A serious surplus of bandwidth
Nothing is yet available to exploit the multi-gigabit broadband era, but that doesn’t mean something amazing isn’t hiding around the corner
Iam never knowingly undersold. When I first signed a mobile phone contract back in the late 1990s, I made sure I went for one with something like 20,000 call minutes, even though every month I’d still have 19,935 of them left in the bank. Hello, Mum.
Yet here I am, with Virgin Media begging me to take a gigabit broadband line, dangling the prospect that it will be boosted to 2.2Gbits/sec before
2022 is out, and suddenly I’m not for turning. I’m all bandwidthed out.
Granted, Collins Towers has two broadband connections: a 65Mbits/sec FTTC Zen Internet one for the main house and a dedicated 200Mbits/sec Virgin Media connection for my home office. They run independently on separate infrastructure, providing true redundancy, and if one falls over the other can cover the entire property. I’ll let you guess which one fails more often.
I’m nearing the end of my Virgin contract, hence the dangling of deals, but I’m not the least bit tempted. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve come close to maxing out the 200Mbits/sec connection over the past year or so. If anything, I’m thinking about downgrading and saving a few bob.
It’s not as if I’m not trying to give the Virgin connection a good thrashing. Over the past year I’ve downloaded countless Windows 11 ISOs, tons of hefty games and their equally hefty updates, and loads of massive apps. And I have been known to stream the odd football match or Test match from the office. But even when you’re sucking down files that are hundreds of gigabytes in size, you rarely come close to saturating the connection, because the bottleneck is at the other end. Even Microsoft, Epic Games and Adobe don’t have the capacity to deliver downloads at 200Mbits/sec during normal waking hours. Sure, the excess bandwidth has let me get on with other stuff while the big files are chugging down the pipe, but I’d probably have to download Windows 11, Fortnite and Photoshop at the same time to come close to saturating the connection. Even on the 65Mbits/sec “home” connection, with several HD/4K streams running simultaneously, we rarely suffer a stutter.
So I find myself wondering: when Virgin Media (and others) do roll out multi-Gigabit connections this year, what are people going to fill those pipes with?
4K streaming requires around 25Mbits/sec, according to most sources, and even that’s top-heavy with the clever compression that Netflix et al are using these days. The downloads won’t arrive more quickly, because the bottleneck’s at the other end. Even streaming gaming services such as Xbox Games Pass and Google Stadia don’t require much more than the Netflix streams for 4K action. You’d need a family the size of Boris Johnson’s before you’d even touch the sides of a 2Gbits/sec connection.
For the first time in a long while, we need something to push the limits of our broadband. For almost the entire duration of my (wince) 24-year career in IT journalism, I’ve been going to press conferences with companies lamenting what would be possible if it weren’t for 56k dial-up or patchy ADSL. Now the onus is back on the tech innovators to do something that makes a multi-gigabit connection desirable.
Maybe, just maybe, that missing link is the metaverse. I know my fellow columnists Nicole and Jon dropped a bucketful of snark on the metaverse concept last month, and I partly agree with them, but if and when virtual reality technology reaches a point of making virtual worlds look convincingly like the real one, my word you’re going to need bandwidth. And latency in singledigit milliseconds, something that only pure end-to-end fibre connections can provide.
Nicole’s right – joining friends to watch a concert on Zoom is a poor alternative to a live gig. But if you could look around at a virtual concert hall, rendered in detail so sharp it’s hard to imagine you’re looking at a screen, with proper surround sound, it might feel less like a work meeting with Noel Gallagher.
The metaverse might be the prod that’s needed to spur another round of internet innovation, one that will take advantage of the terrifying speed that’s coming online (yes, before you write in, I’m aware there’s still a good chunk of folk who’d lop an arm off for 20Mbits/sec). Even if Zuckerberg’s horrific-looking virtual office or the other early metaverse concepts that are being bandied around leave you cold, they might still be the catalyst for something great. And if that happens, I’ll be the first on the upgrade hotline to Virgin Media.
You rarely come close to saturating the connection, because the bottleneck is at the other end
Now the onus is on the tech innovators to do something that makes a multi-Gigabit connection something to desire