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Going to start by openly admitting I have a lack of knowledge and/or imagination when it comes to this subject. In the past I've always greeted new internet technology with scepticism and been proven wrong every time. Like when I confidently asserted that nobody really needed mobile internet because you're never very far from a computer.
Anyway, my lack of foresight doesn't mean a lack of curiosity so I'm wondering what folk will do with 5-10x more bandwidth to their homes. I mean, it's cool that you can do a teams call while someone else in the house is playing Call of Duty, but I can't imagine that alone is worth the squillions that have been spent on getting fibre to so many homes.
So, what else is it used for and what else will it be used for. I'm eager to learn about niche/esoteric applications as much as I am mainstream ones.
I WFH and upload applications to work, therefore my 30Mbps down and 4Mbps up would make quite a difference to me.
Lots of the benefits are to do with the amount of bandwidth available allowing lots of data to travel before anyone really notices the speed of anything slowing down.
In a house of 2 adults and 2 kids it is not unusual to have 4 - 5 phone, 2 - 3 devices all on and doing things at the same time such as playing games while streaming TV and someone else listening to music while on a conf call etc.
Now add in the smart meters for electricity, water, gas sending real time updates back to suppliers and your fridge communicating with your toothbrush to update your online shopping etc. Smart devices sit there streaming lots of data when you know nothing about it. Video door bells have introduced a level of constant surveillance that would have worried the Stasi in Eastern Germany.
It all adds up .
And when you come in from a walk and your phone syncs with the cloud - that can easily be a few GB of video and photos trying to get up to iCloud.
My old ADSL used to take hours to catch up - during which time there was so much contention on the upload that web pages and streaming were impossible. Maybe 70Mbit up was overkill but it has got rid of that problem.
In a house of 2 adults and 2 kids it is not unusual to have 4 – 5 phone, 2 – 3 devices all on and doing things at the same time such as playing games while streaming TV and someone else listening to music while on a conf call etc.
Now add in the smart meters for electricity, water, gas sending real time updates back to suppliers and your fridge communicating with your toothbrush to update your online shopping etc. Smart devices sit there streaming lots of data when you know nothing about it. Video door bells have introduced a level of constant surveillance that would have worried the Stasi in Eastern Germany.
It all adds up .
it does all add up, but to a small number. all your smart things together probably peak at <1kbps, and a few streams is maybe 5mbps per device for video, 1 for audio. So with all that, you could easily cope with a stable 20mbps. gigabit isn't required.
With more WFH I can see big improvements in virtual presence, effectively putting you in a room with your virtual colleagues while they drink virtual coffee and eat virtual crisps (loudly). And porn obvs.
8K porn obviously.
squirrelking may be joking about porn but it's driven a number of technologies we take for granted nowadays.
They seem to have missed of Polaroids and camera phones.
Having recently gone to a 160mbit connection I've found that stuff that everything just works way better with more available bandwidth.
It's part of the hardware/software cycle. Give people/software more hardware capability and the software/people will use it. Then is starts to feel slow, then you need more hardware. then the cycle repeats.
Anyway, I think the main thing people see with all the bandwidth is that it is seen as some sort of magic wand to innovation, like "coding". This will allow people to just magically grow the economy by doing things with compooters.
In reality, for the average person it's about Netflix streaming better and eCommerce not being as slow. Business will get better links for their front ends or services.
Like most advances in computer technology, it won't really about easing the ability to do things that people have had difficulty doing without it, it'll mainly be used to enable things that people never needed to do before, that soon become 'essential' .
Uploading and downloading to/from cloud, I reckon. My phone only stores something like 4Gb of images and videos, the rest are on the cloud. I can browse them as if they are on my phone, more or less, same with 5G out and about.
Another niche usage for me is building docker images and pushing them to a remote registry. If you don't know what that is, it involves moving half a Gb or so of data in the middle of your workflow. Not having to wait more than a few minutes for me is fantastic.
yeah, high upload speeds are definitely more noticeable than increased download speeds!
Plus, purely fibre connection has got to be more reliable than anything involving copper, I'd have thought? So less outages, which gets more important the more stuff is connected.
