Faster Internet is very nice to have.

fretmeister

My village finally got fibre and this week I've gone from about 50 down, 15 up to 500 down, 70 up.

It's very noticeable, although obviously I will be complaining it is too slow in another month!

Now I just need to figure out the right bandwidth limits to apply to Battle.net for their downloads. It's famous for hogging everything to the point when it's downloading everything else just grinds to a halt.

They could have just optimised it, but no. They decided to have "pick your own limits" settings instead. This is particularly stupid as download speed is usually expressed in Mbps, but when downloading it shows in MB/S, and in the limit setting page it is in Kb/s.

nobbers.

nanoman

I've just gone the other way. Had Virgin gig fibre for years but costs were spiralling and they refused to cut a deal so i kicked them into touch and the next best thing i could get was 65down/15up. It's noticeable but not terrible. Nvidia shield upscaling working overtime as all tv is now over the slower connection as well. Occasionally feels like cutting off my nose to spite my face but £25 vs £100 /month is quite a nice saving

DiscoStu

I've got 80 down/20 up fibre which is brilliant and I can't see how having 500 down would make any difference. 


But obviously I'll want it when it's available.

RedRabbit

I'd love faster internet.  Where I live the only option for anything reasonably fast is a Wireless ISP and the one I'm with is 30 down/5 up on a good day (and they don't have many of those).  And it's pretty unreliable - goes down at least a couple of times a month for more than an hour, shorter outages are at least weekly.  

It's a local small business running things, so support is 9-5 Mon-Fri.  Out of hours support is done by leaving answer phone messages which are meant to be checked hourly, but last time I tried it took 12 hours to get a response.  The guy who rang back did at least admit that he'd just not been checking for messages.

Unfortunately, my only other option is Starlink and...well, Musk! Just can't swallow that pill at the moment.

Emp_Fab

I've doubled from 78Mbps ADSL to 150Mbps FTTP and to be honest I haven't noticed a difference.  Unless you're downloading large files, most people won't notice much difference if they're just browsing & watching videos etc.  The bottlenecks have now moved to DNS server responses, latency, crappy routing and overloaded servers at the other end.

I'd prefer a near-instant web browsing experience to the ability to download a gazillion gigabytes a second.

nanoman

Emp_Fab said:

I've doubled from 78Mbps ADSL to 150Mbps FTTP and to be honest I haven't noticed a difference.  Unless you're downloading large files, most people won't notice much difference if they're just browsing & watching videos etc.  The bottlenecks have now moved to DNS server responses, latency, crappy routing and overloaded servers at the other end.

I'd prefer a near-instant web browsing experience to the ability to download a gazillion gigabytes a second.

I'd mostly agree with that. Might have disagreed back in the day when i was downloading everything on the internet but for a usable experience, I wouldn't say you need over 100Mbps down. I've seen a bit of an issue since number one son came back home but he's gaming and streaming constantly so i expect it will return to normal when he heads to his new flat

Sporky

How many kitten videos can you watch at once? 

Emp_Fab

That's not her name.

fretmeister

nanoman said:

I've just gone the other way. Had Virgin gig fibre for years but costs were spiralling and they refused to cut a deal so i kicked them into touch and the next best thing i could get was 65down/15up. It's noticeable but not terrible. Nvidia shield upscaling working overtime as all tv is now over the slower connection as well. Occasionally feels like cutting off my nose to spite my face but £25 vs £100 /month is quite a nice saving

I’m paying just over £50 and that includes a digital voice “landline” with unlimited calls.

I previously had 2 traditional landlines and separate internet so this has halved my costs.

digitalscream

fretmeister said:

It's very noticeable, although obviously I will be complaining it is too slow in another month!

It's quite shocking how quickly you get used to it. I've had gigabit in both directions for a few years now, and...it's not that my connection is good, it's that everything else just seems a bit shit by comparison. I refuse to go to 2Gb/s, though, because it's ludicrously expensive with my current provider.

Above about 200Mbps, the problem is no longer raw speed, but latency - essentially, how long it takes to make a connection. I have about 1.2Gb/s with Virgin, but I'm looking to move as soon as my contract's up because the latency is bloody terrible.

Philly_Q

Emp_Fab said:

I've doubled from 78Mbps ADSL to 150Mbps FTTP and to be honest I haven't noticed a difference.  Unless you're downloading large files, most people won't notice much difference if they're just browsing & watching videos etc.  The bottlenecks have now moved to DNS server responses, latency, crappy routing and overloaded servers at the other end.

I'd prefer a near-instant web browsing experience to the ability to download a gazillion gigabytes a second.

Agreed, that's exactly the same as my recent experience.  I could've got 500 or 900 Mbps but since it's just me and I'm not gaming or running a business, it didn't seem worth paying for anything more than 150 Mbps.  But there's no difference in performance.

nanoman

fretmeister said:

nanoman said:

I've just gone the other way. Had Virgin gig fibre for years but costs were spiralling and they refused to cut a deal so i kicked them into touch and the next best thing i could get was 65down/15up. It's noticeable but not terrible. Nvidia shield upscaling working overtime as all tv is now over the slower connection as well. Occasionally feels like cutting off my nose to spite my face but £25 vs £100 /month is quite a nice saving

I’m paying just over £50 and that includes a digital voice “landline” with unlimited calls.

I previously had 2 traditional landlines and separate internet so this has halved my costs.

That's good. Problem with VM is once you're in it's much harder to cut a deal. I had 1Gb, Landline with free evening and weekends, biggest TV package with Sky Sports (lost BT/TNT in the last negotiation). Every other year, retentions would drop it just enough for me to bite. Zero movement this year despite me being willing to drop loads of the package and bandwidth. This was also with me having a change in my income and I (honestly) said I just couldn't afford it (Their T&Cs say they will try and help in this scenario even when in contract - total BS)

I just have to keep reminding the wife that the (digital) landline is now just for incoming calls as our monthly £25 has jumped a couple of times when she forgets

RaymondLin

I went from about 70/20 to 180/200 to 490/480.

The biggest difference I can feel is uploading. Because most down stream are Netflix or video content which 70 isn’t more than fast enough.  The only time I’m watching the download bar is when I download games but uploading going from 20 to 200 was a big upgrade.

going to like 500 up and down is not noticeable to be honest.

stufisher

We moved to a FFP 500 down/90 up option in Dec'23 and at first it was great, having previously had 33/5 performance.

I figured with fast-growing grandkids, my sons and their wives all with us in the house we'd remove the chance of any gripes about shit internet because we'd have sufficient bandwidth to cope with simultaneous multi-user requirements.

Whilst that logic was sound the issue we have now is latency (as mentioned above). Ever since the service provider started adding more subscribers within the village we've noticed a decline in overall performance.

When it's contract renewal time in a few months we'll revert to a cheaper, lower speed service because I suspect that there won't be much of a difference but we might save ourselves a flight ticket to Crete! 

exocet

I'm still waiting for it to arrive. Local altnet provider appear not to have given up completey after having installed the optical splitter box in floor chamber outside my house last year. Various sprayed yellow markings appear from time to time so they may dig a bit more to complete the fibre run. Yesterday one of their team plugged a test box into the splitter outside my house as if expecting it to show a live circuit. Wasting his time because there's still a 50 metre fibre run to complete at other end of street...