Ok - put another way.

What service or software has a requirement of more than 80/20Mb for domestic users?

In reply to a post by AndyHCZ:

Ok - put another way.

What service or software has a requirement of more than 80/20Mb for domestic users?

With the manner in which we're being encouraged to use cloud services increasingly while there is no requirement for higher bandwidth we are getting to the stage where, for those taking advantage of such services, the bandwidth you have at home directly influences how responsive many tasks can feel.

Companies are actively advertising the cloud to domestic users, alongside online backup services and the like.

4K streaming is nearly upon us. While this will have an ABR around the 15-20Mb mark trials have shown bursts of 50Mb. The parents downstairs watching a very busy scene on a move, say a car chase, which by its nature will be very high bit rate, alongside whatever the kids are doing has the potential to stress the average FTTC connection.

Remember that while FTTC is sold at 80/20 or more exactly usually 76/19 due to distance from cabinet the median speed is somewhat lower. The Think Broadband Blog indicated a median speed of what looks like 53-54Mb/s. Take about 50Mb from that for the busy 4K stream downstairs you don't leave much for anyone else in the household. If mum isn't really paying attention to the action movie, which will inevitably feature Dwayne Johnson, but is doing other things, alongside the 2 kids browsing, Skyping, streaming, downloading, dad may find that part way through his movie he sees the dreaded buffering.

This is not an unlikely scenario. We should also be mindful to avoid discussing what 80Mb/20Mb can do, but instead to discuss what VDSL 2 can do in the current version of the technology. Until they actually JFDI vectoring is vapourware, and there is no guarantee Openreach will deploy vectoring, after all they were just over 2 years ago forecasting 10-20% of us to have access to >100Mb through them by now.

The presentation I started the thread with has a few interesting bits about this. Slide 21 estimates the average family might require 40-55Mb, in which case a substantial proportion of these average families would be SooL as their VDSL 2 is incapable of 40Mb. It is, it seems, over the top with its estimates of bandwidth requirements however it is spot on in that concurrency is the killer application.

In other news on that presentation slide 19 has a funny section:

Virgin � very much in the press, very public �speed war� materialising

Ya. Never happened, never going to. BT don't want to spend the money on pair bonding, it may harm other more profitable businesses and have never had any interest in competing with Virgin Media on raw speed.

Vectored, line bonded VDSL 2 would bring 100Mb to the majority but would cost money in terms of CPE, line cards and additional cabinets.

Vectored, line bonded VDSL 2 would bring 100Mb to the majority but would cost money in terms of CPE, line cards and additional cabinets.

In the foreseeable future I don't see mass take-up of that unless it's a fully out-of-the-box packaged product at under £40pm plus line rentals.

Even at well under that, take up would be low.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

4K streaming is nearly upon us.

Yeah, they keep saying that about nuclear fusion

Seriously though I'm not sure take up of 4k anything will be very high. The desire for HD is/was more about marketing hype for a lot of people. It's sad how many people are sitting too far from their TV to benefit and perhaps indicative of that that a lot of people I know can't be bothered to go and find the HD version of a channel. Sky tried to address that by swapping the HD/SD channel numbers ( http://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2010/12/09/sky-to-swa... ). And of course some people still only have 'HD Ready' sets. Frankly I'm just not sure people really care - plenty of people are obviously happy watching TV on iPads and the like.

I suppose there could be large droves sucke(re)d into buying 4K capable TVs but I have my doubts. That kind of person is probably only just recovering from being sucke(re)d into buying a 3D set. So I'm with others on this one. I think FTTC will be fine at least until the end of the decade. Quite possibly beyond that.

Another factor to consider is the relatively poor take up of high speed services. It's still a minority of connections and Virgin has twice now pushed people onto faster services presumably because so few people are actually choosing to upgrade.

But of course there's no way to know for sure and such predictions are usually wrong

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Vectored, line bonded VDSL 2 would bring 100Mb to the majority but would cost money in terms of CPE, line cards and additional cabinets.

In the foreseeable future I don't see mass take-up of that unless it's a fully out-of-the-box packaged product at under £40pm plus line rentals.

Even at well under that, take up would be low.

The whole point of the line bonding is that it would be out-of-the-box and invisible to the end user. There is no need for it to include 2 full line rentals and it shouldn't, as it only needs 2 x d-sides.

The main issues are regulatory, financial and commercial. Technically it's not only feasible but has been done all over the place; AT&T have millions of pair-bonded VDSL 2 lines in operation.

It can be used not only to deliver higher speeds to those close to cabinets but as a speed enabler for those further away. For me pair-bonding for a set monthly fee reflecting VDSL 2 port cost and d-side cost would be feasible, with any new bandwidth levels above 80/20 product charged as new tiers.

This approach would both increase >24/30Mb coverage and make 120Mb/30Mb or even 150Mb/40Mb services feasible.

Whether there is the will of course to seek the necessary regulatory approval and deliver such a product is a very different question, but there is no reason why the customer's bill should say anything other than:

Line rental
120Mb/30Mb FTTC+

Or

Line rental
80Mb/20Mb FTTC+

You get the idea, the + indicating speed boosted via bonding.

Could even charge, if feeling fancy, as:

Line rental
Broadband speed boost
80/20Mb Broadband

Would some people complain about being charged more for the same speed as those close? Perhaps, but no-one's forcing them to take it, their call.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

Another factor to consider is the relatively poor take up of high speed services. It's still a minority of connections and Virgin has twice now pushed people onto faster services presumably because so few people are actually choosing to upgrade.

The majority of VM's sales over the past year have been 60Mb+. They and other cable companies have a long history of uplifting tiers, nothing to do with take up.

Given that broadcasters are happy with satellite transmission not supporting a burst system to cope with highly complex scenes, i.e. explosions and falling snow/glitter are the scenes to avoid if you want a film to look good on even HD TV these days.

Thus I doubt they are going to really worry too much about the encoding being variable enough to go from 20 Mbps to 50 Mbps for the 2 second effect shot.

Also live TV over satellite feeds often has a 25 Mbps limit

4K will drive more needs, but I don't see any commercial service pushing anything en-masse beyond 25 Mbps, and that is a Europe wide statement. Google Fiber might do it different just because they can on their FTTP network

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Given that broadcasters are happy with satellite transmission not supporting a burst system to cope with highly complex scenes, i.e. explosions and falling snow/glitter are the scenes to avoid if you want a film to look good on even HD TV these days.

The BBC channels use stat-muxing I think but I think that was more about the lack of capacity on the old satellite. Cost may also have been a factor. So in general I agree that I don't see broadcasters bothering and that's probably another nail in the 4k coffin.

My guess is a wait and see how popular Netflix 4K content is.

Main stream broadcasters are only just doing 4K recordings let alone transmissions and the 'failure' of 3D will mean they are wary of expensive changes to the production chain. Working with 4K means edit suite upgrades, longer times to render final edit etc

The film world is slightly different

But that is the problem with all the "Up To" based products.
Fixed pricing regardless of attainable speed isn't a great way of doing it from a "consumer" point of view.
Obviously there are factors from the technical side of things which prefer this pricing policy due to common components costing the same regardless of attainable speed.
It's kind of like two people paying for a car each, one can do 50mph and the other 70mph, but both paying the same amount.
In lots of other occasions, people just wouldn't accept this arrangement.
I know this is an over simplification
cheers,
flipdee