In reply to a post by camieabz:

Some of the 'silver surfers' (as well as all ages) are using webcams for long-distance family or friend contact. A decent quality might require more than 2 Meg. A 5 Meg upload should cover it though.

You'd be surprised at how little bandwidth some of these modern codecs actually need to deliver reasonable quality video.

Probably. I used to get by on the old 8000 / 400 speeds, but the window was probably 320 x 240 and it was generally of a 240p-like quality.

With demand for 720p-like quality and a display are of 640 x 480 or greater...

I'm sure there's a simple calc for working it out, but I'll guess at 3-4 Meg, and say 2-3 Meg with compression.

There's a test for Andrew and his bag of many gadgets.

The ability of the PC to compress the stream is as much of a bottleneck 1 to 2 Mbps will provide a video quality that most will be very pleased with - or put another way as good or better than the FreeView SD everyone watches.

If more is needed, then you are talking people willing to spend money on good camera/PC so buying 80/20 or a competitors 40/10 will be no hassle.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The ability of the PC to compress the stream is as much of a bottleneck 1 to 2 Mbps will provide a video quality that most will be very pleased with - or put another way as good or better than the FreeView SD everyone watches.

Have you seen / tried the Logitech C920? Video processing done in the webcam, so CPU load is reduced. It seems that the larger settings (1080p) and greater FPS are the main issues. As you say, 2 Meg should be enough.

Buy two C920s and send me one and we'll chat n test.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

I should add that in this day and age, Annex M should be at no extra cost if a user can utilise it. They still offer up to 17Mb on ADSL2+, although said service should be good for up to 21Mb. Peeps are getting stiffed there too.

Why? Not all users would benefit - they'd lose downstream for upstream they may not need or want.

Plus, it's not a free option at wholesale level on BTs side.

Yes seen the C920 and yes much better hardware and lens and again very good streams at 1 to 2 Mbps

The C920 has been the recommended webcam for a long time now.

Shame PN have done this. I was thinking of moving to PN when my contact is up in a few months. I'd have no problem with 40/10, but 40/2 means a big fat no from me.

As someone else said on here recently (I cannot recall who it was), they made a very good point regarding FTTC type speeds and cloud based services. Basically, with a 2 MB upload, any kind of cloud service you may want to use (Dropbox, for example) is going to be rendered unusable. Or at least heavily hindered. I don't think 2 MB is even as fast as the highest possible upload you could get on ADSL2+ with Annex M, and personally, if I was considering the 38/2 package, I would also probably be considering a step backwards to an ADSL line running good old ADSL2+ (which would run at around 8 Mb at my current property).

I do not know who makes the marketing decisions within PlusNet, but this seems backward and it would not surprise me in the slightest if they do a u-turn with this sooner rather than later.

Yes, that's my main problem. I back up just about everything to the cloud. Photos, videos, documents, my CD/MP3 collection, etc etc. A 2Mb upload would be just too much of a pain for me.

Edited by _Resonance_ (Tue 23-Jun-15 07:59:43)

Luckily it's only PN doing this and none of the decent providers.

Many sites have stopped recommending PN and many people who advocated them are starting to look sheepish. It's a rapid decline and sad to see.