Do I want stupidly ...
 

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[Closed] Do I want stupidly fast broadband?

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I got offered 900 down and 110 up, for an extra £14/mo total with discounts, and with premium on-site support and the free 4G router thing if it goes down, as advertised on the telly. I'm currently on 150/29.

I don't really need mega fast broadband, but it's MOAR and I might just feel like having MOAR. Do I get better latency for games and stuff?

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 1:12 pm
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Seems bumps are no longer necessary.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 1:15 pm
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MOAR is always better. I've got the service you're looking at. It's really good.

Do I get better latency for games and stuff?

IME yes. My son has finally stopped complaining about his ping in Fortnite, so it was obviously worth it.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 1:20 pm
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Depends what you have bow tbh. I have 1000mb. Outside of speed tests I've not used a service to date that supplies data faster than 400mb.

Ping is the same as I had with my 100mb contract.

Can't say it's worth it now, maybe in the future.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 1:20 pm
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I’d love even a fraction of that. 30 down 3 up for me even though I live in a major city. Pah.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 1:23 pm
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Who is that with, and how much?

I'm on 75ish down and 20odd up with BT. The keep offering me an upgrade to Halo which nearly doubles the cost but only adds 25% to the performance.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 1:23 pm
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don’t really need mega fast broadband

£14 a month for something you don’t need. Sure!

Btw, I have some of these great beans around - I’ll send you some each month (FREE P&P!!!!!) for £14 a month! And some free* spins**.

😂

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 1:24 pm
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Mols
It might be handy for super fast weather updates. 😉

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 1:24 pm
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Depends how many people will be wanting to use it, I had 80mb for a bit and dowgraded to 40mb as it was just me using it and after the first month or so, I just wasn't using the capacity, not even close.

Family of 5 might be a different story though if your all streaming HD movies at the same time.

Do I get better latency for games and stuff?

I doubt it unless specified, it just allows you to download and upload faster, and that has it's limits after a certain speed, as your connection will be faster than most servers will send the data to you. After a certain point your relying on how fast the information can be sent to you.

If your downloading a big game from steam for example, and steam (for arguments sake) will only serve files at 40mbps, then it doesnt matter how fast your internet is (as long as it's at least 40mbps).

Massive speeds are only really beneficial when you have multiple users all downloading different stuff at the same time.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 1:27 pm
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We've currently got 150/29 and it's ok. There were some slowdowns recently but I suspect that was a network issue rather than contention.

That lot costs us £42/mo. I can get 500/73 for £53/mo but that includes 10% off our most expensive phone bill which brings it down to £50. I do have to WFH and will be in future so the tech support thing (Halo 3) might actually be worth it.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 1:42 pm
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Pretty sure we could live quite happily with 20 Mb/s uncontended.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 1:45 pm
 IHN
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I'd bloody love 20mb, we get 12, tops.

It's still enough though, just, with two of us working from home. But there is just the two of us, no kids, gaming, anything like that.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 1:56 pm
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we get 12, tops.

12! You don't know how lucky you are. When I were a lad we had to pick individual bytes up off the street that other folk has dropped.....

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 1:58 pm
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Due to the outbreak of WFH herself is complaining of slow connections around 2pm. Both of those here working during the day get disconnected around this time. We're nominally on 66 down / 20 up but at times it feels like there's too many using the local bandwidth for this to be maintained.

When I were a lad we had to steal all our bytes. . .

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 2:06 pm
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Pretty sure we could live quite happily with 20 Mb/s uncontended.

Yeah. I think ours is 26MB/s. Plenty for streaming. Ping seems fine. Occasional interruptions to service, but having a faster line isn't going to help that.

BITD when I was gaming or downloading loads of, er Linux ISOs, more speed would have been great. But now I wouldn't know what to do with it!

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 2:06 pm
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Yes.

I've gone from 20-30mbps to 100mbps average (5g) and now I'm used to it, downloading an 80gb game on PS5 I wish it would be faster.

As above, if you have multiple users you'll see the benefit, no slowdown at all for multiple Netflix streams/youtube/gaming/teams calls etc etc.

Each device may not be able to saturate the connection but that means you can have 4 or 5 devices all downloading at 100-200mbps with no effect on the other.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 2:13 pm
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What on earth are you doing online where 150mbps download is not enough?

We are a family of five including two teenage girls and an 11 year old boy with an xbox. I work from home full time. We have the max speed available in our area, 36mbps down, and it is enough.

I don't think I would pay more to go up to 150mbps, 900 just seems nuts.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 2:16 pm
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I've just changed to a 55-70 mbps contract and in real world terms it feels no quicker and much less stable than my old 5mbps one.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 2:21 pm
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Christ I'd love even a stable 12...

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 2:24 pm
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Recently went to 900mbs synchronous FTP. Ping has dropped but I don't notice the download speed increase (up from 100mbs). Upload speed is vastly better. What I do notice is the extra money in my bank. £25 per month rather than the £50 per month virgin wanted for their slower service.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 2:34 pm
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about 4 months after we moved into this house they installed the giga-whiza-boom-bang (tm) fibre stuff in our city.

Goodbye 8mbps, hello 900 up and down.