Oh and
I WFH and upload
applicationsmassive spreadsheets to work, therefore my3010Mbps down and41Mbps up would make quite a difference to me.
If I could just get double-digits up (oo-er), that wuold really help
Plus, purely fibre connection has got to be more reliable than anything involving copper, I’d have thought? So less outages
FEWER outages
IME, having been on FTTP for a while, outages are relatively short (BT) and are related to the upstream networking not the connection to my house. We did have issues with water getting into the old copper cable, but the thing under the pavement was meant to be a sealed unit, and I'd imagine water getting into the optical version they replaced it with isn't going to do it a lot of good either.
I'm on 5G broadband and see 700-800mbps down and around 50-60mbps up.
I see multiple benefits:
Being able to have multiple devices downloading at the same time without affecting each other - 2x teams calls + PS5 game update in rest mode + downloading docs from work OneDrive + streaming 4k TV/movies...
The fact that updates to OS/phones/games etc are completed in minutes or seconds rather than hogging all the available bandwidth for hours (on 'slow' broadband, that 70gb download you started at midnight last night is still going at 8am when you're due to be on a teams call...)
Currently, due to throttling of services I can't get any normal download to max out my connection - PSN downloads top out around 500mbps. If I could max it out I could download 1gb in under 15 seconds, yes it's more speed than anyone needs but as we become more and more data heavy it's nice to have that speed there when I need it.
Everything is getting bigger - I rarely watch anything via streaming that isn't 4k HDR. Same with YouTube, I'll always choose 4k if it's an option. PSN games are regularly 100GB or so.
and a few streams is maybe 5mbps per device for video, 1 for audio.
Netflix 4k is 15mbps, apple TV 4k is 25mbps I think. Sony Bravia have their own streaming at 80mbps quality.
I have 300 up and down. In my previous house I had 100 down and 5 up. The faster download speed has made minimal difference but having a reasonable speed up has been very handy - you can back up things to the cloud much much faster - almost as if google drive is local. If it went down to 100up and 100 down i'd not cry about it, but i'd certainly notice if the up went back to 5Mb/s. That said, i'm not tempted to change it to 1000 up and down which I can also get.
For me right now there's no point going beyond my current 70Mbps (although obviously I would if it were only £20 a month more as I'm a sucker...).
I rarely download games/patches, anything work-related is capped at the VPN end-point (well below 70Mbps), Teams I never use a camera and turn off anyone else using cameras besides the presenter(s), most other Internet stuff is throttled - sometimes above 70Mbps but a lot of times below it (certainly below 1Gbps).
Maybe in another few years when I'm living in the 8k Metaverse I'll need it but right now I don't
Streaming super HD games with less input lag than there is now.
It’s part of the hardware/software cycle. Give people/software more hardware capability and the software/people will use it.
With modern javascript libraries it is stunning just how much is needed to render a basic page after a ton of guff is downloaded.
Shut up you lot. Tried to upload a 6 second youtube video last night. Gave up after 3 hours. Our options of ever getting any sort of speed appears to be limited to a £90 a month subscription to Elon Musk!
On standard FTTC here so 80 Mbps up and 20 Mbps down.
It's fine for us with two people WFH doing web dev type stuff and teams calls. Also handled it during lockdown when we had a total of five of us working or learning from home.
Eldest son wants faster speeds for game updates and patches but that's the only scenario for more bandwidth/speed.
Interestingly one of the weak points seems to be the WiFi router. Were with Plusnet and speeds were getting slower even though peak speeds were fine. Bought a new router and everything started running a lot smoother.
Now with Zen and their supplied router is great.
Fibre to to box on the wall by my toes. Never really think about speeds anymore, it is just there.
No-one 'needs' a car that can do more than 70mph, a bike that costs more than a car, another piece of cake etc but having it can make life easier and enable more things
Another niche usage for me is building docker images and pushing them to a remote registry. If you don’t know what that is, it involves moving half a Gb or so of data in the middle of your workflow. Not having to wait more than a few minutes for me is fantastic.
Meh did a few windows ones 🙁 half a gig would have been a joy with my original network was waaaay more than a few mins. Probably very close to hitting the time limit that azure allowed.
