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by Nursie 1912 days ago
> I think for most people the 'ceiling' is probably something like 25Mbps.

That's one 4K stream and no slack. Fine for a single person, maybe. But even for just the two of us, if I'm watching a UHD stream on netflix/amazon and she's upstairs playing a game and watching twitch, that's not enough. A family with kids is going to struggle to enjoy modern services on that, and that's before we get into larger downloads.

That's really not enough for a household in 2021, and I see no virtue in trying to 'make do' here.

> the emphasis should be on ensuring everyone has access to at least 25Mbps

I would be surprised if (here in the UK) there were many places you couldn't already.

According to figures I can find from 2019, we were at 53% having access to 300Mbps+, 42% with access to 30-300, 4.5% with only 10-30 and 0.5% under that, which is pretty good going. That lowest 5% are clearly lagging and in need of modernising, but I don't think it's wrong to say we can improve it for the 42% as well, especially as the network we roll out now is the network that forms usage patterns over the next several years. It's not just about right now.

1 comments

Fair points.

I wonder if 5G could help with the 'last mile' problem, regarding serving sparsely populated areas economically. It's fast enough to be used for home broadband.