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?
(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"