cable modem War

[Yaka]

well both BY and ntl are gone up the cm speed by a few bumps


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/26/ntl_telewest_broadband/

http://www.blueyonder.co.uk/blueyonder/getContent.jspx?page=bbs_faster

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3646825.stm

 

[Cask]

Wow, quite impressive. I guess those speed increases were aimed at turning people away from ADSL and I've gotta say that if I could get cable in this building I'd probably switch over and save myself £5 a month and get 50% extra bandwidth.

Can't see ADSL ISP's responding to this news as that would require BT pulling it's finger out. Hopefully hundreds of thousands will switch over to cable and BT will be forced to bring this country's broadband into line with the other leading countries, not in my lifetime though. All good for the consumer anyway

 

[Sharma]

Can they please keep doing that to the point where we pay ~£27 for 10mbit connections like sweden please?

 

[Deadmanwalking]

Can they please keep doing that to the point where we pay ~£27 for 10mbit connections like sweden please?

And add the huge amount of Tax they pay?

Not to mention, what the fuck are you going to do with 10 mbit?

 

[Catsby]

Not to mention, what the fuck are you going to do with 10 mbit?

Simple.


ALL THE PR0N IN THE WORLD (faster than before)

 

[Sharma]

And add the huge amount of Tax they pay?

Not to mention, what the fuck are you going to do with 10 mbit?

Well, What do you think? All the more to be downloaded tbh.

 

[Cyfr]

Could stop going to war and use that money for broadband

 

[]AC[dRuM]

By the end of May, all 512k, 1Mb & 2Mb customers will be automatically upgraded, enabling them to go 50% faster.

Notice the use of 'enabling them to go 50% faster' ... not actually set in stone, but we will see..

Great news snippet...

 

[~Yuckfou~]

Not to mention, what the fuck are you going to do with 10 mbit?

As many things as you want at the same time. Multiple downloads from different servers while watching net TV or gaming.
Another point would be that webbies adjust to the amount of bandwidth the potential viewers have.
For example years ago when a 14k dial up was state of the art we downloaded low quality images from text based sites. 56K came along and webbies became more graphic, images of a higher quality, video became feasilble. Along came BB and we now think nothing of downloading a 500mb game patch or video. More bandwidth will give us better content, what that will be I don't know, maybe more of the same at a higher quality, but it will come.

 

[dysfunction]

DVD quality full screen streaming video please!

 

[Deadmanwalking]

As many things as you want at the same time. Multiple downloads from different servers while watching net TV or gaming.

Sorry to piss on your dream but the upload makes all the differenc for gaming pings.

10mbit line and shitty (Cable upload) means you will lag like a bitch if downloading/uploading/streaming.

 

[~Yuckfou~]

Sorry to piss on your dream but the upload makes all the differenc for gaming pings.

10mbit line and shitty (Cable upload) means you will lag like a bitch if downloading/uploading/streaming.

I'm well aware of that, if by upload you mean speed.
It is safe to assume however that your ping will be playable nowadays on any BB connection. If it isn't then you really shouldn't be using that ISP. I have 1mb, happily download in the background while playing CS with a sub 50 ping.

 

[Gumbo]

I other news....

BT to speed up adsl rollout.

 

[Gil]

Nice to hear but are they gonna change the upload speed tho?

 

[mookie]

my telewest cable just got upgraded

1.5mbit, ~180k/s down

UBR #5 at Knowsley for those that are interested. Hopefully the rest of you telewest users should follow on pretty quick

 

[Ch3tan]

Notice the use of 'enabling them to go 50% faster' ... not actually set in stone, but we will see..

Great news snippet...

Nope, it is actually 50% more downstream than before.

 

[old.user4556]

I agree with the bloke who said "what are you going to do with 10 megabit?"

It's nice to have more bandwidth, but seriously, how much faster do you want web pages to load, or how much faster do you want MSN/IRC to be (). Gaming latency isn't going to change either.

The novelty of bandwidth wore off for me pretty quickly once I had downloaded every available Linux distro, BSD version, Oracle 9i iso, porn flick et all. Now I would appreciate better upload speed, or perhaps even lower gaming latency and improved peering.

Nothing worse than having that whopping 3 megabit line and file sharing with another person on a 3 megabit line only uploading at 25k per sec.

I guess what it perhaps does pave the way for is improved streaming media, higher quality audio clips on the net (you could happily stream a CD and have plenty bandwidth left for the web etc) and movies on demand.

G

 

[Will]

UBR #5 at Knowsley for those that are interested. Hopefully the rest of you telewest users should follow on pretty quick

North West 30 April
Scotland 4 May
LaSER 5 May
North London & Eurobell 6 May
Midlands 7 May
South West & Birmingham 10 May
North East, Yorkshire & West London 11May

LaSER = London and South East Region

 

[xane]

I doubt personal bandwidth is going the affect gaming any time soon.

Games designers adhere to the common denominator, which at present is still teetering on "56K modem".

I did notice when BF:1942 came out that you could limit servers to a minimum applicable connection, i.e. a "DSL or above" server. I think this may well be a herald that future games will require minimum connection bandwidths above 56K, but it wont be above the bog-standard DSL otherwise there'd be no one to play them.

BF:1942 really needs the bandwidth to support more players in a game, so the bandwidth restriction is tied in with the server player limit, I'd guess as games advance and they can accomodate more players, this will become the norm.

A fair bit of online gaming is done through MMOGs, which are mostly non-realtime "point and click", rather than "twitch" or "aim and click" (like Quake-style FPS games), these will not really limit bandwidth otherwise they face a limited user market, they don't need to anyway as it is more the server power that limits the number of users rather than client bandwidth.

Does anyone know of "twitch" games that insist on "DSL or above" ? Are there rumours of some on the horizon with this restriction ?

 

[Will]

Planetside was unplayable on a 56k connection. Does that count?

 

[Gumbo]

It was barely playable on 64k isdn, which is considerably more faster than 56k sounds like.

^^ Nomination for worst grammer of the year award.

I recently tried playing an ofp zombie mod, which was also unplayable, but I understand fine with broadband.

The only good news for me is that my exchange will be upgraded by June 2005 and hopefully a damn site quicker than that.

 

[]AC[dRuM]

ahh the day I left dialup for my cable connection is a day I will not forget..

/me slips into a dream.......

It will be interesting to see what d/l speeds we can achieve with this proposed 50% increase.

 

[FuzzyLogic]

Skipping between 170~180KB download speeds now on 1.5Mb, go BY

Blueyonder -> < - Meh.

 

[Wij]

Skipping between 170~180KB download speeds now on 1.5Mb, go BY

Blueyonder -> < - Meh.

Don't tire me out !

I may be on telewest shortly...

 

[TriGGer]

Any idea if the ADSL lot are going to compete ?

 

[Gumbo]

My guess is that BT'll point at the speeded up adsl rollout for a while, and say that is where their resources are being spent at present, so I wouldn't hold your breath. I also believe that distance from exchange/speed is a bigger deal for adsl than it is for cable, though I may well be wrong.