I’d be doing a script and just uploading any artifacts required to build it to a blob and keep it all cloud side if I’ve got do it again 🙂
Sent from Virgin 100Mbps to vodaphone at around 35Mbps. with two people in the house on laptops never noticed any difference. Netflix films take a few seconds more to download.
The extra speed from Virgin was not worth the extra £40 or £50 a month they were charging. They wouldn't negotiate on price at all. Presumably as I had been a customer for so long the were confident I would never leave. Wrong.
After WFH for a year we went to a fresh FTTP connection in November.
One advantage was that I could choose where in the house the connection came in, as a result it now enters through the wall of my office with a CAT 9 cable straight from the router to a switch that runs both my work laptop and the gaming rig.
Way more stable than the old broadband, we're only on 300MBps but could go to 1GB for another £20 a month so we're futureproofed for when the kids are older.
No-one ‘needs’
a car that can do more than 70mph, a bike that costs more than a car,another piece of cake etc
Whoa there man! The first few I agree but cakes can be sliced for a reason and that reason is more cake.
No-one ‘needs’ a car that can do more than 70mph, a bike that costs more than a car, another piece of cake etc
Hmmm...me suspects you have all of these things...
But then, I have the 'how is that guitar different to all the others' conversations...
Interestingly one of the weak points seems to be the WiFi router. Were with Plusnet and speeds were getting slower even though peak speeds were fine.
Hub One POS?
Just renewed our contract and they sent out a Hub Two, night and day thank ****.
Our street has been fibered up, by City Fibre, but I've stuck with DSL via Plusnet as their 60 Mb/s is still miles more than we need, so I just don't see the point in paying any more than £25/month.
Currently waiting for fttp to be installed. I wanted to be on a faster upload connection for work and the new 500/75 connection is cheaper than I'm paying for fttc. In theory connection may be more stable as no cabinet to worry about.
TBH, once we're all working from home it'll be needed.
I've got the lowest package my internet provider offers (100/100) and i can have one kid watching netflix in 4K, another pounding some server based FPS and i can connect to two or three work based servers and do any sort of random work task i want, and everything just works.
Also running most of a smart home, some of that is cloud based, not local. So i'd like that to still be prioritised when all the above is going on. Or it'll take 30 seconds to switch off the living room lights. Also got a couple of home servers that provide stuff to others. (Hosting some stuff for mates).
Thanks for all the replies so far. The one thing that seems to be a big deal is having big upload speeds, which makes a lot of sense.
Does this mean we're going to start seeing some super cool cloud computing stuff? Like google stadia* but more betterer?
*not just games but it'sthe first thing I thoght of where you do something quite complex on someone else's processor
Thing is those type of applications don't need crazy upload speeds as largely they are just sending user input to the cloud. The downlink is much more important as that is where the rendered video would be going.
To the person building docker files. Why not just cloud build?
We are one the same as WCA and it makes everything very snappy 😃.
Future proofing. In the 90s, a typical download was a printer driver that fitted on a floppy disk. Established WebDev wisdom was that if a web page was larger than 50kB, it was too big. Today, a 50GB download on the Xbox isn't unheard of. These numbers are not going to get smaller.
Unload speed is increasingly a thing. If your life is in The Cloud™ then ADSL doesn't cut it any more.
Multiple connections from concurrent users. The single biggest change I ever saw with higher Internet speeds is it not dying on it's arse like when you're in the shower and someone flushes the bog. A 4k TV stream is, conservatively, 25Mbps - multiply that out by the number of streamers in your house. And again, do we think that number is going to go down?
One possible downside is that everything can now use the cloud, which is fine until your connection goes down. I'm sure it would be possible to design a catflap that worked on the WiFi/LAN but ours locks the cats out, etc.
94 Mbs g-fast isn't any use when Openreach's contractor decides it's quicker to snip our wires at the top of the pole to connect a second line line to next door.
yeah it's increasingly going to be a "thing" as smart devices/homes become more commonplace, especially those using fully cloud-based solutions like Alexa (which is also vulnerable to an AWS outage!)One possible downside is that everything can now use the cloud, which is fine until your connection goes down. I’m sure it would be possible to design a catflap that worked on the WiFi/LAN but ours locks the cats out, etc.
