I'm only running 4 laptops here in the flat and I'm not dealing with a huge amount of data my real need is for quality VPN connections to the customers factories and a lot of them can't provide good connectivity anyway because of location like South Africa or Uganda.
Ah well you won't benefit then. I need it because I regularly move terrabytes of data around and use NFS a lot. Sounds like a furnace though this data centre equipment isn't renowned for being quiet.
That’s what one of the houses on the estate are getting as of a few days ago. I think they are a fair distance from the cabinet too, but I gather with fibre it isn’t so crucial?
Yes. Terrabytes of data. When they drill a well these days (that is when they drill) they generate terrabytes of well data. And lots of it. Then they share it, store it and send it whizzing around the globe. Very valuable data it is too, or at least it was until the oil price went south.
Copper attenuates, fibre doesn't, the quality of internal reflection in modern fibre is such that the signal can travel huge distances without a repeater.
It’s an education in itself as with the help of social media, everyone who was using copper before shared their download speed capability and now everyone on fibre is doing the same. With copper it was very obvious that street by street the speeds dropped the further from the cabinet the house was from it. Until those furthest away got next to nothing, if anything. We were lucky being a bit closer but those right close to the cabinet had quite brisk speeds with copper. That example I gave in the photo was one resident who had been getting next to nothing with copper. Around 4 mbs or less. So one extreme to the other. People home schooling or working from home were struggling really badly, furthest from the cabinet.
Shame that full fibre to home is not yet really common in the UK. I had fibre to my home in the US - and remembered when I worked for BT many years ago the pressing problem even then was the 'last mile' from the cabinet to the home which was twisted-pair copper. It's still a problem. Fibre wasn't available in my area when I checked last month. I think it's going to take the UK quite some time to catch up with other countries in terms of high-speed internet availability.
I also realize that all this talk about bandwidth - I didn't actually reply to the talk about 4K. Whether it's worth it depends solely on the angle the pixels subtends to your eye, and your visual acuity as @oss mentioned. That boils down to; a) How good your eyesight is. b) How far you are from the screen. c) How big the screen is. There are calculators that allow you to assess it. I don't personally run a 4K set because I use a Pioneer Kuro KRP Plasma - one of the finest 1080p pictures ever made - and one which the recent LG 4K OLED sets are just about equalling around now. I would like a new 75 inch OLED set but I think OLED is overpriced and I'm waiting for the price to drop. I'm not personally bothered about 4K for myself at the distance I sit from the screen and because my eyes are buggered after a recent operation - and I'm even less convinced by 8K. But it helps the manufacturers sell new TVs.
I remember the 1980's, BT offered to cable the entire country with fibre if the government would allow them to carry entertainment, Thatcher said no. I was in a car a few years ago up in Cumbria with my friend Colin, in the back we were giving a lift to a chap who was the MD of a broadband infrastructure supplier they installed point to point Microwave links and lots of other kit, we got onto the topic of fibre somehow and I mentioned how far ahead we would have been if BT had been allowed to do what they wanted back in the 1980s the guy was dumbstruck and said that I was the first person he had met who understood and remembered the opportunities we had missed all those years ago, he was an interesting chap to talk to.
Everything except splicing the fibre. Everything. However I moved on from that side of the industry in 2007. The underlaying role was to supply well data to various oil company clients. Most of it geological data (petrophysics) some of it engineering data. Lots of it. Many wells have been drilled initially for the express purpose of acquiring information - exploratory, before drilling the producers that get the hydrocarbons to surface. That information is crucial. If you think of Perseverance then you would not be far off track except the difference in remoteness. The data was acquired on the surface but also from downhole at depths several miles beneath the surface using telemetry to the surface LAN. Then from the LAN by satellite to anywhere across the globe. I am pretty much retired now.
The difference is that fibre does not really have a contention ratio, the capacity of even a single fibre is huge because different wavelengths of light can share the same physical medium without interference. Also fibre is not just fibre the cables that are laid across the ocean are of much higher quality glass than the fibre cable between a DVD player and an amplifier, for example the fibres that BT use for the UK internet backbone are up there with the undersea cables I would guess. The other limiting factor is the equipment at the terminating ends of a cable that have to read and reroute the data, that equipment is the main limiting factor rather than the fibre cable itself as you can upgrade that equipment a lot to get more capacity from an existing cable that has been laid. With FTTP I don't think your estate will see any real contention unless the supplier has intentionally built in some throttling, so I would expect that all those folk sharing their speeds will be getting very similar results
Looks like the router supplied isn’t very great. The download and upload speeds at the router are good. So some residents are using Mesh devices to get the Wifi speeds up in the far flung corners of the house.
I know one resident who has done just that but running wiring through brand new stud walling isn’t an option for most residents.
Done. Installed today. Am getting 100mbs download speed at the router. And then speeds like this in the rest of the house on wifi.
That kind of upload speed is to die for, for someone like me, I could back up my entire photographic history in a couple of days instead of a couple of months with speeds like that.
I don’t think we will be using those upload speeds very much. The Yayzi rep claimed those upload speeds were only achievable through them. No other provider can do that. I wouldn’t know if that were true.
