Quote:
Originally Posted by Taf
If you're a gamer, a fast connection is highly desirable, but not just for gameplay. Our twins bought new games on disk, installed them, and were then unable to play until HUGE patches were downloaded and installed. These patches can often be several Gb each!
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Low pings/latency and jitter can be got on a slower connection but that is a valid point on game patches.
I may be wrong but from what I have seen, most say console updates and patches don't actually use up all the bandwidth users have because the source servers are not so fast. Not sure if this is just when new patches come out so its busier or if that is how it always is.
If a new 20GB update came out, I guess thats 30 minutes on a standard 40mbit FTTC connection but potentially 5 minutes on a 350 or mbit. So a convenience of not waiting.
With things like say a Sky movie, they buffer enough in seconds to be able to start a movie and keep downloading the rest in the background so no real difference in that scenario.
Seems weird that people wanted more upload 20 years ago and its still what people want because they are not getting enough.
Is DOCSIS still limiting what upload virgin can give or is that obstacle not an issue with later DOCSIS revisions now? I remember there being technical reasons as to why it wasn't given. Not sure what FTTP/Openreachs excuse is.
Do they have to pay for backhaul or upload over some peering leaks which doesn't apply to download or something similar?
I would think we are past the days of ISPs now wanting us to run servers and limiting bandwidth to persuade us not too.
Other than Virgin and Openreach/LLU suppliers, it seems most fibre to the premises providers here and abroad offer the same upload and download speed, be it 500mbit or 1gb both ways.
If TV does go all over IP eventually, we can still only watch and record so many streams or channels at once so even then I don't think speeds will need to increase.
Something could come along that suddenly needs a lot of bandwidth but it does seem we are ahead of where we actually need to be at the moment in time, bar the few in the outbacks who still have issues but even those are coming up with some fast solutions and with 5G and Starlink, less of an issue.
---------- Post added at 23:26 ---------- Previous post was at 23:13 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Skie
But you also want a consistent connection, free of jitter.
FTTP delivers this, Cable doesn't.
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Its funny but I remember my pings and latency going by to modem, ISDN and the first 1Mbit cable days and I preferred them over my VM connection later.
96 Ping on an internal modem to quake servers on modem with minimal jitter.
10 to 12 Ping on Blueyonder 1Mbit to quakeworld servers with a jitter of 1 or 2
VM was around 28 to 34 ping and ok at first but then started to get jitter of 30+ all the time with worse spikes here and there. Finally got to the point it was unusable to bad packet loss and after months of that they would fix it only for it to start again months later.
Its why I switched ISP's and pretty much stuck with my current one ever since as there is never any jitter and the connection is rock solid. Said back then I would rather have a slower connection with minimal jitter than a superfast connection with crazy jitter. I would consider changing to one of the newer FTTP providers to try them out if I did decide I wanted really fast speeds.
I don't really game online anymore so small jitter wouldn't be an issue but I was damaged enough by their bad connections and support to never want to use them again.