In reply to a post by R0NSKI:

What I am hoping is that 4k Tvs use 10 bit colour, as what I do hate is the colour banding issues which I believe is because the TV uses 8 bit colour

Yes, that would be nice. The other day on the train watching the sunrise I was a bit disconcerted to see banding in the sky. Then I realised it was an after image from the book I was reading and my brain had decided that colour banding was the cause. :-/

not sure how you cant tell the difference to 3G, I think your post is stretching credibility somewhat

using 3G even light pages are significantly slower due to the proxying and extra latency effects.

Do you think there were people who thought, why'd I need a colour tv, sure black and white is just grand.
Crazy thing is, there probably was, I think you can still get a black and white only tv license.

In reply to a post by flipdee:

Do you think there were people who thought, why'd I need a colour tv, sure black and white is just grand.
Crazy thing is, there probably was, I think you can still get a black and white only tv license.

Of course - but in a sense that just helps prove our point. Colour TV took several years to become dominant. Over a decade, possibly two decades. It seems to me that you're just proving that changes in TV standards typically take a decade or more to become mainstream.

Colour TV - At least a decade.
Wide screen - Nearly a decade.
HD - Nearly a decade.
Bluray - At least a decade.

That's a pretty obvious historical precedent. If 4k is becoming available now there's no reason to expect it to dominate until 2025. And even then no-one is saying that FTTC can't handle it. Merely that some households might have a maxed-out connection. By the time that becomes an issue (if it ever does) FTTPoD will be everywhere so easily solved by people paying to upgrade.

As ever you could argue that it makes FTTC only a stop-gap solution but in IT terms a solution that lasts a decade is pretty damn' good. And FTTC isn't entirely wasted since it leads on to FTTPoD. Maybe it would be better if we followed Cyberdoyle's advice and went FTTP/B everywhere but do you think we'd have the same NGA coverage as we do now? I don't. FTTC seems to me to be a good strategy. It's giving the most people most of what they want for the lowest cost.

I can barely tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, in my eyes you have to either be right in front of the screen or have a huge screen to notice 4k.

So its not an equal argument really, as black and white to colour is plain as day, SD on a CRT looks pretty good but looks rubbish on a LCD as LCD's cant handle non native resolutions too well.

I am not sure 4k will take off the same way as HD has, better things that need doing is introducing things like OLED as too many HD tv's exist that have bad viewing angles, bad viewing angles is something very noticeable rather than the difference between 1080p and 4k.

I agree with you, however with those other technologies availability wasn't a primary issue at least in the long term.
Will a decade from first deployment of fttc see 100% "superfast" availability, I'm still not convinced.
I am of the opinion everything should be driven as much as possible otherwise service providers are content to provide mediocre service, just take some parts of America with fttp but 5Mbps service on top.
Crazy.

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

Don't be ridiculous. No IPTV system uses VBR like you say it does. Netflix et al give you a solid 15mbit/sec or whatever and that's it.

As far as I'm aware Netflix use both VBR and ABR, so they may encode one 10-second section at 2Mb/s then another at 10Mb/s leaving an average bitrate of 6Mb/s. Smoothing this out is part of what the buffering is for.

3mbit/sec is pushing what is reasonable these days, but you can still watch iplayer and netflix in HD. Yes, if someone else is using the network, itll drop down to SD on netflix. Not the end of the world.

Netflix SuperHD requires 5.8-7Mb. Indeed not, though watching 480p on a nice large smart TV isn't going to be a thrilling experience having just dropped down from SD.

I think it is very telling that one of the leaked BT slides showed that average usage on FTTC was 200kbit/sec averaged out.

It's twice that now, and that includes everyone who may be browsing or even doing nothing on their connection. It's simply taking the number of active sessions and dividing it by the total bandwidth consumption.

It's a total fact that bandwidth usage growth on the internet is slowing down significantly and has been for a while. It's not the late 90s anymore where the demands seem impossible to meet.

It's a total fact that that's not the case. Virgin Media have seen usage increase 10-fold in 7 years and increase by 50% in the past year. The demands are easier to meet because the technology to meet them is more abundant. The technology is there to meet them because the demand for that technology is there.

I was working on broadband networks for most of the early 2000s and the main driver for bandwidth was P2P. It's now streaming which demands high and consistent bandwidth.

LINX hits 2Tb at consumer peak hours across the public peering, this ignores that to places like Netflix, Akamai, etc, many are going to be using private peering, and still shows a 5-fold increase in traffic in the past 5 years from 400Gb to that 2Tb level. This rate of increase actually accelerated in 2013.

Sky / Virgin Media / Talk Talk / BT Wholesale all reported increased downstream congestion issues over the past year which have required some heavy duty upgrades to address. Ask any of them they'll tell you the same story why - Netflix.

You may also have wanted to look at the presentation some more rather than picking the bits you liked the look of.

Average household data consumption has grown 7 fold in the last 5 years; Ofcom forecast it will grow by a factor of 33 over the next 10 years

I wasn't aware of a huge increase in consumer bandwidth per user in the late 90s. At that time the Internet was still paid for per minute, most of the new usage was academic and business, and broadband was only just in its infancy in the UK.

25% of people use 75% of the bandwidth, it seems in your opinion because you don't require or apparently want that amount of bandwidth no-one does.

Incidentally I didn't raise the whole point about concurrent video usage, the presentation did.

I find your claim that you can't tell the difference day to day between 3Mb/s ADSL, 3G, 4G and fixed line SFBB churlish and absurd. I can and do quite easily.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

By the time that becomes an issue (if it ever does) FTTPoD will be everywhere so easily solved by people paying to upgrade.

By then it may even be priced to try and encourage rather than actively deter people from purchasing it.

I know it's not a great comparison but I still believe that advancements are important because one day that becomes the norm and anything less is considered inferior.
Let's consider this, if fttc was never considered and everything was straight to fttp, would this be pointless, overkill? Ignoring the cost implication.
But yet other countries have gone down this route

I'm too sensible to pay for $ky, never had it. I've used Freesat since HD became available, we now have BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV and channel 4 all in full time HD