Are you talking about the Sure Connect flap btw? I have the same one, pretty sure it only needs internet to change settings via the app (will still function if offline). There is a dude who's reversed-engineered the protocol so you can run it fully offline also, bit of a techy process to implement but will have a go at some point (especially as their servers were playing up a little while back).
Having recently gone to a 160mbit connection I’ve found that stuff that everything just works way better with more available bandwidth.
Yep. I almost stopped grumbling at the Sonos. Agree also about the feeling of helplessness when there's a cut in service - only happened once or twice in the past couple of years but bloody hell, our lightbulbs stop knowing what to do...
We have a rock solid 45 to 50 Mbps down and 10 up which is more than fine for everything I use at the moment... but... When I've be playing around with cloud gaming on the gamepass it's fine with basic arcade style or sim games but gets a bit jaggy with anything throwing around a lot of data such as FPS.
It's not a issue as can download games but as future gaming will progressively move to cloud I think that am indication of future need.
Does this mean we’re going to start seeing some super cool cloud computing stuff? Like google stadia* but more betterer?
A big change here is now we can run the full collaborative 3D CAD, packaging and clash detection software etc from a laptop at home. As long as you have a fastish fibre connection.
Even 4-5 years ago you'd need a dedicated workstation with a hardwired connection and a graphics card the size of a motherboard.
Yes, the laptop won't be a basic €300 thing from Argos (more like €3000), but the increase in network speeds means it's something that both the software company and the customers have pursued, to the point it's now straightforward.
I mean, my first CAD station cost about £30 grand, 25+ years ago and used to take a measurable time to do anything more complex than drawn a line.
Unload speed is increasingly a thing.
"Upload speed," that should say. Apologies.
I suspect one of the next big things for superfast broadband will be virtual reality. For games, work etc. In fact I can see it becoming quite addictive.
my first CAD station cost about £30 grand
My first CAD station was a share of a VAX 11/750 with a pair of monitors that probably cost £30 grand each. When I say a share, I mean exclusive use in the early hours of the morning in order to be able to generate 3d models. A single gear wheel took 30 minutes.
I suspect one of the next big things for superfast broadband will be virtual reality. For games, work etc. In fact I can see it becoming quite addictive.
It wouldn't take much for stuff like MS Hololens to make augmented/VR working a common reality. Star wars style hologram teams meetings here we come! 🤣
I read about someone during lockdown having team meetings around the campfire in RDR2.
A big change here is now we can run the full collaborative 3D CAD, packaging and clash detection software etc from a laptop at home. As long as you have a fastish fibre connection.
Even 4-5 years ago you’d need a dedicated workstation with a hardwired connection and a graphics card the size of a motherboard.
Yes, the laptop won’t be a basic €300 thing from Argos (more like €3000), but the increase in network speeds means it’s something that both the software company and the customers have pursued, to the point it’s now straightforward.
This, except sub in video ingest/editing.
At the office we had a 300mbps leased line for live feeds and a gigabit line for downloading files. It'll revolutionize our workflow when we can reliably get that on location in someone's house.
Star wars style hologram teams meetings here we come!
Star Trek TNG holodeck would be great too!
Star Trek TNG holodeck would be great too!
The porn industry would be all over that.
Which, thinking about it, is the answer to the OP's question too.
Are you talking about the Sure Connect flap btw? I have the same one, pretty sure it only needs internet to change settings via the app (will still function if offline).
Thanks, yes. TBH, I didn't actually test it, the connection went down, the flashing ears on the controller went red and Mrs GB said "we have a problem, no internet, how will the cats get in and out". Testing it will require a cat that does what you want it to do...
The biggest 'local devices connecting via internet' issue I have is my Garmin watch, and the Garmin app which needs an internet connection to download GPS tracks from it. That's going to be a pain on a 2 week wilderness trip.
Are you talking about the Sure Connect flap btw? I have the same one, pretty sure it only needs internet to change settings via the app (will still function if offline).
Why do all these things need a remote server somewhere to work?
I quite fancy being able to individually turn on/off the radiators in my house with wifi TRV's, but the concept that in order to do that the data has to be sent from my phone, to a server somewhere, and back again just seems bonkers. I don't want to have to drain, spend £100's on new valves and refill the CH system each time the manufacturer does a SONOS or NEST and obsoletes it all on a whim.
