less speed. At the time my house was wired with multiple telephone extensions for use with 56kbps modems and also multiple landline phones around the house. I disconnected all the extensions and only had wiring to the BT master socket and doubled my speed. Same technique should still work for ADSL.

One day kids won't believe me when I tell them telephones once had wires and buttons.

[HRL]

Crappy 16Mb rural broadband here in North Devon.

Last week it took the best part of 3 days to download 400Gb of files, which is less than ideal. Lots of complaints from other members of the family but it’s rare that I hog the little bandwidth we have.

Airband are installing fiber in our lane, in fact it already runs past my house, but they’ve yet to make the connection live and it’s taken them over two years to get this close. Anticipate a minimum of 150Mb once it is live, though I’ll believe it when I see it.

16Mb is not enough when there are six of you in the house and two of those are teenagers! Considered Starlink but the latency bothers me as a gamer so I’ll wait for the fiber.

[xeny]

Ken_Code said:

Being able to download a game twenty minutes faster should I ever need to download games isn’t really worth the monthly cost.

Depends how big the game is - if it translates into needing to leave a PC on overnight to download it, you're considering the cost of the electricity cost for that as well as your time wasted waiting.