What essential services for the home require high speed broadband?

RETIRED2017 said:
I think we can see where this is heading ,I suspect we will be reading it in the papers in the next few weeks,
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Really? I'm lost. Maybe you refer to the national broad band plan. Or lack thereof.

People are moving from TV and land lines to save cost and convenience. It maybe this discussion is about people moving to a location with poor broadband.
 
Brendan, what services do you class as essential? Water, electricity, heating (gas,oil, etc)?
 
I am increasingly using cloud services for activities like software development, testing etc.. and I find high speed broadband essential for this.

More and more services are being offered as cloud hosted and an implicit assumption is HS broadband to make them usable.
 

I think we can all agree that household is far from the norm. 2+ people watching different 4k TV streams (50Mbps down, minimal up), another 5 people simultaneously listening to various audio streams on Google Home / Alexa (2.5-3Mbps down, 0-1.5Mbps up), and occasionally another on the PlayStation, plus more people then using FaceTime or Skype (both around 1Mbps) all at the same time...

You can almost forget the Nest cameras, as that bandwidth is predominantly upload, unless you have more people there watching live streams from the cloud service. You can completely ignore the Hue lights, the usage you describe above does not consume any bandwidth.

The only real bandwidth drain in your house is streaming two 4k streams at once. I don't think too many people would conclude that two, or even a single 4k stream is an essential service. If the 8+ people in your house could make do with regular old HD streaming, your demand wouldn't exceed 50Mbps.


arbitron said:
If there was any lag we would all have been annoyed. The expectation now is that things will run speedily and on cue.
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Lag is generally related to limitations or demand on the intermediary hops the data makes from source to your house. But I understand with that many people in a house, all trying to do their own thing, things could get tetchy
 

Depending on the service and your overall usage, moving to cloud can significantly lower the local bandwidth requirements. One of the main benefits of using cloud services is that it eliminates the need for full local copies of all data.

It sounds like you might be working on smaller scale stuff and actually building locally. As a model that's on the way out in the corporate world as a result of data loss concerns.

We now use centralised HVDs for all user desktops, all build and integration infrastructure is also localised. For remote users VPNing in, even when using HD video calling the local bandwidth requirements are in the low single digits.
 
No need for people to keep telling me that high speed internet isn't essential. In my first post I said most people don't need broadband. Even midband is excessive for many.


Leo, you seem determined to argue that my house didn't need 100Mbps. 95% of the time we didn't but at peak usage we certainly used close to that. Not for essential services because, as I said at the beginning, virtually no one needs internet for anything essential.

Our usage at that time was unusual even for us, we're back to a 2 person household now, but consider family homes with kids streaming and gaming. 4K TVs are becoming common, some live TV broadcasts starting in 4K now. I think the FCC definition of broadband is now or is proposed to be 100 megs.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
And that is nice. But it's not essential. If they lose their Hi Speed broadband they can go back to their TV and land line.
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That depends on your definition of essential. I haven't had a regular phone line for years. I also have gotten used to making video calls. I can't go back to a regular phone line for that. And if you say that video calling isn't essential, well neither is audio calling. There's always the postal service. And failing that you can do everything in person.
 
Leo said:
...
It sounds like you might be working on smaller scale stuff and actually building locally. As a model that's on the way out in the corporate world as a result of data loss concerns.

.....
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Cloud is not suitable for everything. Though it is for a lot of tasks. A lot of our environments are virtualized, so we can VPN into them if needs be.

I'd hate to be trying to do my work on mediocre broadband.
 
dub_nerd said:
And if you say that video calling isn't essential, well neither is audio calling. There's always the postal service. And failing that you can do everything in person.
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That does not hold at all.

Being able to make telephone calls is essential. Video calls certainly are not, whether you have got used to them or not. Don't get me wrong, I am sure that they are nice, but they are not essential.

We have a universal postal service - I would consider that essential.
We have a universal telephone service - I would consider that essential.

The ability to make video calls is not essential. I don't think that anyone at all could argue that.

Brendan
 

I'm not having a go, but the subject of this thread relates to the argument put forward by some that high speed broadband is almost essential to modern life, and using that argument to justify significant public funding. You did state as much in your earlier posts, so those arguing the above point clearly have a different impression, or perhaps don't have sufficient knowledge on the subject.

I picked on your contribution just to tally the numbers and demonstrate what the overall requirements would actually be in a very high-demand household. I'm sure there are many reading this that don't know the bandwidth requirements of these devices, so it made a good example.

I was just trying to point out that unless a household considers watching multiple 4k TV streams simultaneously as essential, they only need a fraction of 100Mbps.
 
Unless it's essential for work.

For people working away from home they might feel it's essential to them.

Though I've seen some people doing video calls on the bus with a tablet. You can do it on your mobile broadband also.
 
Leo said:
I'm not having a go, but the subject of this thread relates to the argument put forward by some that high speed broadband is almost essential to modern life, ...
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Modern life means different things to different people....
 
Brendan Burgess said:
The ability to make video calls is not essential. I don't think that anyone at all could argue that.
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Even if it were essential, it doesn't require high speed broadband. Skype for Business for example will work on a minimum of 500Kbps up & down.
 
A lot of people may pay for a much higher capacity service than their equipment can use
 
AlbacoreA said:
Cloud is not suitable for everything. Though it is for a lot of tasks. A lot of our environments are virtualized, so we can VPN into them if needs be.

I'd hate to be trying to do my work on mediocre broadband.
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Absolutely, anyone who needs to upload/download vast quantities of data on a regular basis will suffer delays when doing so without a high-speed connection.

But if your environments are virtualiased, there should be limited need for such bandwidth. My parents live in a rural location with broadband of ~6Mbps, my VPN connection works perfectly over that.
 
You're right Leo, we generally don't need as much as we buy. 100 megs is excessive for most of us. It's a marketing trick in many ways. It would be interesting to hear what most people feel is essential though. I'd happily do away with my landline but my parents consider it a basic necessity.
 
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