Sponsored Links

For the multi-gigabit deniers

I just don't think downloading video games is what the average internet connection is going to be used for the vast majority of the time. If you have 3 kids that are constantly downloading AAA titles, then yes of course, you can definitely use gigabit.

When I was a gamer, I would download maybe 1 game a month on average, and I wouldn't delete them for years. 95% of the time I played the same game over and over again. Unless I was downloading more often than 1 game per week, I wouldn't care if a 100GB download finished in 40 mins or 10 minutes.

Games have been ~100GB for a decade, people were downloading them on 20-50 mbps connections. I'm not saying we shouldn't want faster connections, all I'm saying is that I don't think more than 10% of people at most right now on sub-200 mbps feel their connection is slow and are making a purchasing decision based on speed, and I think figures show that. I would bet more than 50% of consumers right now would go for 200/200 over 1000/1000 if it was £5/month cheaper.

And that's all about gigabit vs. slower. The thread is about multi-gigabit. I don't even know if Steam can serve you faster than gigabit right now. How often are you downloading games that you're actually noticing having to wait on a 1 gig connection, aren't you going to fill up your storage quickly? 2 gigabit is HDD speed.

Like... I remember having to wait 20 seconds for a web page to load and everyone switching to DSL when it became available within 2 years, I guess I'm thinking about this a little differently than some people here. Also, I think Ookla on average measures max connection speed pretty well, although Wi-Fi is a bottleneck past 400 mbps. But again - I think if the average person actually needed much faster speeds you would see the average Ookla speedtest quickly climb to north of 300 mbps, given that over 80% of people in the UK have access to speeds like this. But no, we are at 80 mbps average for home connections.

Sorry I'm typing and posting too much.
Most of the time our internet is sitting idle but we do get through about 5-6TB a month with two adults and three kids. This is recorded by our pfSense router and is accurate.

To me, when I want to download something big I want it done as soon as possible. Time is precious. And I think ISP's know this, Community Fibre recently said they were surprised by the uptake of their 3Gb service and had to delay some installs due to a lack of equipment. There is demand for higher speeds.

I had 100Mb in 2010 from Virgin Media (got in on a trial). That was awesome but even then I felt it wasn't fast enough when I wanted to download large things, mostly games from Steam. And sure people have been downloading 100GB games on slower 20-50Mb/s connections but that takes 4 hours and 26 minutes to transfer 100GB on 50Mb/s and 11 hours and 6 minutes on 20Mb/s. That's fully flat out 100% utilisation too, stopping others in the house from enjoying YouTube, Netflix or whatever in a lag-free stutter-free way.

Meanwhile, I can download 100GB in 11 minutes at 1.2Gb/s and as soon as I get CF installed that'll be about 4 minutes. Simply wonderful and honestly not that much money. If YouFibre were here and I could get their 8Gb for £99 a month I'd do it in a heartbeat. I'm not at all suggesting I'm the normal consumer just saying I understand the time things take and the usage of my own family, I'd say totally we would get the use out of it.

By the way Steam can handle these kinds of connections. I know someone on a 10Gb connection and they get about 6Gb/s from Steam. However, his limiting factor appears to be his CPU handling the download and unpacking of the files and not the internet connection itself, so it may go faster with a better system as he's running an older Core i7 4930K from 2011.
 
Now can we please have multi-gigabit plans from Openreach and VM? We need some good competition with Altnets.
Typical domestic users have switches, network cards and cable that can only handle 1Gb max, so multi-gig connections are generally sold as being shareable between members of a multi-user houses where some of the users need well over 500Mb of bandwidth. Such packages are currently sold with a modem/router with usually one, sometimes more, 2.5Gb ethernet ports and perhaps multi-gig WiFi.

Our house has two gamers and four video streamers, a plex server and at least one heavy torrent user. Even so, a symmetrical 1GB is plenty. Even with the Plex server having up to 10 clients at times and torrents sometimes using most available up and downstream bandwidth, such demands have never occurred at the same time. We are much heavier users than most. Our street has two ISPs offering a symmetrical 2.5Gb, but I won't be splashing out an extra £15 a month for 2.5Gb or on a 10Gb switch until someone in the house complains that their style is being cramped.

