Call me a Dick

[tabbypurr]

I assume you mean 10Gb

NT

[tony sayer]

10 Gig you mean surely?. Probably can be done on that if your just using e-mail but we run from what is essentially "home" and use a lot more than that. In fact when the BB went down for a whole working day the amount of "twiddling thumbs" that went on !.

Anyway we do have a back up system in place now but theres no doubt if your running a firm of most any type the BB is about as essential as having a phone.

[Big Les Wade]

tony sayer posted

I don't think anyone's questioning that the vast majority of home businesses need broadband; in fact most plain ordinary households need it in some sense. But how many home businesses need enough bandwidth to deliver streaming video? Very few, and they are mainly confined to the A/V sector.

[Clive George]

Lots more stuff is coming on video these days - corporate presentations, training courses, instructions, etc. So having the bandwidth to recieve it is more important than you think.

[Big Les Wade]

All those things can be downloaded as files on a 6-8Mbit connection, then saved and watched at leisure. There is no need to watch them in 'real time'.

[Huge]

I was an IT consultant, and the vast majority of my work was done over video conferencing. I can *just* squeeze a crappy Skype session down my 1.3Mbps line, but not at the same time as doing anything else.

[Huge]

6-8 Mbit. In my dreams.

[dennis]

I used to do video over a 64k ISDN line so you don't need 1.3M.

[Bod]

You need a minimum of 44Mbs speed to stream Ultra high definition video (according to BT). 6-8 Mbs is pathetic in todays world.

[Robin]

I thought you were moving. Did you not put "50 Mbps or more" on your "must have" list?

[Huge]

My "must have" list runs to 817 pages. There are no houses anywhere that meet all the requirements.

Seriously, though, fast BB is quite low down on the list, but by a remarkable coincidence the house we put an offer in on this afternoon has 76Mbps.

And a workshop with a car lift.

:o)

[John Rumm]

I would say "most" if not all.

Keep in mind that the bandwidth required to deliver streaming video is not huge - only around 2Mbps for SD quality, and twice to three times that for HD. That is still fairly low in the grand scheme of things. At those rates it takes many many hours to fully patch a new PC after a fresh windows install for example.

Worse though, that is just the download speed limitation. For many users the upload speed (i.e. sending emails with attachments, dropbox/onedrive/google drive synch, online backup) is absolutely woeful at under 512Kbps

I would suggest any business would really benefit from at least 10Mbps of *symmetric* bandwidth.

I get about 3 to 3.5Mbps down here - aggregated over two load balanced links. That makes for a maximum single download rate of about 160 to

180Kbps (although I might be able to do two of those at a time). Since 200MB downloads are not uncommon even for mundane things like driver updates, that's lots of waiting about. Its good enough to remote control a client's PC, but makes sending them files of any size, or for example remotely mounting a CD/DVD image via a VPN on their machine a non starter.

[John Rumm]

What you can do when you control the software and bit rates on both ends of the link is somewhat different from what you can achieve when random clients want to use COTS products like skype...

I have worked on military comms kit that can (just) do digital voice over 2400 bps links (that bits not K bits!), that does not mean that a modern voip phone is going to work perfectly over a 1Mbps shared broadband connection though!

[dennis]

I used to use the Intel video download and my end was Demon and the other end was Eirecom. Not much of it was under my control but it still worked most of the time.

I have played with some very low bitrate audio codecs, one was 600bps, it was intelligible but you sounded like a robot.

[John Rumm]

Skype sort of works - but it tries to automatically set the video quality based on what it thinks the link will support. Hence it tends to hot most of the bandwidth and then start dropping out when you dare to have some back!

LPC10 IIRC was the codec that was used at the time. As you say, you lost all intonation in the voice, and had to make sure you left adequate pauses between words to be intelligible. Having said that, it could do that while fast frequency hopping anywhere in the HF spectrum at multiple hops per second.

[dennis]

Well things are different now.

You can still frequency hop to prevent jamming but you don't need it to avoid interception if you use public key encryption. Spread spectrum is the way to go these days even though it would just be frequency hopping on multiple channels at the same time.

[John Rumm]

I think The kit I worked on is still in use. It had strong encryption as well as fast hopping. (voice quality without encryption, but still frequency agile was "normal" - it was the cryptos that imposed the bit rate limitation)

I recall at one trade show there was a bunch from Rhode and Swartz demoing their latest spectrum analysers. They were convinced that fast hopping was pointless since they would soon be able to capture the full hop set using their high tech kit. They tried, turns out they could not even detect when the Marconi kit was transmitting ;-)

[Big Les Wade]

John Rumm posted

Your argument here seems to be that people need high bandwidth so they can keep installing the latest software updates on their PCs. Well, perhaps, but it seems circular to me.

Yes, upload speed probably does affect some business users.

Greek to me. All I do is view web pages and send e-mails.

[John Rumm]

As a business you have no real option - updates come thick and fast - especially when you install a new out of the box PC...

(did one the other night - it sucked down 220 updates in its first couple of days of patching).

My setup is fine for doing that, but its not really ideal for business use, and does constrain what services I can provide.