Is the speed of local broadband important to you? Options

[Andy Capp]

This is the current NWN question. It seems a poorly designed question. ~6Mb is important, but it is not important for me to get, say, +20Mb!

[Guest_xjay1337_*]

I had sky at my old place, 10MB connection, happy with it. Here I have Orange/BT which is not so good, about a 3.5MB connection. Only one third of my old speed. Plus can't torrent in "normal" hours. First world problems

[user23]

Have you registered your support for Superfast Broadband in Berkshire?

[Andy Capp]

Have you registered your support for Superfast Broadband in Berkshire?

Faster broadband = more Newbury job losses.

[JeffG]

Have you registered your support for Superfast Broadband in Berkshire?

Your link quotes Superfast Broadband as "24 Mbps or faster". I don't know how old the site is, but it's available now in Newbury. I have BT Infinity with a download speed of 37 Mbps.

[Edit: this is FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) with the last part from the local cabinet to the house on normal copper wire as before. It looks like the site is talking about FTTP (fibre to the premises), where the fibre-optic cable goes all the way to the individual premises. This is a lot faster than 24Mbps.]

[stewiegriffin]

Well, it's important for it to be fast enough. But I don't need the superfast stuff for my purposes.

I get about 8-9ish on average and that's fast enough for streaming HD content.

No doubt in a few years we'll need higher speeds, but for now I'm happy with what I've got.

[Ron]

Made an application to Virgin for fibre optics connection but we are 'the wrong side of the road' and thus too expensive to be connected!

[Darren]

I'd rather trade some of the download bandwidth into upload bandwidth.

[NWNREADER]

I don't think it is a matter for local or central government. Business case will rule.

[Andy Capp]

I'd rather trade some of the download bandwidth into upload bandwidth.

Agreed.

[dannyboy]

Agreed.

Me too. Takes ages to upload the latest vid of the missus.

[Guest_xjay1337_*]

Is that the one where she escaped from Broadmoor?

You don't need more than about 30Kbps of upload speed (as in what you actually get irrespective of advertised line speed). Unfortunately it doesn't work in such a way as that, you get a 10Mb connection, you can't have 8Mb down and 2Mb up, or 5Mb down and 5Mb up.. there are some hosting companies which provide this service where you can change your bandwidth, normally used by networking companies who want complete control. Or you can have a balanced pipe (SDSL) which would for example give you a 8Mb up AND down speed but these can get incredibly expensive.

About 85% of web traffic is download as normally all you are doing is sending tiny ack packets back to servers when you establish TCP connection (when you type in www.myinappropriatewebsiteforyoungladies.com or something).

For example when you navigate to Youtube.com you and the youtube server exchange packets and loads data, fine - but this may only come to around 1.5mb for the main splash page at Youtube.com for traffic both ways (as in the data on the Youtube site plus your return ack packets..

All of the adverts that run, videos you watch, are all UDP and almost entirely dependant on downstream traffic (as with UDP you do not need to send a return packet to acknowledge reciept of the previous packet) so your upload speed doesn't matter so much. If you have about 10-12kpbs of upload available then you will be able to stream HD videos without a problem which have a far higher data rate, compressed, of about 500Kbps.

[Andy Capp]

You don't need more than about 30Kbps of upload speed (as in what you actually get irrespective of advertised line speed).

Having better upload means cloud backup is a lot more convenient. For me, ~6Mb is currently fine (double it for luck), but 400kb is a bit weedy.

[Guest_xjay1337_*]

I'd hate to rain (ha ha cloud reference) on your parade Andy so perhaps the bandwidth is useful for some things. Best bet would be to set up RAID1, after all what good is the "cloud" if you can't reach it, whether their servers are offline or whether you can't reach them because your internet is down. Especially with the new wave of "shutting down cloud-based storage sites due to copyright"... I need RAID1...just need to get another brontobyte hard drive.

[dannyboy]

Is that the one where she escaped from Broadmoor?

You've seen it!