Betamax, VHS, DVD, Blu Ray, 4k Blu Ray... ?

4K blu ray looks and sounds tremendous to us, now that we have entered the modern age with a new telly and Oppo 203 discerisor.

Streaming is the future though, if/when users have access to the broadband speed for sensible money. That's a big if/when though for many.

I'd be delighted if I thought my broadband, which supposedly is good enough for 4K, actually didn't manage to buffer so often.   Does anyone ever get the speed quoted?

Apparently you need  clear, spare 15MB of uninterrupted bandwidth to stream a 4K film. Netflix recommends a 25MB connection, which allows for other demands to run in parallel.

This seems okay if you are blessed with a fibre optic connection to your house. However, can anyone with a copper twisted pair internet connection achieve a 25MB/second connection speed?

Best regards, FT

I bet 100Mb/s will be a pitying speed in 2 years!

The thing I wonder is will phone lines connected to our roofs be disconnected soon. They pollute our skies!!

Netflix recommend a 25Mb/s connection for 4K (not 25MB/s which would be 200Mb/s, my pedantic network designer kicking in, sorry). On the FTTC connection I have, so fibre to the street cabinet, copper from the cab. to my house, my download speed runs between 60Mb/s and 70Mb/s. So I could stream a couple of movies and have some Tidal running, although I suspect my Home Hub might groan at that.

Consciousmess posted:

I bet 100Mb/s will be a pitying speed in 2 years!

The thing I wonder is will phone lines connected to our roofs be disconnected soon. They pollute our skies!!

I doubt it, it’s not just about speed, it’s about quality and latency and sustained throughput... the limited for the domestic environment is not so much the access for many with fibre or VDSL, but the capability  of the piece of tin on the end of the FTTP fibre / or FTTC copper... and the required energy to power the CPE device...  it was interesting, and probably frustrating for the users, to read about bandwidth throughput issues with some recent Virgin fibre routers.

Dungassin posted:

I'd be delighted if I thought my broadband, which supposedly is good enough for 4K, actually didn't manage to buffer so often.   Does anyone ever get the speed quoted?

Surprisingly, given our remote rural location, we've now been connected up, Fibre To The Premises, and measuring the speed gave 310 Mb. As we are only paying for 200 Mb, I reckon this is pretty good!

Eoink posted:

Netflix recommend a 25Mb/s connection for 4K (not 25MB/s which would be 200Mb/s, my pedantic network designer kicking in, sorry). On the FTTC connection I have, so fibre to the street cabinet, copper from the cab. to my house, my download speed runs between 60Mb/s and 70Mb/s. So I could stream a couple of movies and have some Tidal running, although I suspect my Home Hub might groan at that.

One has to be careful here... saying the bandwidth required for 4K is bit like saying how long is a piece of string.. quality and techniques vary hugely. Amazon and Netflix use unicast adaptive compression... it’s very processed, and is not suitable for real-time TV, but can handle varying conditions and will adapt to the bandwidth available within reason... they have to use these compromises as they don’t control the access bandwidth, and of course there is no QoS on the public internet.

ISP IP TV services such as from BT tend to be of a higher quality as they tend to use non adaptive encodings, use multicast for real-time TV, and control and fence off the bandwidth for non TV use (hence effectively providing a strictly policed QoS environment) so it doesn’t interfere the with IPTV (this are some of the smarts that goes on in higher spec ISP routers) ... this gives a better quality video experience in many circumstances. From memory for example BT TV fence off 30 Mbps for their UHD TV content.

So as you can see with TV/video, above a certain threshold level it’s not really about bandwidth, but about data quality.

Indeed Simon, a few months ago I was chatting to a friend who also designs networks for a living about the fact that when his daughters started watching TV his music streaming started juddering. We had a quick look, and decided it could only be jitter, bandwidth he had plenty, the family wasn't even using 4k TV, just HD. But somewhere in his router there was some prioritisation happening, and his music stream was being queued just enough to provide audible gaps. A switch to a higher spec router seems to have fixed that.  I agree with you, having designed corporate networks for a living, when you get multiple time sensitive streams on a network, effects such as jitter and even crude latency will potentially be an issue.

Hi Eoink, I suspect it was not prioritisation, just plain old congestion and device bandwidth saturation ... some of the older consumer stuff out here just was not designed for much other than web based traffic (web site, social media etc) ... which until very recently is what most used their broadband accesses mainly for..

Dungassin,  I wish the overhead lines would disappear but until we all get FTTP we are facing a long wait & I fear.      

Talking of line speeds,  we had an Open Reach (BT) gang working on my local FTTC box,  3 guys is a bit more serious & I think some hardware got changed.  Prior to that I had a once in a while glitch with internet TV  nothing that bad but invariably during early evening & the 'busy' internet use times. iRadio & other www services were rock solid.     Since the whatever BT were doing at the FTTC box the TV nuisance glitches have not happened.   Previously my 80/20 service drooped to around 72Mb/s (Ookla) during the peek usage times,  last evening between 7 to 8pm is was getting 75 to 76Mb/s,  so it seems whatever was changed in the FTTC box it has improved.

tonym posted:

Dungassin posted:

I'd be delighted if I thought my broadband, which supposedly is good enough for 4K, actually didn't manage to buffer so often.   Does anyone ever get the speed quoted?

Surprisingly, given our remote rural location, we've now been connected up, Fibre To The Premises, and measuring the speed gave 310 Mb. As we are only paying for 200 Mb, I reckon this is pretty good!

Well, we've got fibreoptic according to OpenReach/BT.   Measures 40Mb/sec (or very close to it) when checked by engineer, but we still get buffering with YouTube, and streaming video (catchup TV) often falters, so it doesn't seem to work any better in practice than what we had before.

Dungassin posted:

Well, we've got fibreoptic according to OpenReach/BT.   Measures 40Mb/sec (or very close to it) when checked by engineer, but we still get buffering with YouTube, and streaming video (catchup TV) often falters, so it doesn't seem to work any better in practice than what we had before.

If you've gone to 'fibreoptic' (according to BT) that normally means you've changed from ADSL (copper all the way)   to FTTC (Fiber To The local distribution Cabinet) & its still copper from the cabinet to your house (same as me & 99% of all domestic users)   FTTC enables better line speeds than ADSL which are typically 17Mb/s max with BT.   With FTTC you get BT Infinity which can be up to 52Mb/s or 76Mb/s.    I guess you are on 52Mb/s & the +/-40Mb/s you are getting is probably as a result of the distance from the cabinet to house.      But per S-i-S post (above) its not all about line speed.    

Mike B : I went from Netgear 600 to BTHomeHub6 when I got BT Infinity  I know about the 'fibreoptic to distribution cabinet' bit, but it doesn't alter the fact that subjectively it's no faster than what I had before.  No intention of going 4K until the TV in my study dies.  Just having a whinge about, IMO, rather poor router/internet performance.

Dungassign,  I doubt it's the HH6,  if BT have a good one, that's it.    BT Infinity is 52Mbs & if you're getting 40Mbs that's either copper wire distance or bad wire or connections,   It's even worse if you're paying for Infinity-2 which is 76Mbs.    Have you whinged loud enough at BT? 

"Where is this technology going??"

8k is next. However, as mentioned above, we need the infrastructure to work before we can even think of that!
My own internet is around 3mbps on a good day. 1.5mbps on a bad day.
There's no fibre availability in this remote rural area for the foreseeable future. At least until the local council (Oxfordshire) actually gets the quotes in from various contractors. It will then take some considerable time to actually build the network and connect us...
BT will not be providing fibre to this area.