I'm not a multi-gigabit denier. I'm just being realistic about the general demand for it right now. Having said that, we have seen hungry applications being developed after the capacity comes available, e.g. ever increasing streamed video definition, video calls and video game updates. I expect ISPs will be watching to see the extent to which 2.5Gb gets taken up before they decide to offer 5 or 10Gb at domestic prices.
 
...Community Fibre recently said they were surprised by the uptake of their 3Gb service and had to delay some installs due to a lack of equipment. There is demand for higher speeds.
The 3Gbit service had been widely available on CF for at least a few years prior to the standard price reducing from £99/month to £49/month at some point earlier this year. Equipment shortages only became apparent when the price dropped, so I can only assume that orders increased significantly.

I had the option at £99 and didn't take it, I went for the 1Gbit service instead. Yes, I make use of the extra speed now that I have it, but it wasn't worth the higher price to me. I'm surely not the only customer in this position.

It feels like the strategy is now to compete harder on price, including at the 1Gbit level. That would point to the 1000/1000 service not managing to command a sufficient premium over 80/20 in the mass market.
 
The 3Gbit service had been widely available on CF for at least a few years prior to the standard price reducing from £99/month to £49/month at some point earlier this year. Equipment shortages only became apparent when the price dropped, so I can only assume that orders increased significantly.

I had the option at £99 and didn't take it, I went for the 1Gbit service instead. Yes, I make use of the extra speed now that I have it, but it wasn't worth the higher price to me. I'm surely not the only customer in this position.

It feels like the strategy is now to compete harder on price, including at the 1Gbit level. That would point to the 1000/1000 service not managing to command a sufficient premium over 80/20 in the mass market.
You're right, when they halved the price the takeup increased significantly.

I would say though, the 1Gb service is half the 3Gb. £25. So for all those who are very price conscience that's a great deal, way cheaper than even quad bundle pricing from others. So the fact people are even taking up the 3Gb service at £50 says something about what people want.

To me, I put this kind of service in the same league of products as those who buy a needlessly fast (and expensive) vehicle when they live in a city with 30mph speed limits and bumper-to-bumper traffic or people who bought new phones for 5G with 1Gb/s (that all the networks were pushing hard) when they just browse Facebook and use Whatsapp on it.

To me, I think the 1Gb service at £25 is great value and certainly fits the bill for most families but there should certainly be higher offerings even if they're at higher price points.

I suspect the reason Community Fibre lowered the cost wasn't because they felt it was priced too high for what they were offering but because they needed that halo product to get people to switch from their current providers and potentially break contracts that cost hundreds of quid to get out of.

I watched that interview between Jeremy the CEO of YouFibre and the CEO of Zen and in that he said he saw other ISP's launching 2Gb and 3Gb plans and he said to himself why not offer 8Gb and a superfast (£500 at retail) Asus router. This is a halo product for them that drives excitement and does get consumers to think about breaking their contracts and going through the faff of an installation to switch.

When you look at how many people are on 1Gb with Virgin for example which is much more accessible and for millions of people a mere phone call away without new drilling and cables you can see the demand for speed is there. According to ispreview.co.uk (aka this website) the top 10% of Virgin Media's customer base is averaging 626.6Mbps, up by 29.59% a year ago.

With the current economic situation, I think a lot of people (at least more than 8% of Virgins customers based on these speed results putting them on 1Gig already) want higher speeds but they don't want to pay for them because they need to put the money elsewhere, food, energy, rent, mortgages and other essentials. I don't think we'll get a clearer picture of what the market is willing to pay for superfast broadband until after the current financial crisis is over.
 
To me, I put this kind of service in the same league of products as those who buy a needlessly fast (and expensive) vehicle when they live in a city with 30mph speed limits and bumper-to-bumper traffic or people who bought new phones for 5G with 1Gb/s (that all the networks were pushing hard) when they just browse Facebook and use Whatsapp on it.
Exactly - nobody really needs the high-end Mercedes/BMW etc, it gets you there with similar reliability to the Skoda but there is definitely a market for nicer cars! To each their own.