Now, we don't get those rates, more like 500 both ways, but by christ with 5 of us, god knows how many connected devices, WFH, schooling, my wife teaching from home, PS, XBOX etc etc - we bloody need it!

So I would say - yes, its good. favourite thing to do is download OS updates or, as mentioned previously, mammoth Xbox games. in a few seconds/minutes.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 2:35 pm
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We are a family of five including two teenage girls and an 11 year old boy with an xbox. I work from home full time. We have the max speed available in our area, 36mbps down, and it is enough.

What happens when you're trying to have a teams video meeting, whilst your girls are video calling thier mates, and your boy is trying to download the latest xbox game patch which is 20gb in size?

Even downloading a game will saturate your network and make doing anything other than Web browsing a chore.

36mbps will do the job, but everything would be a lot faster/smoother/more reliable with even 2x or 3x the speed.

Now, if you're not heavy Internet users I'm sure it's fine, but these days everything is online and is getting bigger.

We have 2x people wfh, both with an RDP connection, plus separate teams calls, plus one with voip calls. Iplayer, Netflix, YouTube, 20/30/40gb game updates, neice and nephew constantly watching youtube/video calling friends, online classes... You get the idea.

Nah, give me all the speed. And then some more. Tbh upload is actually the biggest limit, on 5g with 100-150 download my upload is sometimes as low as 3-4mbps which limits things.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 3:32 pm
 Ewan
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I get 300 up and down, I could upgrade to 900 up and down. Previous to moving house I had 100 down and 20 up. Having 300 up is much more useful than the extra download speed - it offers up doing useful things like big back ups to cloud storage. Plus more is better...

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 3:57 pm
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I get 200 down, 20 odd up with Virgin (on the ridiculous prices, badum tisch).

Be keen to get more upload speed and a faster ping, but most days it's just me on it so 200 is plenty.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 4:20 pm
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@Ewan - who's your provider?

I get 300 up and down,

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 4:22 pm
 Ewan
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Company named gigaclear - rural broadband - fibre to my house.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 4:24 pm
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will help you 'make progress' on t' net

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 4:36 pm
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Bear in min if its a 5ghz network it doesn't travel as far through walls.... someone else can probably add something more technical to that.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 4:53 pm
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Company named gigaclear – rural broadband – fibre to my house.

Nice. Us folk in the burbs seem to be restricted to virgin for super-superfast. BT aren't doing FTTP yet.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 4:57 pm
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What happens when you’re trying to have a teams video meeting, whilst your girls are video calling thier mates, and your boy is trying to download the latest xbox game patch which is 20gb in size?

You say 'everyone off the internet now I have to make a call'. That's what we did until 2 years ago when we had 3Mbps

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 5:00 pm
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We just got upgraded from 200 to 500 down (well 525 down and 40 up at the last test) and as I type it's handling a PS4 and laptop both on Fortnite and Mrs M and I wfh on Teams calls with ease (meetings at this time on a Friday - wtf people!!).

That said, the biggest impact I've had on the quality of our internet was sticking the provided SuperHub3 (Virgin) in modem mode and installing something that's up to the job of actually being a router.
Although I'd second the Fortnite ping thing, that's definitely improved (well the complaints stopped anyway), although that may well just be the router.

Get it if you want it and if you think it gives you £14 of benefit. You'll do well in broadband top-trumps if nothing else.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 5:04 pm
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I just had Toob installed which is full fibre right up to the box under my desk on the side wall. £25 per month.

It is reportedly 900Mbps up and down but I can't test that as none of my devices are fast enough. was getting 542 down and 627 up over wireless on my phone yesterday which seemed reasonable but the old desktop and laptops were around 2-300 each way.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 5:06 pm
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Even downloading a game will saturate your network and make doing anything other than Web browsing a chore.

Most routers, even the cheap shitty ones that you get with provider x, will have some degreee of traffic management built in, so viop, teams, zoom etc, will take priority at the expense of torrents and other regular file downloads. Torrents can be a bit naughty sometimes, but you can cap the maximum torrent speed within the torrrent software to preserve more bandwith for time critical stuff.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 5:19 pm
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Tha broadband is only as good as tha router son.

592/523 wireless with a 1gbps service and a Nokia hyper hub. Don’t let you provider mug you off with a router that won’t deal with the speed at the wall

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 5:43 pm
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Was going to say if you're on a slower connection and lots of people need to use it setup QOS on your router. But MattyFez beat me to it. We have standard 80/20 here and it was fine when 2 adults and 3 kids were all working from home last year.

As someone else said make sure the router is good as it may well struggle to support loads of devices at high speed.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 6:12 pm
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I just had Toob installed

That's what we have had installed Nick. Our wi-fi does periodic speed tests and so far it's reporting the advertised speeds. 👍

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 6:23 pm
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I have virgin gigabit broadband. 1Gbps down, 50Mbps up at the router.

The ping and jitter are the same as when we had 300Mbps down. Generally about 9-13ms ping and 1-4ms jitter.

Our typical peak demand is <500Mbps but I have seen spikes of 900Mbps. I'd guess that median demand is <300Mbps.

I'd like it if I could get ~500Mbps up and down with a consistent ping <10ms and jitter <1ms but I think that's a dream.

 
Posted : 21/05/2021 6:32 pm

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