Broadband News

The current surge in media interest in broadband speeds and availability has, like any war, had truth as its first casualty. We have been hearing today that without 2M broadband you can't shop on line, use twitter, receive email and so on. Such exaggerations are the stock in trade of campaigning types and usually contain a tiny element of truth blown up out of all proportion, especially when repeated and re-quoted a few times.

Personally I have helped several people get broadband in what were otherwise considered notspots, in some cases achieving link speeds as low as 160 kbits/s downstream. The most recent case, in S. Derbyshire, we managed to get a service running just below 500k where BT had failed to get a connection - the key was a different make of router. All of these users were very happy if not ecstatic to have any form of broadband up and running, and were happily using the web and email, instant messaging etc. Any ADSL connection is a world apart from dialup, with lower latency, higher speeds (especially upstream), always-on connectivity and no interruption of voice phone service. To me the "no ADSL" cases are the ones that merit attention and public intervention.

But what of this "2M is not enough" argument ? Some applications like Twitter transmit very small amounts of data and are not real-time, they will work on dialup or any broadband connection. A "tweet" is 140 characters, or 140 bytes, which even a 2400 bits/s dialup modem would transmit in less than a second. One would have to be following a lot of verbose twits before this traffic amounted to anything measurable.

Email is also a low bandwith activity and again it isn't real time as the whole system works on a "store and forward" basis. Look at the total email traffic in green on Plusnet's broadband traffic graph :-



Naturally it takes longer to receive an email with a big attachment at slower speeds, and the asymmetric nature of ADSL means it takes even longer to send it back. But even a 0.5M broadband service will download over 40 kbytes/s and upload about 30 kbytes/s so a 5 Mbyte email (as large as many services allow) will be along in a couple of minutes.

Moving on to more fashionable applications like the BBC iPlayer, I tested using it with a 2M connection by throttling my connection using Netlimiter. The streaming version worked fine on standard resolution at 2M, with bursts of download and spaces in between, but as the available bandwidth reduces the spaces disappear. The graphs show traffic at 2M, 1M and 0.5M limits :-



At a limit of 450 kbits/s the iPlayer suffers regular transient pauses and flashes up a warning about "insufficient bandwidth". So a 0.5M connection is the absolute bare minimum for a single user streaming the iPlayer, such a user may appear to be better off using the download version however a typical programme of 623 Mbytes would take over 3.5 hours to download, so in practice the iPlayer is not for 0.5M users in its current form. Youtube suffered similar pauses and re-buffering at 0.5M.

With the limiter set to 250 kbits/s I was able to browse samknows.com, run the speed tester at www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk, leave feedback on Ebay, check out some stuff on amazon.co.uk and so on. Apart from some sluggish images the web browsing experience was fine, just as it was when I used to have  a 512k connection when broadband arrived in 2003.

A quick test with Skype showed that it only sends about 35 kbits/s each way and that too worked fine at 0.5M.

What conclusions can we draw from this ? A single user household can certainly stay digitally engaged with a 0.5M connection, even if that means watching TV on a television, using a recording device for timeshifting and buying music or films on CDs & DVDs. A family or other multi-computer / multi-device household would definitely struggle with 0.5M and 2M looks more realistic. Even then there's no room for downloading the internet via P2P or other heavy-use indulgencies.