I'd caution against reading too much into the ISPR speed statistics as AFAIK they don't correct for multiple tests by the same user. Those who are paying for the highest speeds are more likely to carry out multiple tests to check they're getting what they're paying for. With that said, 8% of VM's customers on their highest package doesn't feel unbelievable, their offer is complicated due to bundling but I'm sure they sell a fair bit to casual gamers.

Good point about the friction of switching to an altnet - renters are much less likely to consider it for a start.
 
Will come back to this later but just to point out the average usage is the peak usage: it's calculated based on peak load divided by number of customers.

The usage increases are largely unrelated to higher speeds: heavier users seek out higher speeds, people don't often become much heavier users because speeds are higher.

Virgin Media have plenty of data on this where they've increased customer speeds for free.
 
Sponsored Links
"Global Internet traffic grew 25%, in line with peak 2022 growth."
https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2023-year-in-review

"TalkTalk forecasts that peak usage could rise by another 20% by the end of 2023"
https://www.talktalkgroup.com/newsr...s-to-grow-due-to-streaming-and-gaming-updates

Now can we please have multi-gigabit plans from Openreach and VM? We need some good competition with Altnets.

Okay, cool.

The global traffic numbers aren't really relevant to the UK's numbers. Thanks to the BBC and iPlayer we were already pretty mature as far as streaming goes a while back and nearly everyone who wanted superfast broadband had it by 2020, with Openreach and some others plugging gaps for the pandemic.

TalkTalk's forecast is PR. An 'average peak time' increase of 20% between 2020 and 2022 does not mean an increase of 20% between 2022 and 2023: the pandemic brought usage increases forward in the evenings more than it created new usage, evidenced by reports from other ISPs in 2023. Their network spiked at 10.25 Tbps however networks are not built end to end around those once a year spikes, they're built around the other 99%+ of the year. The transit, peering and cores may be fine or may not and may require some traffic engineering but localised congestion will absolutely happen.

BT have seen a peak demand increase of less than 8% over the past year. No reason to think TalkTalk would be any different and, if anything, would be seeing a lower increase as BT have pushed harder on FTTP: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.p...s-record-uk-internet-traffic-of-30-1tbps.html

Even the networks of all-FTTP altnets are topping out at less than 7 Mbps per customer at absolute burst peak for right now.

Multigig is a willy-waving exercise more than a realistic and required product. If it's free or really cheap to provide it happens, else it waits.

The major 'issue' offering it isn't really how much it gets used it's having to ensure there's enough bandwidth sitting idle for the customer to receive what they think they're paying for. If you want to see higher speed tiers a good plan is to petition Ofcom and the ASA to change the regulation so that 'up to' speeds are permitted again. Once that's done ISPs can open the taps rather than having to worry about Ofcom riding their backs because the average customer gets 2.8 Gbps instead of 3 Gbps at peak times.
 
Networks are not built for average peaks but actual peaks. As mentioned previously on this forum Openreach is already deploying XGSPON in "combo" to GPON. Of course they do have a massive GPON installed base they will need to upgrade too but at least they should adding more legacy kit. My prediction is that Openreach will need to move to XGSPON sooner rather than later. The presure from Altnets and VM which on DOCSIS 3.1 can do 10/2 Gbit will mean they will start to drain users.
VM absolutely cannot deliver 10 Gbps downstream and 2 Gbps upstream on DoCSIS 3.1. They may be able to eke out a 200 Mbps upstream and 2 Gbps downstream product but no more: their networks don't have the RF bandwidth and they've too much legacy stuff using it. To get to 10/2 with DoCSIS 3.1 would require nearly as much expense as to go DoCSIS 4.0.

On Openreach and 'combo' cards the Adtran chassis that are compatible haven't been going in for long and they have to be able to offer the product to a significant proportion of their passed premises before they can start selling it. The Huawei kit feeding me isn't combo, and they installed a lot of Adtran kit that isn't capable of handling combo line cards. It's not especially difficult but there's a business case that has to be made versus sweating the GPON and while that continues to sell well that case isn't there.

