Asked PN about FTTC today. I was rather disappointed that the standard upstream speed is only 1Mb/s, possibly 2MB/s. The standard technology now used will happily give 10MB/s upstream so it's being deliberately throttled for the ordinary domestic products.

Think I'll hold off for a few months and see how FTTC products progress.

Edited by ppppenguin99 (Tue 08-Nov-11 17:17:06)

I've not heard of the 1Mbps upload, (maybe that is on the 5Mbps download product), but yes, Plusnet only do 2Mbps upload at the moment. Most ISPs do 10Mbps upload.

Is 2Mbps upload such a drag anyway, at Plusnet FTTC prices? It's a heck of a lot more than you get now .

Perhaps i'm being mean but 2Mb/s upstream isn't really worth the extra £10/month for FTTC. My downstream is fast enough for everything I do at the moment and I don't see why I should spend an extra £10/month to get a reliable connection. Looks like My E-side troubles have been fixed (famous last words) so it's just a question of getting the interleave and capped rates sorted.

When Plusnet offer 10Mbps upstream it will attract an extra fee (BTw charge ISPs more for 10Mbps than 2Mbps).

BTW I wasn't aware of any ISPs that offered 10MB/s!

In reply to a post by jelv:

BTW I wasn't aware of any ISPs that offered 10MB/s!

That's called careless typing. I'm well aware of the difference between bits and bytes. Many people must be confused by the fact that DSL (and ethernet) speeds are usually quoted in bits/second while file sizes and virtually everything else are in bytes.

Quite (I guessed it was a slip of the fingers hence the tongue)! I've lost count of the number of times people have complained about download speeds reported by whatever software they are using being about 8 times slower that the expected speeds given by Plusnet!

Confused yes. But, of course there are good reasons for it as a 1Mb/s link will not download a 1MB file in 8 seconds - if speed was measured in MB/s then people would expect a direct correlation between speed and file size which is of course not the case (unless they also then understand all of the overheads and everything else). If people truly understand what a MB is then it isn't that much of a stretch to multiply/divide numbers by 8 (and I would argue that most users have no idea what a MB is just that a MP3 is around xMB, a film around yMB, etc)..

I think most people have grown used to GBP as a common abbreviation

Video encoding, you usually pick a bit rate, not a Byte rate either

What's £ got to do wth it?

Andrew,

Often a target file size, in Bytes, as well as constant and variable bit rates, bits, can be chosen when video encoding. Using a target file size will maximize the video quality for the allocated storage space available, e.g. if I wanted to save a video to a data CD then the quality would be much lower, in terms of bit rate, than if I saved it to a data DVD.

Under those circumstances a transfer speed in MB/s is more relevant than Mbps - Mbps being perhaps more relevant to an indeterminate video stream in terms of duration and hence file size? However video quality is normally best judged by the codec and bit rate, bps, used in compression as you pointed out

Edit: one can of course calculate a file size from a given bit rate, or vice versa, but that can be tricky when working with variable bit rates depending on video content.

Edited by 4M2 (Wed 09-Nov-11 17:27:42)