Is broadband getting any faster ?

[john]

Maybe, but not much, see article here

[Rik]

About what you'd expect, John. Unless someone spends some serious money, it's not going to get a lot faster, and that someone is unlikely to be BT at this time.

[Sebby]

So true, Rik.

[Simon]

I think it's time some ISPs were told to remove the 'up to 8Mb' line from their advertising, particularly the ones who throttle speeds, as, to my mind, that's blatant deception.

[Sebby]

I think it's only the ones that throttle that need to remove it, Simon, because it's factually correct otherwise.

[Lance]

I disagree, Sebby. When you factor in the profile, its only up to 7.15mb! (And even then there will be some overheads on top!)

[Simon]

I posted this before, but it must have been lost in the outage. 

If you buy a pint of milk, you expect a pint, not what the cow might be able to deliver! 

[J!ll]

 

[john]

Don't be silly, everyone knows that milk comes from bottles, not cows 

[Simon]

That could have been a lot worse, John! 

[john]

 

[Inactive]

That could have been a lot worse, John! 

Udder rubbish.. 

[john]

 

[Rik]

The other issue which is coming fast is capacity and bandwidth. With the BBC attempting to share the iPlayer with the other broadcasters, I can see bandwidth usage increasing quite sharply. That's going to show up a lot of ISPs, and it's also going to bring the 'unlimited' providers into the spotlight as they start putting the brakes on people.

[Sebby]

Indeed - capacity is becoming a major issue.

[esh]

A couple megabits down is frankly enough for me. What I *would* like is a couple megabits up though. There's SDSL of course, but I think that's a dying and somewhat awkwardly priced sector of the market, a bit like ISDN in the mid-90's.

I'm pretty sure the distribution system for popular P2P systems like iPlayer will have to be fundamentally altered to bias connections towards local sources to avoid a lot of expensive cross-network capacity issues.

[Rik]

ADSL2+, when BT deign to give it to us, will improve u/s speeds.

[Sebby]

Do you know how it's going to work, Rik? I know that Be uploads syncs as high as it can, i.e. the upstream sync has a target SNRM too.

[Rik]

I'm not sure, Seb, but I know it's faster than IPStream, so it's likely to be similar (I wonder if you can trade upstream and downstream?).

[Sebby]

On LLU, you can't. I wondered the same thing - why can't download use unused upstream frequencies? Maybe it can, but it's just not something that's done.

[Rik]

I suspect it's not 'convenient'.

[Sebby]

Ah, the old convenience issue. I suspect you're right.