Openreach aren't adding 'legacy' kit now: all the chassis can take combo line cards but most of the chassis in service can't: all the Adtran before early this year and all the Huawei.

The limitation to selling multi-gig isn't on the core of the network but the edge. For most ISPs they rent that edge. For Openreach they sell what BT Wholesale, Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone ask them to. Across the entire user base of even a medium-sized ISP multi-gig won't do much as all the users sticking with their current tiers make any difference multi-gig users make at the transport and core level statistical noise.
 
I watched that interview between Jeremy the CEO of YouFibre and the CEO of Zen and in that he said he saw other ISP's launching 2Gb and 3Gb plans and he said to himself why not offer 8Gb and a superfast (£500 at retail) Asus router. This is a halo product for them that drives excitement and does get consumers to think about breaking their contracts and going through the faff of an installation to switch.

Exactly. This.
 
Well it was bound to happen, the multi-gigabit denier post...


That's what you use, so you think that's what the internet is built for which couldn't be further from the truth. The internet is not built just for you. When a single Steam connection can saturate even a 1gb connection you quickly realise that the internet is built for peak usage not average usage. Why? Because it's simple math, once you handle the peaks you will be able to handle the off peaks...

Ha! I had 70/20 5 years ago to this date! I was on BT watching BT Sports 4K (~30mb), the wife on the other TV watching Netflix 4K HDR (~30mb) and as soon as my daughter started to play online games everything went downhill as there was no bandwidth left (*). So 5 years ago I had to leave VDSL2 and trade latency and reliability for bandwidth by going to VMs 350MB which was the fastest option I had at the time. It felt like a backwards step but it was the only thing I could do to cope with the usage from the house. And believe me, I spent 5 years regretting it having to deal with VM's Retentions Team to get a decent renewal price and their internet going up and down like a roller coaster. And that's 5 years ago.

FTTP take is slow because not everyone has the same needs. Take up is slow because 1 in 7 people are lazy and don't look for better deals. The fact is FTTC is currently more expensive than FTTP so this proves my point. Some people are happy to say they can survive with 70/20 and any more than that it's an excess. Some people use PAYG and count every MB/GB so they only pay for what they use. Others get an unlimited SIM and don't need to worry about data. I would say most people don't know what's their peak usage is, so how can they actually buy a speed that suits their needs properly? (ie good networks are built for peaks not averages)


Averages flatten peaks. And since good networks are build for peaks you should ignore these useless stats. Mark makes a lot of valid caveats when posting about speed tests. Most uses do this via wifi which in most cases is far from being able to properly saturate a broadband router. However given the right conditions you can see proper speeds. Have a look at the Fastest streets for broadband in the UK article for instance. You can see there that people are on 500mb and 1gb plans otherwise you wouldn't be able to see averages of 500-900mb. Then look at the Full Fibre Altnets by Avg. Download table. Looking at the top 4 Altnets: CityFibre, Hyperoptic, Community Fibre, Netomnia (YouFibre) all offer "slower" plans 150mb or below yet when you see that table the speeds are way faster. What that is telling you is that people want faster speeds but they want it cheap. Make the difference between 150/500/1000mb a few quid and you are going to have a lot more people on the upper tiers. Just like fixed rate mortgages and unlimited broadband and SIMs most people would always prefer peace of mind, if it is available at decent price.

This couldn't be further from the truth. You can call me a niche if you want, however I would say you are stuck in the past. Like I said a single Steam download can saturate a 1gb connection and I doubt that's niche. No wonder the record peak usage events all get broken when new games/updates being released. And while I couldn't find updates stats on Steam UK users the latest I found says they have 120m active monthly users and 3% are in the UK. So that's 3.6m "niche users" right there for you. Of course you can say how many times you download games from Steam and I would say lots. Games get updated monthly now, sometimes even faster. Lots of different games means lots of different updates. Even all my Apple devices get monthly updates that go from half a gig to several gigs and that's for every Apple device in the house, which I wouldn't want to even count them. But of course even all that usage won't keep my Community Fibre 1gb symmetric connection busy all the time. But remember, good networks are built for peaks not averages! So yes a 1gb is perfectly suitable for my usage patterns (which I haven't even started to list, just gave a sneak peak) specially when you consider that it only costs me £27/month.
Your argument only holds true for the pattern of usage on a single line or a single backhaul serving a small group of numbers as, as you said, as soon as the cohort gets large enough statistical multiplexing kicks in and heavier usage is balanced out by lower usage.

