Broadband is it sad to still get excited ?

[Narcisus]

My first introduction to the online world was a Radio Shack ( Tandy ) Acoustic Coupler .... I vividly remember my first broadband at 50k/sec. Just had a bit of an uplift from Virgin to around 540mbps down 36 up.

Just downloaded The Witcher 2, 30Gb, in about 6 minutes.

I know that's nowhere near the fastest home broadband by a long shot but i'm still very pleased with it. Still miss the old Bulletin Boards though

[devnull]

it is cool, but rather like having a payrise, you get very used to the new headroom very quickly! I have the same package as you, and we are big streamers and video conference users. Means i never have to be remotely concerned about what others in the houe are doing.

[Narcisus]

devnull said:

it is cool, but rather like having a payrise, you get very used to the new headroom very quickly! I have the same package as you, and we are big streamers and video conference users. Means i never have to be remotely concerned about what others in the houe are doing.

Yeah 2 week honeymoon period then .... What's the next tier ?

[mmm-five]

I remember working in a bank in the late 80s, and our modems were 600 baud (2.4kbps) - and that was used to send out daily transaction data around the country.

I can't tell you the excitement that went around the office when we got an upgrade to our Hayes modem to a nice new 14.4kbps model.

I think it was a couple of years later when they became common enough that your computer had one in the back (I know all my Macs/Powerbooks of the time did).

[2 sMoKiN bArReLs]

In the mid '70s I worked for Philips, the electronics giant.

We had a fax. I remember being blown away seeing a fax printing out that had been sent seconds before from Moscow.

[CubanPete]

My Dad had a 2.4, then 14.4, then 56k modems. They used the same line as the phone, and were in phone rates too.

You ran a Web trawler as search engines like Google didn't exist, 'gopher' rings a bell. Pictures downloaded a line at a time, and it was always a bit of a surprise what you were actually going to get!

[Gman20]

The connection between bandwidth and speed is a bit of a marketing scam really. Higher bandwidths have never really meant higher speed, without a change in technology the changes in response times are hard to even measure and are completely imperceptible. And these days most of the time a change in technology is pretty imperceptible too.
A better analogy for bandwidth would be capacity not speed.
It would be hard not to get excited about the offer of making your car twice as fast for an extra £10 a month, but making your boot twice as big, meh might be useful but I'm not going to run out and see how many boxes of frozen sausages I can fit in it.

[boxst]

I've been using bulletin boards for as long as I remember, starting with a 300bps acoustic coupler.

To the question: I'm just about to get 900mbps down and am incredibly excited

[mmm-five]

Gman20 said:

The connection between bandwidth and speed is a bit of a marketing scam really. Higher bandwidths have never really meant higher speed, without a change in technology the changes in response times are hard to even measure and are completely imperceptible. And these days most of the time a change in technology is pretty imperceptible too.
A better analogy for bandwidth would be capacity not speed.
It would be hard not to get excited about the offer of making your car twice as fast for an extra £10 a month, but making your boot twice as big, meh might be useful but I'm not going to run out and see how many boxes of frozen sausages I can fit in it.

Not really - it's a function of both:

• Low capacity x low speed = poor experience
• High capacity x low speed = poor experience
• Low capacity x high speed = good experience, until you hit your data cap
• High capacity x high speed = good experience

Capacity is how much I can download.

Speed is how fast I can download it.

Response is not much of an issue if you're downloading a 200gb install or web browsing, as I'm not sure you'll notice a change from 10ms to 5ms response when so much is loading from multiple servers and trackers. A day trader may have different priorities/requirements.

Your car analogy would be fine - if I needed to transport something twice as big as the capacity of my boot, as I'd need to make 2 trips. But if my speed is 10x faster, then I can afford to do 2 trips (or use 2 cars) and still be done 5x faster.

Edited by mmm-five on Monday 8th March 20:18

[theboss]

I would find upgrading to FTTP or leased line terribly exciting but then I've had to manage without it so far so it would be a significant improvement in stability and quality of service, and also having the upstream bandwidth to store everything I want offsite.

I can work with quite high latencies, its variation of latency (jitter) and instability which annoys me.

[Lucas Ayde]

Narcisus said:

My first introduction to the online world was a Radio Shack ( Tandy ) Acoustic Coupler .... I vividly remember my first broadband at 50k/sec. Just had a bit of an uplift from Virgin to around 540mbps down 36 up.

Just downloaded The Witcher 2, 30Gb, in about 6 minutes.

I know that's nowhere near the fastest home broadband by a long shot but i'm still very pleased with it. Still miss the old Bulletin Boards though

Broadband is amazing when you grew up with modem access to the Internet. I still remember my first proper broadband (cable modem) .... 640kbit/sec down and 64kbit/sec up. I was totally amazed at the speed and the fact that it all just came through an ethernet connection with no need to dial up and spent the first couple of weeks using it as much as I possibly could, like a kid in a candy shop. Then I discovered peer to peer filesharing and .... liftoff.

[alorotom]

theboss said:

I would find upgrading to FTTP or leased line terribly exciting

I was super excited for my FTTP 1gb connection when we sorted our new house a couple of years ago.

This was a jump from a copper line that topped out at 15mb at our old place.

[SCEtoAUX]

I did all of the modern stuff and the thing that sticks in my mind was when Freeserve offered an 0800 number so you could stay online as long as you wanted for no cost.

Napster was my gest friend and I remember downloading the video of Kylie on a bucking bronco. All 20mb of it.

[lastexile69]

Ah the Kylie ad - Agent Provocateur wasn't it? asking for a friend is all...

I remember tying up the phone line for hours and hours watching film trailers one after another as a youngster. Dave's Trailer Page - anyone remember that?!

[Teddy Lop]

Last time I was impressed was getting the first 512mb ADSL connection when they came out, which would have been '01? Not only insanely quick, but shared internet access for our flatshare, concurrently! Ethernet leads everywhere! Kids today don't know they're born...

[devnull]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Virgin sent me an email in December to say I was in the top 5% of the country of their downloaders. I must have been doing something right Not even like it was my good old days of piracy, little to no point anymore.