How fast does your internet need to be?

[Condi]

We hear a lot about gigabit broadband, fibre to the home, fibre to the cabinet. Adverts on meercats "can you get faster broadband" etc, but what do people with gigabit do that people with 30 or 60 meg don't? Games download faster, but the games themselves play well on even 30 meg. Youtube and Netflix work well with 30meg. WFH is perfectly possible with 30meg.

Having lived in some rural places with less than 5 or even less than 1Mb/s it would seem far more important to get everyone to say, 50Mb/s across the country including rural areas than pushing FTTP for people who can already access 60MB/s.

Or am I missing something and there is a benefit to superfast broadband beyond what can be achieved down a copper cable?

[sjg]

“Busy households” is the usual line, ie streaming video to a couple of TVs, plus gaming, etc all at the same time.

We get 60ish mbps down on FTTC and that’s fine for us. Can get g.fast or even faster on virgin but no real benefit beyond the odd big game or patch coming down a bit quicker. Generally upload is no better either. After so many years spending a fortune to get the best home internet available (from Home Highway ISDN, through early ADSL, etc) it’s been a bit odd in recent years to think “nah, the midrange is fine”.

Most people would see better throughput by putting their money into better home WiFi.

[Gluggy]

sjg said:

Most people would see better throughput by putting their money into better home WiFi.

Very true.... Its surprising how many non-technical people don't realise that their connection is only as fast as the weakest link and 9 times out of 10 that is the WiFi.

We have 200/20 from Virgin Media and were lucky enough to be able to run gigabit network points to the lounge and bedrooms but if we had to rely on wireless alone it would make more sense to save a bit of money and go with a slower connection.

[MitchT]

I usually get about 66Mbps. I can't think why I'd need more. On a typical day I'm working from home moving very large files around and streaming radio. At the same time the OH is usually working from home and often on MS Teams calls. Works perfectly for iPlayer, etc. on the TV too.

[craigjm]

Question was answered in the first reply. You don’t need mega fast broadband unless you have lots of devices attached doing things simultaneously. Working from home, couple of TVs streaming, mobile phones attached, smart home devices etc all going for it at once. I reality nobody needs ultra speed Internet

[telford_mike]

At our place in the U.K. we have 70mb via FTTC. In our holiday home abroad where we spend most of our time we get about 20mb through 4G. The experience is no different - Netflix, Amazon video etc all work fine. There are just 2 of us though, and I'd agree with the comment above about 'busy households'.

[xeny]

Condi said:

Or am I missing something and there is a benefit to superfast broadband beyond what can be achieved down a copper cable?

It may give you faster upload speeds, which is often the source of contention with WFH.

I put SNMP monitoring on my main internet connection early in April last year.

With two people WFH (on wired connections so WiFi not a bottleneck), watching streaming media (but only an HD TV) we hardly ever exceeded 10 down except for me moving VM images or ISOs around.

Some people seem to throw money at faster connections thinking (or possibly being left to walk down this path by salespeople) it will "scale up" the speed of wireless in the slower parts of the house - say you only get 20Mbit somewhere, they think doubling the external link speed will double that to 40Mbit.

[xeny]

Gluggy said:

Very true.... Its surprising how many non-technical people don't realise that their connection is only as fast as the weakest link and 9 times out of 10 that is the WiFi..

Not always non-technical people - I ended up giving a friend a better AP for Christmas as he was so frequently having connection glitches. I think some people just think "this is how it is" if they've not encountered this is how it can be.

I was luck I ran a couple of cat 5 cables perhaps 20 years ago. They ran to the right parts of the house and come March last year I just hung a switch off each one to create two workspaces.

Edited by xeny on Monday 17th May 08:10

[Sheets Tabuer]

Get about 8 most days, sometimes goes up to 26 or 30 on a good day.

Perfectly fine for me, I have 5 PCs, 2 NAS, 30 smart devices, 4 TVs, SKY and a playstation.

I do live alone though.

[alorotom]

I’ve recently dropped from a 1gb connection to a 500mb line (FTTH)

On my Mac via Ethernet it runs at full speed - all the Wi-fi devices seem to run around 330-380mb

We don’t suffer drop outs or stutters and Teams runs like a dream. Additionally I host my own Plex server that some family members can access and it keeps that running with multiple HD/some 4K streams without issue too.

[alorotom]

Sheets Tabuer said:

Get about 8 most days, sometimes goes up to 26 or 30 on a good day.

Perfectly fine for me, I have 5 PCs, 2 NAS, 30 smart devices, 4 TVs, SKY and a playstation.

I do live alone though.

This is the key piece as concurrent consumption will be low with one person accessing devices.

[RichTT]

4k streaming, faster uploads and downloads of files. I have ±300mb down and 50mb up. Mostly needed the up speed for cloud security camera storage.

[normalbloke]

I thought most fibre services were symmetrical, ala Hyperoptic, or are they unusual?