The Internet is not built for peak usage. You buy IP transit you'll pay for it at 95th percentile usage, not maximum, specifically to avoid billing based on transient spikes. This is how it's been for as long as I'm aware. Not average, but not peak either, and really drags down the number in most cases as that one day a month where a game update is released and/or major streaming events happen is smoothed out by the other 97% of the month.

I'm not sure what capacity planning has to do with multi-gig either way: at the core it doesn't really matter and at the edge it means lots of wasted bandwidth having to sit their idle just in case which is hardly a great incentive to ISPs to especially upgrade their links so that a few customers will pay a little more. ISPs don't want their customers to make heavy use of their connections and do not want to engineer around huge spikes as it leaves so much capacity empty 99% of the time.

Zen did a presentation a while back showing how insanely bursty backhaul became when ultrafast customers were brought in. Here you are:
 
I'm honestly confused by the premise of the thread. What is a multigigabit denier supposed to be, someone ideologically opposed to technological progress? What exactly are we arguing about?

Internet speeds are going to get faster whether people like or not (who doesn't?), it will just happen progressively slower than in the past because speed increases past ~200 mbps right now are not demand-driven anywhere near to the same extent as in the past.
 
Sponsored Links
I'm honestly confused by the premise of the thread. What is a multigigabit denier supposed to be, someone ideologically opposed to technological progress? What exactly are we arguing about?

Internet speeds are going to get faster whether people like or not (who doesn't?), it will just happen progressively slower than in the past because speed increases past ~200 mbps right now are not demand-driven anywhere near to the same extent as in the past.
I still see peole saying 40Mbps is more than plenty, which in their use case is correct, I had someone arguing with me that you're wasting money if you go for higher tiers, in this day and age some people need that bandwidth sometimes.
 
I'm honestly confused by the premise of the thread. What is a multigigabit denier supposed to be, someone ideologically opposed to technological progress? What exactly are we arguing about?
"You don't need that speed"
"It's a waste of money"
"My XX/XX works fine for me"
"Most people don't need that speed"
"Only gamers need that speed"
etc
etc
etc
 
"You don't need that speed"
"It's a waste of money"
"My XX/XX works fine for me"
"Most people don't need that speed"
"Only gamers need that speed"
etc
etc
etc
This brings back (painful) memories of trying to organise OR Fibre Community Partnership some years ago.

We simply asked people to register their interest but my god the amount of people dictating what someone should or shouldn't have was ridiculous.

"We get by on our (20Mbps) connection so why can't everyone else"

and the best

"Unless you're doing something illegal you don't need fast internet"

Wow 🤯
 
This brings back (painful) memories of trying to organise OR Fibre Community Partnership some years ago.

We simply asked people to register their interest but my god the amount of people dictating what someone should or shouldn't have was ridiculous.

"We get by on our (20Mbps) connection so why can't everyone else"

and the best

"Unless you're doing something illegal you don't need fast internet"

Wow 🤯
some people cant accept the truth, its sad
 
There is a vast amount of space between "nobody needs quicker than 40Mbps services" and "Openreach and VM had better introduce faster-than-1Gb services if they want to remain competitive". Will the incumbents lose customers as a result of only offering asymmetric 1Gb services? Probably a few, though I would guess they lose more to altnets on price grounds. I also have to assume they are very familiar with what their deployed base looks like, and can see FTTC ceases being replaced with no service in areas where they know CityFibre etc. are operating so can respond appropriately.