If it's all on the same network, why can't it just talk to the ip addresses?
short answer - convenience/ease-of-useWhy do all these things need a remote server somewhere to work?
long answer - they don't necessarily need a [I]remote[/I] server but they do need some kind of server. In the case of wifi TRVs, they probably don't have any intelligence of their own so need to be told what to do. You can't use your phone as the server because presumably, you want them to also work when you're not around! More expensive systems e.g. Wiser have a hub which acts as a server, so you don't need internet access even if you use the phone app rather than their controllers.
If you're interested in locally-controlled smart tech, I run a home-server called "home assistant" which is free & open-source, and very lightweight (can run it on a Pi). I know that the Shelly brand WiFi TRVs can talk it to directly (rather than via the cloud) once everything's set up. It can't necessarily control every WiFi gadget locally - there either has to be a published API or similar, or someone clever has to reverse-engineer it (in the case of the cat flap) - but it does open the door to a lot more locally controlled stuff. Also, it allows you to control everything from the same app on your phone/tablet/browser window rather than needing a separate app for every different device.
If you’re interested in locally-controlled smart tech, I run a home-server called “home assistant” which is free & open-source, and very lightweight (can run it on a Pi)
I'll look into it, ta 👍
I quite fancy being able to individually turn on/off the radiators in my house with wifi TRV’s, but the concept that in order to do that the data has to be sent from my phone, to a server somewhere, and back again just seems bonkers.
The problem is that if you want to control things in your home from outside your home, you have to start opening up ports in your router and allowing remote access to devices in your home. Cheap end point devices aren't very hardened and are easy to crack and act as a bridge into your home LAN, so you basically end up putting everything online even if you don't realise it!
However, your home router will allow outgoing traffic to a central server and corresponding return traffic once your LAN has established the connection in the outward direction, so using a 3rd party server in the cloud (not your LAN) means its easy for your phone to talk to it and you don't have to start opening ports in your firewall router.
It's much easier for the vendor to design a reasonably secure sever and to maintain it etc with patches than to harden and update millions of crappy end point devices which are about as hardened as a soggy lettuce and can normally be cracked in seconds. So it's not perfect, but it's a lot more secure and would take a lot more skill to turn your local endpoint into a bridge into your LAN.
If it’s all on the same network, why can’t it just talk to the ip addresses?
It can. If you buy a smart plug from Amazon, it sits on your WiFi and talks to your Echos (I think). If, however you buy a cheapo one, it talks to a server in China and you have to give them your WiFi details too. The server often goes down, in my experience too.
If you’re interested in locally-controlled smart tech, I run a home-server called “home assistant” which is free & open-source, and very lightweight (can run it on a Pi).
Yeah, i spent about a month trying to get Home Assistant/HASS.IO to work with google assistant/android. I swear it took 5 years off my life... But that was 3 years ago. I might try again at some point.
My first CAD station was a share of a VAX 11/750 with a pair of monitors that probably cost £30 grand each. When I say a share, I mean exclusive use in the early hours of the morning in order to be able to generate 3d models. A single gear wheel took 30 minutes.
Reckon you've got a few years on me then!
Mine was a SUN SPARCstation 10 IIRC. (Though i didn't have to share it)
Then upgraded to an SGI Indigo... Then got sufficiently promoted to have someone to do the heavy CAD/CAM lifting for me!
Getting us off the creaking old copper network is the main driver for the FTTP rollout, delivering faster speeds is a nice side effect of that.
To be honest my wfh desk is at the end of a homeplug that manages about 10mbit and that’s fine for what I do including video meetings etc. It is nice to pull down ps4 games and updates quicker though, and even 4k streaming to the TV has next to no buffering at the start now.