[Muppet007]

craigjm said:

Question was answered in the first reply. You don’t need mega fast broadband unless you have lots of devices attached doing things simultaneously. Working from home, couple of TVs streaming, mobile phones attached, smart home devices etc all going for it at once. I reality nobody needs ultra speed Internet

I do. I have 300 MB/S and could go up to 1GB/S but I'm in an old house and using powerline tech which limits speeds.

I'm constantly downloading and uploading massive files 20gb-200gb, so the faster the better.

[EdR]

I've recently gone from 77Mb FTTC to a 900Mb (symmetrical) fibre connection. Would have quite happily stayed on the 77Mb connection if we didn't have a better option as it was hardly ever an issue, although with 4 of us in the house doing various Teams / Zoom / 4k streaming / god knows how many other things concurrently, there were a few times that the connection started to get a bit congested (noticed by video dropouts in Teams & checked at the router). The fact that it is basically the same price as my FTTC connection makes it a bit of a no-brainer.

Since having gone for the 900Mb connection, I've never noticed any performance issues, and obviously downloads and uploads are much faster - downloads quite often catch me out as it completes so quickly with a smallish file that I think it failed to start downloading! I also do offsite backup replication, which is vastly quicker now.

I have a combination of wired ethernet to some devices and a Unifi Wifi setup, which tends to get around 400-550Mb most of the time. I did nearly get sucked into upgrading to Wifi 6 to get better Wifi performance, however managed to stop myself as there really would have been no real benefit to doing so!

I do actually agree that that having 50Mb everywhere makes more sense for now than focusing on full fibre, however a few years from now doubt we will think the same (I remember doing the firmware upgrade on my modem to go from 33.6k to 56k, so gives an idea of how much we are able to soak up additional bandwidth over the years!)

[TypeRTim]

some things have hard lower limits for bandwidth

4k streaming is one of them. If you get your TV through BT and subscribe to BT Sport, they deliver that as IPTV over your broadband connection. To receive BT Sport Ultimate (4k) you need at least a 40Mb/s connection and it hogs all that bandwidth.

As 4k becomes more and more popular/mainstream, more content will be delivered over the internet as Freeview has pretty much run out of bandwidth.

So I'd say if you have a 4k TV and want to take advantage of it whilst doing other things as well, you'd need at least 50Mb/s connection.

[Mars]

I'd be happy with something like 90/30. The 90 download speed would satisfy the whole family but I (more than the rest of the family) could use a reasonable upload speed - 30 would do - for work (IT).

Anything faster would be wasted, even when we're all on VCs all day.

Interesting conversations happening in many IT depts at the moment is how their corp network will cope with the new demands for VC when (if) everyone returns to the office. The requirement won't go away because few companies will demand everyone returns to the office so there will be considerable additional bandwidth demands to connect teams who are partly WFH. It works today because everyone supplies their own bandwidth but multiply everyone's average bandwidth together (inaccurately assuming that is what they need) and your corp network bandwidth demand exceeds what is possible in many cases.

[Griffith4ever]

I have (measured) 24mb down and 2.6 up.

We stream 4k with zero issues and this is often when I'm gaming on my pc. Only time we notice the lack of bandwidth is torrenting as it's easy to use up all the upload bandwidth without throttling it in the software.

I'm a tech heavy user and tbh, 99% of the time it's perfectly adequate.

Downloading giant installs can be a pain. Ms flight sim takes a whole day / overnight. That is partly due to not getting full download speed from MS too.

[rdjohn]

Muppet007 said:

I do. I have 300 MB/S and could go up to 1GB/S but I'm in an old house and using powerline tech which limits speeds.

I'm constantly downloading and uploading massive files 20gb-200gb, so the faster the better.

I suppose the question should be, “how many homes in the UK are likely to need this level of service?”

Even if dad is watching Netflix on TV, mum is catching up on Eastenders on iPad, son is on Fortnight and daughter doing homework while listening to Spotify, i doubt that you really need 1Gb/s

[sjg]

Mars said:

Interesting conversations happening in many IT depts at the moment is how their corp network will cope with the new demands for VC when (if) everyone returns to the office. The requirement won't go away because few companies will demand everyone returns to the office so there will be considerable additional bandwidth demands to connect teams who are partly WFH. It works today because everyone supplies their own bandwidth but multiply everyone's average bandwidth together (inaccurately assuming that is what they need) and your corp network bandwidth demand exceeds what is possible in many cases.

Yep. The bigger problem is internet egress in many cases - traditional model was to connect sites back to a regional hub, where your servers and a central internet connection would be. Could proxy it and snoop on what everyone was using the internet for, but lots of traffic didn't need to go any further than the hub.

Now with cloud services (Teams, Zoom, etc) all that has to go out to the internet and it can easily swamp that sort of setup. There's a lot of organisations that had started moving stuff to cloud without planning properly and were running into issues before covid - they had quite a relief when everyone went home and their experience improved. New model for offices really needs fast internet at all of them.