How fast is your internet connection?

[Edwin]

For those of you getting 100Mbs + ...do you need that sort of speed?

In the case of Virgin, they cleverly combine faster downloads with faster uploads (albeit the uploads are still much slower than the downloads). Faster uploads are handy for remote backups and for clearer Skype video and the like. If the upload speed was the same for both, I might consider dropping down a speed tier to 100Mbps.

 

[Edwin]

I'm sure @Edwin will know more about this and hopefully he'll share; but another factor I think is crucial is contention. For example, I'm in an apartment complex in China right now and in the morning, the speed is reasonable. As soon as the day wears on, the kids get online and start playing their multiplayer games, and the parents are all online watching videos. Then the speed starts to trickle. Same in Thailand.

When I lived in the UK I had a BT connection. When I asked them about contention they told me there would be a maximum of 50 'sharers'. I don't have my Android phone with me and it's not available on iOS, but a really fascinating app is 'Wifi Analyyzer' which shows you all the wifi routers in range and their signal strength. There are apps for iOS but they only address public systems like Starbucks etc., not private 'in-range' systems. If you have an Android phone - grab this app - very interesting. You can also use it to choose the optimal channel spectrum to set on your router.

Yes, contention's definitely an issue. Not had too bad an experience with Virgin in our area, but it seems that's partly down to "luck" as there are plenty of horror stories in their support forums (although to be fair they also have millions of customers so the law of large numbers suggests they will also have a meaningful number of complaints even if the % of people experiencing problems is very low)

I spent quite a long time having fun going around the house with various wifi sniffing tools, seeing which neighbouring signals were strong/weak on which channels at different times of day. From that, I picked the channels that seemed on average the least contended (having two wifi routers at either end of the house also helps) - we can get 40Mbps+ in every room most of the time. We've got 2.4ghz and 5ghz bands active, and if I'm on a device that supports 5ghz and there's not too much between me and the router (5ghz suffers much more from attenuation) I can double that at least, and sometimes hit 90-95Mbps.

More than good enough, though I'm sure if I was to replace the routers with more recent models I could squeeze a bit more out of the wifi.

 

[webmasters]

Just or only $5 / month

 

[RobM]

I can have 5 people in my family streaming video from netflix simultaneously. Along with that, everyone auto checking mails, programming, and server maintenance speed I would say that 100Mbs+ is necessary to do everything comfortably. I also like to game and that needs good internet speed to be competitive in some games. There really is no excuse now for networks (including the 'one' here) not to be able to maintain/offer that. The world is overtaking Uk/Europe it seems - consistently Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong with the best internet speeds.

 

[BeachLife]

Small market town in Wales, has been getting slower and slower over the last few months, was 70 down 20 up.

 

[lazarus]

Just seen this for who ever is on Virgin
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.ph...ltrafast-broadband-standard-adds-300mbps.html

I will probably not choose the free upgrade to 300MB / 20MB but drop down to the Vivid Gamer package @ 200MB / 20MB

Nice to see upload speeds creeping up

 

[monaghan]

I can have 5 people in my family streaming video from netflix simultaneously. Along with that, everyone auto checking mails, programming, and server maintenance speed I would say that 100Mbs+ is necessary to do everything comfortably. I also like to game and that needs good internet speed to be competitive in some games. There really is no excuse now for networks (including the 'one' here) not to be able to maintain/offer that. The world is overtaking Uk/Europe it seems - consistently Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong with the best internet speeds.

Netflix only suggest you need 5Mbps for HD streams, email takes very little (unless you're constantly getting very large attachments), a few SSH sessions, ftp uploads, web pages open and so on, even if all 5 of you were on at the same time that's still nowhere near 100Mb. I went for the higher fibre speed as I do a lot of backups into the office over night so do genuinely peak very high use but during the day and evening the line is nowhere near capacity (watching the interface stats on the router ports only shows between 1.8kbps and 2.1mbps at 9am) but even with the kid's netflix, youtube and online gaming and countless devices all running concurrently there's never a complaint on speed, admittedly I don't use an ISP router or ISP wi-fi box.

What really matters and very few companies talk about is the quality of their interconnects to other provider networks, this is where the difference in providers comes.

I do agree that we're falling behind other countries, but a lot of these that have really fast connections are not dependent on the old infrastructure we have allowed to fester after we sold off the GPO all those years ago :-(