500/900 utilisation

I was just curious for those lucky people fortunate enough to have 500/900 connections how much of that speed you get to utilise on an average day to day basis?

Do services like xbox, steam, playstation, netflix, prime allow you to download at full speed? Do you generally manage to download large files etc from the majority of sites at full speed or are you usually limited/throttled by the other end of the connection?

Obviously if you have a larger family and are sharing your connection with numerous other people all streaming simultaneously then each of them can enjoy the faster connection, but wondered what it was like as a single home user experience.

I got a 300mbps fibre connection in January (up from a 8mbps), which I upgraded to a 900mbps in March. Through the lockdown usage has been typical wfh/domestic - sometimes multiple video calls, occasional 4k streaming, game console downloads, etc.

On a day to day basis having 900 over 300 makes no practical difference at all. Netflix, Prime etc don't even touch the sides. I have found that PS4 downloads are throttled by Sony.

The only times I have noticed the benefit is when downloading os or other updates or images, or torrents, or occasionally for work (large brain scan files). I have not noticed much far-end throttling for these. At these times having to wait a few minutes rather than 3 x a few minutes is nice. And much, much better than having to wait 100 x a few minutes.

Edited by deleted (Sat 27-Jun-20 09:14:52)

In regards to the Netflix downloads, if you are downloading a whole season of a program at the same time. This is when you will see a big benefit to the speed boost, but for ordinary viewing then you wont see any difference.

There haven't been many services that really use 900. MS Store once got 650 I think, most others are 200-500. Usenet is the exception, with the right setup you can get max speed all the time.

Overall, there's no practical difference with the 300 I had before. Before that, going 15>80 and 80>300 were very noticeable improvements, but up to 900 has been a little pointless - for now at least.

Having said all that, I'll probably still be first in line when 10gbit becomes available

Edited by deleted (Sat 27-Jun-20 12:17:50)

In reply to a post by Chipmunk77:

There haven't been many services that really use 900.

1Gbit, is really about multiple services running happily together and for fast downloads, again not at the expensive of other usages on the network.

People say "oh but there no single program or games that use 16c so i don't need 16c".........

Actually, one other thought - the step up from 50mbps to 120mbps upload was very noticeable, especially when shifting data around for work.

On reflection, worth updating for just this. (For me, ymmv.)

We went from a very bad ADSL2+ connection that only got 5Mbits on a good day that dropped down to nothing and a dead line, sadly there wasn't any spare pairs so we had to just put up with it.

Then we got FTTP at 317Mbits and that was a huge leap in speed, a few years on BT's 900 package became available and where I wanted more upload and the price was the same between our 300 and 900 we went with the 900 and once again we saw another huge leap in speed.

According to my White Box we are getting the full 923Mbps 24/7 and on average 900Mbits, I did see a drop down to 534Mbit on the 14th but if I recall we were downloading a lot that day and I was uploading a little.

As for Xbox and PlayStation they never get the full amount of speed (not when doing their built in speed test), but they are faster than what they were before.

Steam I see at almost full speed, downloads from sites are most of the time at full speed depending if the site has setup a throttling on each download.

Netflix and Prime I assume are fast due to I see absolutely no buffering at all, not even at the start.

So going by the above "nearly" all places allow for our full speed when downloading from them.

There is a few of us here that are using the connection so our connection is always in use and we never notice any issues doing stuff.

Paul

Thanks everyone for the replies. Very useful.