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According to Ofcom, speeds of 24Mbps are currently available to 94 per cent of premises. Yet only 45 per cent have signed up, sticking with their poxy standard ADSL packages of around 11-12Mbps.
A survey of 3,000 customers by Which? suggests that the most common reason for not bothering to upgrade was because people felt happy with their current speeds.
So if people can't be arsed to upgrade from creaking ADSL services to the much-derided "superfast" fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) speeds, why on earth are they going to bother with the far more expensive full-fibre speeds?
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Do Brits Really Even Want Full Fibre?
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In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls.
-- Lenny Bruce
(Score: 4, Informative) by Freeman on Friday August 09 2019, @03:05PM (15 children)
Gaming doesn't require super high speeds. Yes, it does require a certain amount of bandwidth, but the key is low latency. I moved and had to switch Fixed Wireless providers. Now, I'm at 25Mbps down and 5Mbps and my previous issues with online games have melted away. Of course my ping went from 100-200ms to 12ms.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 09 2019, @03:40PM (8 children)
Instant gratification when download new games. When you buy a new game that is 10-20GB you want to play it, not wait 2 hours.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 09 2019, @04:12PM (5 children)
Don't forget the typical day one 50 GB patches. That's over 4 hours if saturating the entire 25 Mbps connection.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday August 10 2019, @08:30AM (4 children)
I'm not saying it doesn't happen - but which OS is sending out patches of that size?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 10 2019, @12:11PM (3 children)
http://www.pushsquare.com/news/2018/10/physical_copies_of_black_ops_4_require_50gb_day_one_update_on_ps4 [pushsquare.com]
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/444534/50gb-update-wtf [elderscrollsonline.com]
https://www.dualshockers.com/fallout-76-patch-50gb/ [dualshockers.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/5nwv7v/50gb_updates_are_ridiculous/ [reddit.com]
I think you can find patches of this size for online distributed PC games but they seem to be more common on consoles.
50 GB is the capacity of a dual-layer Blu-ray disc. So what is probably going on here is that people buy a physical copy, then have to download the update, which is the size of an entire game, directly to the hard drive of their console.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday August 10 2019, @01:17PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 10 2019, @01:47PM (1 child)
If your home connection is capped at 25 Mbps, torrenting (which could be done behind the scenes in some updaters, although I don't know which ones) won't allow it to go above that. You're still spending at least ~4.5 hours to grab 50 GB.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday August 10 2019, @01:58PM
I know.
But if you only need such a large bandwidth for rare occasions, it would make sense to torrent and thereby allow others to make better use of the available bandwidth at the same time. As others have pointed out, very few people actually need 100MB to meet a family's needs. What is a 4 hour wait?
It seems to me to be a very inefficient (and selfish) way to share what, at the end of the day, is still a limited resource - even if that resource is becoming more plentiful every day.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday August 09 2019, @11:01PM (1 child)
I mean, I guess I understand that. But it's a pretty expensive premium to pay just to avoid waiting a couple hours. How often do you download new games? With my internet provider, paying for the next step up in speed would have cost me $15/month plus taxes, so likely over $200/year. I get why some people pay for Amazon Prime to get stuff within a couple days rather than a couple weeks (sometimes you need emergency supplies or whatever) -- plus they get a bunch of movie and video content and other perks, but that's a lot less money then we're talking about here.
Everyone had his own life priorities, so I'm not judging anyone. I just wonder when we transitioned to a culture where we can't wait an hour or two to be entertained by a new purchase. I noticed it about 7 years ago when Netflix stopped buffering videos and instead would simply start playing them immediately at a lower quality rather than give you a 5-10 second delay (maybe longer on slower connections). I found that incredibly annoying, as I'd prefer to have an option to watch the first few seconds in high quality when it actually matters (and isn't just credits), but we just moved to a situation where apparently people aren't willing to even wait 10 seconds to watch a film.
I get that people don't want to waste time. But I'm not sure I've ever felt this compulsive need to get a piece of entertainment RIGHT NOW so much so that I'm willing to pay a large premium rather than just do something else for a couple hours until said item arrives.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday August 12 2019, @02:02PM
Fast food places survive, because people can't be bothered to make their own food. Don't be surprised, when people's addiction to instant gratification leads to what you might call dumb things.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 09 2019, @05:04PM (1 child)
i agree.
i am "stuck" on 30/10 VDSL2 'cause i am to lazy to dig a trench, drill concrete etc. etc. for the phiberoptics (one-loooong-continues-cable).
however, i did it for neighbors.
the technology is GPON, so it's like wifi but inside a tiny glass pipe: shared (broadcast) download, time-slotted upload.
the download speed is massive. bursty, it goes all the way to 500/500.
but i still prefer my VDSL2 just because of the lag.
once the GPON starts, it downloads massively but so far it doesn't beat the response time of VDSL2(*).
i am a bit of a "surfer" not a "streamer" so your mileage will vary.
(*) same internet provider for both technologies, same package price, same DNServer configured, same config: isp-router/modem in bridgemode (yes, a GPON modem can be put in bridge mode) with a ubiquiti Edgerouter X.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday August 10 2019, @03:00AM
Yeah, GPON. It's great when you're the first customer on the OLT because you've got a dedicated optical link to the core network.
Then a few more people join up and things are at about 50% capacity and you start to get performance about what's advertised.
Then more people join up and things are at 100% capacity and you're noticing lag and dropouts at peak times.
Then even more people join up and things are at 200% capacity and you get nothing but "buffering..." messages mid-evening when you want to watch a movie.
Then more people join up and things are at 400% capacity and even web surfing is starting to lag.
And they're still signing up more users, because there's no limit to how may times you can oversell your network.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday August 09 2019, @06:22PM (1 child)
That's right. For online gaming, latency is far more important than bandwidth-- as long as your bandwidth is at least 56k. I had a problem with my router in which every 15 seconds or so, packets were delayed for 1 to 1.5 seconds. The longer the router went between reboots, the worse the delay got. Couldn't even play slither.io.
Sure, you don't want to wait hours for a slow connection to deliver patches. But there are ways around that. It can be worth taking a laptop to some place with a fast connection, updating the game on it, then copying the updated files to your desktop machine at home. Patchers don't care how a file was updated. I don't go that far. I'll let one computer update online, then have my other computers copy the updates from it. My 100M Ethernet LAN is quite a bit faster than my WAN. I suppose I should upgrade to 1G Ethernet some day.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday August 12 2019, @02:08PM
56kbps up is probably too little to host your own server. I like playing games like Space Engineers where I host my own world and my friend joins me. Still, 5mbps is likely way overkill for that. I probably wouldn't notice, if they throttled me back to 1Mbps upload, since I normally wouldn't be using that much bandwidth for uploading.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday August 09 2019, @10:45PM (1 child)
Thanks for the clarification. I thought it was mostly low latency that gamers were after, but I've seen a lot of discussion online where gamers have chimed in and said they really need their ultra high bandwidth connections, too, so I assumed they were using them for something.
But that just makes me even more mystified at the vitriol displayed in the post I was replying to (as well as the summary and some other posts here) where 24-25 Mbps is apparently so ungodly slow that no one on the planet could find it usable anymore.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday August 12 2019, @01:56PM
Well, it is kind of hard to play COD:Black Ops 4, stream to all your Twitch followers, download torrents, and stream Netflix all at the same time. So, 25Mbps might get a bit dicey in that situation . . . Though, there's also the Multiple GB patches that some games put out. They want to play when they want to play, so waiting 30 minutes or more to play would be the end of the world.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"