[gubby]

I personally don’t understand the claimed need for such high bandwidth for video calling and general business use.

My work laptop has forced software updates, so at the start of lockdown, to protect my home internet connection I hard capped it to 4Mbps in both directions at the switch. I’ve been having ~back-to-back Meet video calls all day for an entire year without exceeding this or having any problems.

I think the quality of the connection (consistency, upstream contention, jitter, packet loss) is probably far more important for most practical business applications (ie excluding HD Netflix, game downloads etc).

[Jonnax]

There's a concept of "contention" when it comes to consumer broadband.

Your 50/5 broadband isn't dedicated to you, instead you share a single up link connection.

Depending on where you live and how they've extended it, you could have terrible ratios like 1:20.

This is often where you get the issues with connection consistency.

However consumers have no way of seeing what their ratio is.

So I'd argue getting higher bandwidth connections to households means that this would give a reason for ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure.

Also as consumers we should demand more not less from service providers.

50/5 is terrible. 625 kilobytes a second upload, that's objectively horrible internet.

If you're sharing a home with other people, you need to say to them "I'm going to have a conference call, could you not use the internet"

That is ridiculous. Video conference calls can have higher quality streams as well.

But also there are plenty of industries where they aren't just pushing text to the internet.

What about creative fields where they want to upload a multi megapixel image they're going to get printed on a billboard?

Or a game developer who wants to iterate on assets?

High quality remote desktop streaming to a high end PC in a data centre?

There's a lot of business applications which aren't just email and code which would benefit from a good internet connection.

Where one person will have to wait seconds for an upload, and someone else has to wait minutes or hours.

Like I have a 1000/1000 connection in the UK, that has a low contention where I get great consistency of connection. And it costs me the equivalent of $70 a month.

It enables so much in an internet connected world. And I think as consumers we should be demanding that.

Not arguing that a connection that'd be impressive in 2005, is acceptable.

[wffurr]

As the article shows, you can run 10 concurrent video calling sessions over 5 Mbps upload. That’s hardly “I’m going to have a conference call, could you not use the internet”.

There’s plenty of use cases for higher upload bandwidth, some of which you mentioned, but VCs on current generation laptops isn’t one of them.

A bigger issue is over reliance on WiFi in dense neighborhoods or through multiple walls. A better or more widely deployed in-unit wired network technology would be more impactful for a lot of people. I wish cat6 Ethernet was standard in construction, but in the US at least it seems to not be still. Our building was renovated in 2009 and has plenty of coaxial connections: 3 in the living room and 1 per bedroom, but no Ethernet. I’ve been slowly adding Ethernet to the coax plates, but it’s a real pain in the tail to do in an already built building.

[Jonnax]

Does the article show that?

Is there any examples of the quality of the video? If someone's face is a handful of pixels and them presenting their screen is a blur or super laggy, is that good enough?

What happens if one person makes a Google Duo call? That's in HD.

Or if one person turns on their console and starts uploading a save file to the cloud?

5mbps is horrendous.

[KozmoNau7]

You can run networking over your existing coax wiring, with MoCA 2.5 you can get over 1Gbps, which does require you to buy adapters, but you don't have to pull new cabling.