Give me whatever speeds you can, I'll take fast services as long as the quality is there and I can justify the cost, but I don't think I'm in the percentage of users that these providers really think about too much. I'm an enthusiast and my home network can't run quicker than a gig, and I'd love to see the figures for how many VM or BT routers have nothing connected to the wired LAN ports.
 
Sponsored Links
Never managed to max out my 1GB symetrical FTTP line with Box other than by speedtesting it. Game downloads via Xbox/Steam/Epic seem to max out around 6-800mbps, uploads never even get close, usually uploading to foreign servers at a max rate of 250mbps

It just makes things so much easier and quicker for the one person who is doing the intensive task and means the internet is useable for everyone else at the same time

Were for once in the period where speeds are starting to outperform the current highest demands, but don't worry, i'm sure use cases will soon develop that demand these speeds over mobile and fixed connections
 
There is a vast amount of space between "nobody needs quicker than 40Mbps services" and "Openreach and VM had better introduce faster-than-1Gb services if they want to remain competitive".
Indeed there is.

I have 8.5 Gbit/s down, 8.075 Gbit/s up coming into the home across my primary and backup with a fibre optic ring at home currently running mostly 10GBase-BX with my main switch an 8 x 25G, 2 x 100G port beast taking with 10G and 25G devices connected to it, so I'd like to think I'm not a 'multi-gig denier'.

Not a flex, I'm ridiculously over-engineered as I'm a WFH high performance WAN architect who also thought it'd be fun to be in ISP adverts online, just emphasising the, accurate, post above.
 
VM absolutely cannot deliver 10 Gbps downstream and 2 Gbps upstream on DoCSIS 3.1. They may be able to eke out a 200 Mbps upstream and 2 Gbps downstream product but no more: their networks don't have the RF bandwidth and they've too much legacy stuff using it. To get to 10/2 with DoCSIS 3.1 would require nearly as much expense as to go DoCSIS 4.0.

On Openreach and 'combo' cards the Adtran chassis that are compatible haven't been going in for long and they have to be able to offer the product to a significant proportion of their passed premises before they can start selling it. The Huawei kit feeding me isn't combo, and they installed a lot of Adtran kit that isn't capable of handling combo line cards. It's not especially difficult but there's a business case that has to be made versus sweating the GPON and while that continues to sell well that case isn't there.

Openreach aren't adding 'legacy' kit now: all the chassis can take combo line cards but most of the chassis in service can't: all the Adtran before early this year and all the Huawei.

The limitation to selling multi-gig isn't on the core of the network but the edge. For most ISPs they rent that edge. For Openreach they sell what BT Wholesale, Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone ask them to. Across the entire user base of even a medium-sized ISP multi-gig won't do much as all the users sticking with their current tiers make any difference multi-gig users make at the transport and core level statistical noise.
Well I had FTTP available from Openreach for over 2 years now and I just checked and I can get EE’s 1.6Gb service so I think you might be overestimating the lack of combo cards. Also it’s possible Openreach may sell it and provision a combo card as needed so I think your idea of it having to be ready for service for most people before they can sell it is not correct. And GPON can still do multi-gigabit 2.4Gb/1.2Gb so for the lower plans they don't need combo cards.
 
This brings back (painful) memories of trying to organise OR Fibre Community Partnership some years ago.

We simply asked people to register their interest but my god the amount of people dictating what someone should or shouldn't have was ridiculous.

"We get by on our (20Mbps) connection so why can't everyone else"

and the best

"Unless you're doing something illegal you don't need fast internet"

Wow 🤯
They should be caned in the public square for their impudence, I say!
 
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 (6028)
  2. BT (3639)
  3. Politics (2721)
  4. Business (2440)
  5. Openreach (2405)
  6. Building Digital UK (2330)
  7. Mobile Broadband (2146)
  8. FTTC (2083)
  9. Statistics (1902)
  10. 4G (1816)
  11. Virgin Media (1764)
  12. Ofcom Regulation (1582)
  13. Fibre Optic (1467)
  14. Wireless Internet (1462)
  15. 5G (1407)
Sponsored

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