How progress changes your expectations

[Suff]

Specifically as Fibre has come to my sleepy town in France and I have signed up. I also took advantage of a package to get a French mobile with 70gb of data each month and unlimited calls and texts.

Now fibre is normally Gigabit. That is what SFR were offering me and that is what is normally pushed out to Internet users. Except Orange (France Telecom), has to go one better. They'll give you 2 Gigabit. Most people will still be working in Mbits, 70, 100, maybe even 300. There are 1000 Mbits in a Gibabit (well 1024 but that's technical and not really that important).

Great, give me some of that.... Except.... 1Gbit is on the wired network and 1Gbit is on the wifi. Hmm, I don't use their wifi for a very good reason. So now, my expectations readjusted (well not really, I read the fine print even French uses most global terms in technology), I got my fibre and new LiveBox on Friday last week.

Next expectation setting. For those of you who have 70Mbit or 100Mbit or even 300Mbit, your bandwidth (fixed speed), is usually quite fixed. It doesn't vary too much although it can. However I'm very aware that Gbit speed lines are very variable and can depend very much on how they are being used.

When setting up the box, I plugged in my laptop, the most expensive piece of kit I have even if it is 10 years old, then did a speed test direct on the LiveBox. 200Mbits. Well that was down, I'm used to fast down and slow up, my old connection on ADSL was 22 down and 2 up. So the up speed was 600Mbits. Odd you might think until you realise that most people are downloading, video, files etc. The age of peer sharing has not quite arrived, but it will.

Not a whit deterred, I tried it again 3 or 4 times at which point it finally gave me 600Mbits in each direction. Not so shabby. It is still varying between the two.

Next expectation setting. Last year I bought two packs of 3 eero wifi mesh devices on Amazon for the princely sum of £300, in a lightning deal. This was down from the £500 it would normally cost. I did this because my home is not your normal house where you have a wifi router in the living room and everyone shares it, or if the house is a bit bigger there is a repeater on another floor. Now the average UK home floor space is 100m2. My home is 600m2 and it has outside walls which are 2 feet thick and the wall between the two buildings is 2.5 feet thick. I did a lot of research before I bought and I decided not to spend £1,000 on the V6 kits as I didn't need them. The V6 kits support gigabit connections to wifi devices.

Eero devices support being connected to a cable for every device. I have 4 eero deployed and 3 of them are Gigabit cable connected. Giving me fantastic coverage and speed. Mrs S was constantly complaining that her Samsung phone or iPad would disconnect from the 4 different wifi networks I had before. Never a complaint since I got the Eero's and I still have 2 to deploy when the areas are ready and done.

These devices are around 350Mbits in performance. Reality is that none of my wifi devices can actually go any faster than 200Mbits.

So, for my non fixed (cabled) devices, I'm down to 200mbits from my 1,000 Mbit connection.

Then we have the media devices in the living room. They are specially connected to a different cabled network (yes I have two different networks in the home for a good reason), where they connect to my server that shares it's ExpressVPN network on this cable and they sit within the UK (as far as they know). Or the US depending on what I want to watch.

In my rounds of testing, I tested the max speed of the VPN. 30Mbits. Hmmm. I checked with my internet checker I have on the FireTV and it tells me it is only good enough for 4k TV. Well that's OK then because I don't have a 4k TV. Yet. It is, apparently, not good enough for 8k. But then I won't buy an 8k TV for another decade so that's all right then.

Working down this path I started at 2000 Mbits. Immediately dropped to 1,000, found my cabled devices only get 600Mbits and my wireless only get 200Mbits. Then my media streaming only gets 30Mbits.

It could be a bit disappointing, except that if you think about it, my wifi devices are slower than my wifi network, the FireTV will stream on the VPN just fine for my HD TV and anyone watching the TV is unlikely to be impacted by my downloads.

In reality, using it, I'm getting choppy connections with people on conference calls. I don't know if this is because I'm pushing too much video at them or whether my variable connection is the issue. I may try my VPN to see if it stabilises it.

The other reality was that we were recording a film from the Freesat box when I realised it was a follow on movie. I went to my machine to see if the earlier one was available and it was. So I set about downloading it. All 1.7Gbytes of it.

It completed in less than 3 minutes. I learned that the line takes time to come up to full speed and the internet test programs don't have files big enough to get it up to full speed. My download was going at over 700Mbits.

Whilst it might seem like a bit of an anti-climax, getting this connection and finding that everywhere you look things are just so much slower than advertised, reality is that it has totally electrified my internet usage and the synchronous (same speed up and down), nature of the line will be a massive boon for me when I eventually have to go and work away from home. I have struggled for two decades with getting stuff off my home servers when I forget to bring it with me. That problem is now gone. As I understand it, in the UK, most Gigabit links have much slower upload speeds.

Fortunately my expectations were real when I got this upgrade. I wonder just how many people will be severely disappointed? Even when they are going so much faster than they could ever have contemplated even 5 years ago.

[cruiser2]

Suff

I don't understand what you have done.
I am thinking of having cable--Virgin- which will include more TV channels. I get reasonable speeds 30.26Mbps upload and 4.63Mbps download.
These would more than double with cable.
Do you think it is worth it? Not much upheaval a I am having new flags at the front in July where the cable from the road will have to go.

[Suff]

Absolutely worth it Cruiser if you are not having to pay a premium.

For me I had a phone line which is now fibre. The main thing in the story was that Orange sold me a 2Gbit link which could only be used by me at 1Gbit and then the service was actually slower than advertised (this I know). Then you need more infrastructure to support gigabit speeds in the house, some of which I have and some I don't.

For you, the speed update will make things much better but won't exceed your in house capabilities. Portable devices and standard wifi will support your doubled speed without effort.

Excellent choice if you can get it at a good price.