this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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25/3 is way more than fast enough for most people not to notice. Its enough to stream 4k compressed. Maybe we should start measuring broadband in terms of reliability and latency. That has a far larger impact on overall experience.
Broadband in most of the developed world is 100Mbps, with South Korea transitioning to 1Gbps broadband. The point is less "what's good enough" and more "evaluating internet access as a required utility".
My point is, reliability, latency, and consistency is what is important. Bandwidth is nearly totally irrelevant for 99% of internet users. A couple years back I ran an entire office of 100 people on a 50 mbit connection. Thats 100 Concurrent users all using their cloud apps to do work. Many of them streaming music while they're working, some of them are even streaming video while they're working. It was never an issue for anyone and there was always plenty of bandwidth to go around, because bandwidth does not impact user experience unless you are regularly downloading or uploading massive files. Even on windows patch days where there are updates being downloaded for every computer at once it wasn't a problem and nobody noticed.
More megabits does not mean better or more reliable access to the internet. Just like how a 100 megapixel camera that costs $200 is not better than a 24 megapixel camera that costs $1000.
Just to prove my point, I restricted my internet bandwidth to 25/3 on my firewall, which means its restricted for the entire home. Every device on the network is sharing the single 25/3 connection. I started streaming a netflix 4k movie, then opened a youtube video concurrently, then started streaming a random TV show from amazon prime. I opened up another concurrent video YT on my phone and ran that concurrently. That is 3 1080p streams and 1 4k stream and I ran out of screens to test with. Then I started streaming music from spotify and apple music both at once. Then, to top it all off I ran a speedtest. I still had 8mbits/sec to spare and any website I went to was still loading instantly. With the connection 100% saturated there was absolutely no interruption in any of the other streams, thanks to QoS which almost every router has nowadays. This is not a hard thing to try yourself and I highly suggest it if you're open to your opinion being changed.
no it isn't.
I'll second this. 4k at 25 mbps might be OK for a sitcom or drama without much action or on-screen movement. But as soon as there's any action, it's gonna be a pixelated mess. 25 mbps is kinda the sweet spot for full fidelity 1080p, and I'd much rather watch that than "4K".
He means a 4k reel of just darkness. Could probably do it at a few hundred FPS and still have some bandwidth to spare.
4k netflix requires 15 megabit: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444
The reality is that it’s not, most importantly because the advertised “up to” speed might rarely be achieved. However even simple websites are now horribly overburdened with ads and trackers and “live updates” and “lazy downloading” that it’s just not functional at that bandwidth
This is really easy to verify and I think you might be surprised. Open your resource monitor and browse the web, stream videos, etc. My family of 4 with 2 of us working from home with a video streaming on the TV and maybe 30 total wifi devices has averaged 12 mbits/sec down over the past hour. The highest spike was to 30 mbps.