@mert yeah, try again. I've been using it 2 years and the amount it's improved in that time, especially user-friendliness, is incredible. Think it's even an install option now from the official Raspberry Pi Imager! They made a big change recently and all the core functionality is now GUI-configurable, no coding required any more. Also I don't think there was an Android app 3 years ago (or at least it was crippled) whereas now I believe it's functionally equivalent to the iOS one.eah, i spent about a month trying to get Home Assistant/HASS.IO to work with google assistant/android. I swear it took 5 years off my life… But that was 3 years ago.
even if that's the case, without internet Alexa is extremely limited in functionality surely? I think some of the newer devices have basic offline voice control, so you could manually turn your plug on/off maybe, but it wouldn't exactly be "smart", i.e. scheduling/IFTTT etcIt can. If you buy a smart plug from Amazon, it sits on your WiFi and talks to your Echos (I think)
Why do all these things need a remote server somewhere to work?
With things like Alexa, the Echo devices are relatively cheap endpoints and it needs Amazon's cloud services for the heavy lifting in natural voice recognition. This much I can get behind.
There is really little need that I can see for everything to connect via the intertubes. I have a broadband outage... great, now I can't turn my lights on.
they don’t necessarily need a remote server but they do need some kind of server. In the case of wifi TRVs, they probably don’t have any intelligence of their own so need to be told what to do.
Why's that such a leap though? There's already a plethora of smart hubs like Philips' bridge (ooh, the Zigbee!!) for different devices.
I run a home-server called “home assistant”
"Home Assistant! HOME ASSISTANT!" That was probably a mistake.
I really should revisit HA. I looked at it ages ago and it just seemed to be an exercise in complexity, XKCD "Standards" wise. That's probably a topic for a new thread.
The problem is that if you want to control things in your home from outside your home
Absolutely. But again, why does it have to be either / or? Internal devices could talk to each other over the LAN / Wi-Fi / Bluetooth / Zigbee, Echos could talk to the Internet for external control / AI voice processing.
yeah... the complexity is by necessity though, the whole point really is it takes all these different incompatible systems and allows them to operate together... they've made huge leaps in usability/UI now though and it's possible to hide/ignore a lot of that complexity, if you wishI really should revisit HA. I looked at it ages ago and it just seemed to be an exercise in complexity, XKCD “Standards” wise. That’s probably a topic for a new thread.
a lot of these devices (like Hue) the hub isn't really smart, it's just a gateway for communicating with devices using a different protocol. They [I]could[/I] build-in smart functionality but that would obviously increase cost/complexity and then you have situation where you've got loads of different smart hubs that can't really interact with each other... the alternative is running a single server like HA and then you don't even need the Hue hub, just a generic Zigbee USB dongle that can then talk to ALL the different Zigbee devicesWhy’s that such a leap though? There’s already a plethora of smart hubs like Philips’ bridge (ooh, the Zigbee!!) for different devices.
HA was my winter project. It's improved in the nine months since I started. Used mostly with smart plugs and temp/humidity sensors. One day I'll integrate our ground source/underfloor stuff into it.
If you want to talk 'poverty media' until 2 years ago, we had 2xADSLs bonded delivering a massive 9 meg. For £130 a month. Now we have SIM Broadband and one day, maybe, we'll get fibre. I'd really appreciate a consistent 30+ meg connection just for stuff I do every day. Problem with SIM (here anyway) is it's a bit 4 meg one day, 40 the next. Generally when I need more than 4!
Back in 2000, I had the whole of Gillette corporate internet connection to myself for Y2K duties. That was internet provision for 30,000 employers, 100s of site: 1 x 2 meg connection out of Boston 🙂
@zilog6128
I've got a spare RPi so i might have a look at that once the weather turns, as long as i can get it to talk to my hue and smartthings hub, or replace them. (Though i'm using wifi, zigbee and z-wave devices from about 11 manufacturers, some of which aren't officially compatible...
yeah it's great for that 😃 I got into it during the lockdowns, meant I never got bored!!HA was my winter project.
Smartthings can go in the bin, you can carry on using the Hue hub (HA will auto-detect it so you can literally set it up with 1 click) or replace it with a generic Zigbee USB stick (the Sonoff one is good but the process is somewhat more involved). Enabling devices from different manufacturers/protocols to interact is kind of the whole point! 😃as long as i can get it to talk to my hue and smartthings hub, or replace them. (Though i’m using wifi, zigbee and z-wave devices from about 11 manufacturers, some of which aren’t officially compatible
Shall we split this off into a separate discussion?
Fire up the Pi & start a thread when you have questions!! 😃