Comment by dspillett
2 years ago
You are not alone. The last time a home internet upgrade felt really significant to me was going from 2mbit to 8mbit. Everything else has been luxury. Though I'll be signing up for ~160 or ~1000 as soon as the new cables the street was recently dug up to put in place are connected, I like my luxuries!
I do still notice upstream improvements though. Both those old 2mbit and 8mbit connections were 256kbit up, and I currently have "up to 17mbit" which is [quick check of router logs] ~11mbit ATM - that can be limiting for backups or when wanting to share video or HQ photos with a large group. So the FTTP upgrade _might_ be justifiable as more than pure luxury.
you get used to high speed. I have recently had to download a 3Gb file on a 100mbit wifi. god, it took 5 minutes! that would take <1min on my 1gbit at home.
DSL can usually do up to 250 mbit/s, no?
The standard FTTC options in the UK are nominally 40/10 and 80/20. I have the latter, which in reality works out as “up to 76mbit down, up to 17mbit up”. My router is currently synced at 56/11. Where G.FAST is available IIRC that is up to 250down/36up.
The engineers who invented DSL did Gbit/s speeds in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, real life 50 year old copper pairs aren't as fast as those in their lab...
Near Silicon Valley, we would get 256kbit theoretical.