How do you define reliable?

Do you just mean uptime, or how about this,? The ability to do what you want when you want without services falling over?

Imagine being able to download whilst watching Netflix, Twitch etc., no drop of resolution or buffering. To me thats as much reliability as is service uptime. All without no QoS meddling on local setup.

Thats the real advantage, a connection that you wont or will rarely saturate, meaning everything just works.

RAM pack had to be placed on a piece of hardboard.

In reply to a post by broadband66:

RAM pack had to be placed on a piece of hardboard.

Whole setup was best on hardboard with some small risers to hold in place, ZX81 + rampack, or Spectrum + Interface 1 + MicroDrives.. ahh long time ago!

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

How do you define reliable?

Do you just mean uptime, or how about this,? The ability to do what you want when you want without services falling over?

Imagine being able to download whilst watching Netflix, Twitch etc., no drop of resolution or buffering. To me thats as much reliability as is service uptime. All without no QoS meddling on local setup.

Thats the real advantage, a connection that you wont or will rarely saturate, meaning everything just works.

I used to download and watch netflix or equivalent when I was on 36Mbs FTTC, downloading was not so fast, but it worked, as long as you remember to restrict it over wise it will take as much as it can and Netflix will have nothing, and it can still do that with higher speeds broadband.

As you said, the advantage of higher speed broadband is the bandwidth available to do more things faster, which for a lot of people will not make one bit of difference.

I bet if I went to the majority of people I know and had 1 Gb/s FTTP broadband service put into their house, they would not even notice, even those with a few people living there. Why? Because the majority of people use their broadband for streaming, maybe connecting their phones or tablets to and even those with computers, I doubt download large files.

All this you need 1Gb/s is a marketing ploy and now some people can get faster speeds, that will be a marketing ploy to get people to part with more money for a service they don't need.

My eldist brother have dropped from 500Mb\s to 120 or something like that, because it is cheaper and while he does download now and again for bits for Abaleton live, he don't stream as he is not a TV person and he may browse for different things and that si about it.
My partner have dropped from 900Mb/s to 200, realising that she never needed that speed.

Sure if you are going to make use of the speed then there is nothing wrong with going for it, not sure if anyone really need 5Gb/s, that would take some using, unless you have around 30 people in the same building using it at the same time, and then you need the internal network to cope with it which is another problem.

Internet providers will talk people into getting these faster speeds, because you can do everything faster, but the user will not do be able to do anything faster as they have not got the equipment to do it, even if it did make a difference.

Video will only stream so fast, music takes very little even high def, browsing, people will not notice any difference, reading their emails, texting with WhatsApp or RCS or any other thing like that is not going to make their text get to the other person any quicker.

You get to a certain point where things are so fast, you notice little difference, the ones on here on about ZX81, or about more than 640K of ram and faster CPUs, if you're going down that road then you can say, why did we come off dial up or ADSL. Apart from the odd thing, like games because they tend to use faster tech, if I stuck to say my AMD ryzen 7 1700 based computer in front of you or many people to be honest and also a machine with a AMD Ryzen 7 8700F, with the same amount of ram in and maybe the same video card. You would say the 8700 on benchmarks would be a lot faster than my old CPU and you would be right, it is. But would you notice in normal use?
Even video editing, the difference is minimal, maybe 30 seconds longer on the older machine to render on a 1-hour-long video. If you are just browsing and doing a bit of office stuff, you certainly would not notice.

That is why I am dithering to update my PC, it is only used for games mainly these days, but older games, it works, sure it is 8 years old now, well the board, CPU and some of the memory is, but for the most part it is still workingish.

Just trying to get though that a lot of people would not notice any difference in speed whatsoever. As for reliability, if it does what I need and works when I want it to, then that to me is reliability.

Sorry about it being so long.

In reply to a post by broadband66:

RAM pack had to be placed on a piece of hardboard.
I had a memotech ramp pack, made not to wobble

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by broadband66:

RAM pack had to be placed on a piece of hardboard.

Whole setup was best on hardboard with some small risers to hold in place, ZX81 + rampack, or Spectrum + Interface 1 + MicroDrives.. ahh long time ago!

The microdrives were amazing for the time, you think these were the days, where most people were using cassette and then on the spectrum you could have these drives that were fast, well faster, and they could go to the file you needed without pressing play or pause. The only places most people at that time have seen anything like that is in films, and they were big reels of tape. I know someone people knock him, but Clive was a genius, and he did get a lot of people including myself into computers. Sure he had some duds, the C5 for one, but he was right, electric vehicles were the thing of the future and this what is happening now.

I am on 220 FTTP, getting ~205 up and ~30 down. It is adequate. Of all the possible upgrades, raw headline speed does not interest me. I would actually prefer to go symmetric at 200. Marketing departments are getting this wrong by making symmetric the upgrade after all speed upgrades. It should the basic upgrade these days. We are no longer constrained by ADSL, where the asymmetric speeds were the optimum use of restricted bandwidth. But so much of the thinking these days around FTTP still seems to be constrained by the requirements of ADSL.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Sorry about it being so long.

You've managed to convince yourself the difference between the technology (VDSL/FTTC) and others (FTTP).

In reply to a post by DFScale:

But so much of the thinking these days around FTTP still seems to be constrained by the requirements of ADSL.

I assume this is what the sales department at the huge networks (VM & OR) think is the only way to protect their revenue from business circuits/leased lines.They appear to be working to the assumption (even after pandemic) that home users only upload emails and keystrokes.

VDSL and DOCSIS coax were symmetric due to the technology, but anything newer does not have to be, it is being artificially limited.

In reply to a post by DFScale:

I am on 220 FTTP, getting ~205 up and ~30 down. It is adequate. Of all the possible upgrades, raw headline speed does not interest me. I would actually prefer to go symmetric at 200. Marketing departments are getting this wrong by making symmetric the upgrade after all speed upgrades. It should the basic upgrade these days. We are no longer constrained by ADSL, where the asymmetric speeds were the optimum use of restricted bandwidth. But so much of the thinking these days around FTTP still seems to be constrained by the requirements of ADSL.

This is openreach for you, that is the way they are, also this is the UK, we are normally behind other countries and now we have fast broadband, our government is taking us more into being a nanny state, so what is the point?

In reply to a post by jchamier:

You've managed to convince yourself the difference between the technology (VDSL/FTTC) and others (FTTP).

I have known the difference for years, even before FTTP was a thing in most of the country.