Sponsored Links

Do you really need 1000Mbps (1Gbps)?

Mark.J

Administrator
Staff member
ISPreview Team
Interesting article about South Korea's upgrade to 1000Mbps fibre optic broadband on the BBC today, which contrasts that with what the UK is doing. I didn't cover it in our news because we tend to stick firmly to fully UK focused stories.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9093991.stm

It's a useful question though, can we really benefit from such speeds? Certainly not yet we can't, maybe in the distant future, but I note that the BBC, as is so often the case, failed to consider a number of crucial issues when talking about speed.

1. They neglect the age old 'Advertised' vs 'Real-World' speed dilemma. Sure South Korea already has 100Mbps connectivity, yet even the most optimistic studies shows that the national average download rate is around 20-30Mbps. More pessimistic ones put it at 6-10Mbps. It can't do 100Mbps reliably but they want 1000Mbps? Where's the logic.

2. Most internet services, not even YouTube, the BBC or Microsoft's servers, could take advantage of such speed. The vast majority of servers and websites restrict their per-connection rates to many.. many times less for load balancing.

3. People are quick to forget that the national backbone fibre optic links between operators and connections between countries aren't actually all that big. Installing domestic 1Gbps isn't going to provide any benefit to content transferred over longer distances, which will be throttled by nature of the physical infrastructure.

Now don't get me wrong, 1Gbps at an affordable price would be amazing, but South Korea and one or two other countries are the exception not the rule. Every country has a different structure and the comparison with SK is always an annoying one. I think it's better to look towards places like Sweden, which also has a lot of FTTH in the ground but is a closer budgetary comparison to ourselves.
 
But you could bittorrent a blu-ray rip in minutes!!! :D
 
Sponsored Links
No, I don't need 1Gbps. The last time I got excited about an ADSL speed bump was when I went from 512Kbps to 2Mbps. From 2Mbps upwards is a great, but not amazing, change. :hrmph:
 
Terabits, Petabits, Exabits, Zettabits and Yottabits

The consensus on the Click Online programme is that when faster broadband is a reality, services will become available to make use of it. There is a computing analogy; as processor speeds have increased, software applications have been developed to make use of them. Processor speeds have doubled, tripled then quadrupled and further software has been developed to demand even faster speeds.

A 1,000Mbps connection speed that gives a 300Mbps "real world" download speed is still ten times faster than a 100Mbps connection that gives a "real world" download speed of 30Mbps.

Some time in the future, we will all be laughing about the "ridiculously slow" 1,000Mbps connection speed of the mid 2010s as we whiz along at speeds 1,000 times faster still. :nod: People will be talking in terms of Terabits, Petabits, Exabits, Zettabits and Yottabits; then they'll have to invent new names for even faster speeds. :laugh:
 
Sponsored Links
Meanwhile, here in rural Wales . . .

where telephony still largely depends on wires on poles miles from the exchange, some of us are still managing on 512Kb broadband.

Faster (and faster) broadband will be a reality for some and I dare say services will develop to utilise it. However unless a base line for broadband speeds is set across the UK, in the same way that there is a common voltage for electricity and standard pressure for gas (not available here either!), super-fast speeds are academic.

I don't think I'm going to need to worry about what happens after Yottabits for quite some time.

:shrug:
 
where telephony still largely depends on wires on poles miles from the exchange, some of us are still managing on 512Kb broadband.

Faster (and faster) broadband will be a reality for some and I dare say services will develop to utilise it. However unless a base line for broadband speeds is set across the UK, in the same way that there is a common voltage for electricity and standard pressure for gas (not available here either!), super-fast speeds are academic.

I don't think I'm going to need to worry about what happens after Yottabits for quite some time.

:shrug:

I do feel really sorry for you. My local exchange was one of the later ones in England to get broadband, even though it is only 15 miles from Bristol & serves about 4,000 homes. We still have only one supplier (BT Wholesale) and no date yet for upgrading to 21CN.

That is the problem, large areas of the UK only have ONE supplier, meaning there is a monopoly and little incentive to encourage improvement. There are still areas of the UK without landline or mobile broadband and some are unlikely to receive it until 2012 at the earliest.

Thanks to the misbehaviour of the bankers, the UK's infrastructure upgrades have probably been pushed back by several years.
 
Last edited:
As BB speeds increase, so do the download restrictions imposed by the ISPs. I have a 10 Mb/s connection with Virgin Media, and yes, I actually do get that speed, average d/l speeds of 1240 KB/s, but only for about 17 minutes, then I hit the "traffic management" limit and lose 75% of my speed for the next five hours. It seems pretty pointless having a fast connection when you aren't allowed to use it :confused:

VM have a 50Mb/s service which is not subject to traffic management (yet!), but as soon as there is enough takeup of the service, traffic management will be introduced (as promised by VM themselves).
 
The other thing that tends to happen as BB speeds rise is that people start doing multiple things at the same time (e.g. listening to music and surfing) and the number of devices increase. So whilst 'download' speeds from a single site doesn't increase massively the utilization of the line does...

Of and SuperHigh Definition is 300Mbps
 
Sponsored Links
Agreed, and my own home life is a graphic example of that. My wife is often streaming YouTube 720p HD videos at the same time as I want to be on BBC iPlayer catching up with some news, F1 or TV shows. Luckily the 10Mbps connection does just about keep up but there's more pauses and buffering. I think a stable 20Mbps would be the sweet spot for us but if we have a bigger family in the future then god knows..
 
A 1,000Mbps connection speed that gives a 300Mbps "real world" download speed is still ten times faster than a 100Mbps connection that gives a "real world" download speed of 30Mbps.
I would disagree with that because FTTH connections aren't like traditional unstable ones. With FTTH you can actually deliver 100Mbps if the customer demands it, so the technology should not be delivering 30Mbps in the "real world" unless it's an issue of package choice, traffic management or network congestion.. something like that.
 
Top
Cheap BIG ISPs for 100Mbps+
Community Fibre UK ISP Logo
150Mbps
Gift: None
Virgin Media UK ISP Logo
Virgin Media £22.99
132Mbps
Gift: None
Vodafone UK ISP Logo
Vodafone £24.00 - 26.00
150Mbps
Gift: None
NOW UK ISP Logo
NOW £24.00
100Mbps
Gift: None
Plusnet UK ISP Logo
Plusnet £25.99
145Mbps
Gift: £50 Reward Card
Large Availability | View All
Cheapest ISPs for 100Mbps+
Gigaclear UK ISP Logo
Gigaclear £17.00
200Mbps
Gift: None
Community Fibre UK ISP Logo
150Mbps
Gift: None
Virgin Media UK ISP Logo
Virgin Media £22.99
132Mbps
Gift: None
Hey! Broadband UK ISP Logo
150Mbps
Gift: None
Youfibre UK ISP Logo
Youfibre £23.99
150Mbps
Gift: None
Large Availability | View All
Sponsored Links
The Top 15 Category Tags
  1. FTTP (6024)
  2. BT (3639)
  3. Politics (2720)
  4. Business (2439)
  5. Openreach (2405)
  6. Building Digital UK (2330)
  7. Mobile Broadband (2144)
  8. FTTC (2083)
  9. Statistics (1899)
  10. 4G (1814)
  11. Virgin Media (1763)
  12. Ofcom Regulation (1582)
  13. Fibre Optic (1467)
  14. Wireless Internet (1462)
  15. 5G (1405)
Sponsored

Copyright © 1999 to Present - ISPreview.co.uk - All Rights Reserved - Terms  ,  Privacy and Cookie Policy  ,  Links  ,  Website Rules