jon1
ULTIMATE Member
GWS Study Claims UK Mobile Users Satisfied with 1-5Mbps Speeds
A new study from Global Wireless Solutions (GWS) claims to have found that the UK's major mobile operators are currently delivering mobile broadband (4G and 5G
Just want to break this off into it's own thread, because it's a bit off-topic in the other threads
A few questions/points I have:
- I don't think 1mbps should be the minimum here, there is a huge difference between 1 and even 2 or 3 mbps in terms of scrolling social media, we're talking 2-3-4x speed increase each time. Once you get into the ranges of 5-20mbps the data isn't there to load, so you don't see much benefit.
- Are the kind of people who spend most of their screentime browsing Facebook the kind of people who understand mbps, even if they claimed to understand it?
- Did GWS ask these people to measure their speed using the GWS OneMeasure app, which consistently reports my speed at 1/3rd of what it is in reality?
- This survey obviously doesn't question the users who are putting the most strain on networks today, they might have asked some of the lightest users possible, I'd wage a nice bet that TikTok is a lot, lot higher up on the charts of usage than Facebook. According to every other source, TikTok is among the top social networks today, with Facebook near the bottom. A nice statistic is that US Adults spent 4.43 billion minutes on TikTok last year. Using the rough numbers below, we can assume that's 8Billion Megabits or using 253mbps across the USA, 24/7 in 2023, which doesn't include people watching live streams, making live streams, uploading content, etc, etc, etc
According to TalkHome, TikTok uses 840MB of data in an hour of continuous scrolling. The TikTok feed is made up of ads that aren't cached in the buffer of videos (which only lasts a few minutes anyway), and Live Streams that we all know certainly aren't going to work well at least at 1-2mbps, even less so if your trying to run that stream yourself (as in uploading)
We can actually draw the bare minimum for TikTok at around 1.87mbps, on the lowest quality it uses 840MB in an hour assuming you don't come across any live streams or advertisements, and that you don't open the comment section.
WhatsApp video calls are actually extremely optimized, only requiring atleast 0.3mbps which I assume is the same for Messenger, Instagram, all the meta chat apps.
In terms of Youtube we're probably exceeding this 1-5mbps range, for a 720p video you need 2.5mbps and for 1080p you need 5mbps, apparently 4K uses 20mbps
So technically, they have some good points with the apps they used, but anyone who's more than a moderate user is going to need more than 5mbps pretty quickly imo. Networks here already only advertise their speed limited plans for light users, e.g VF's 2mbps plan or EE's stay connected are very clear that they are for light users. There's a market here if the pricing of those plans actually made sense, often an MVNO is offering a cheaper deal with a much faster speed.
What's interesting though, is let's say a site has 200mbps DL backhaul, it can only handle:
- 106 people watching TikTok or
- 80 people streaming 720p YT or 40 people streaming 1080p YT or 10 people streaming 4K YT
If you have a school with anywhere from 500 kids, all with phones, and they get out at 3PM, what's going to happen? A nice graph from EE (Look at the grey line, the others were showing that this spike disappeared during lockdown):
I can vouch first hand that ever since TikTok became popular, all speeds drop pretty low if anything around peak times on all 4 networks here
What do you guys think? I used google for the data usage numbers above, so please correct if they were outdated. Personally I think GWS is looking to show some USA carriers in this, they seem to be much more relevant over there and this is in-line with the billing tariffs they offer
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