Quote: A Horseradish @ 15th November 2019, 5:03 PMYou know it makes sense.
I see what you did there! 
I read the news today oh boy! Page 2,123
Apparently giving free broadband to all is communism
Kin' ell!
I don't get why the whole country needs super fast broadband as a priority. Fast speeds are only important for online gaming and streaming and normal speeds that load web pages and can stream with the occasional buffering should be enough for anyone. All that road digging to lay the fibre and disruption to traffic and lost business for current broadband providers makes it sound like a ridiculous idea. If people need free internet access there are libraries and if they want home internet at lightening fast speeds so they can play the latest Call OF Duty multiplayer with stable VoIP they should pay for it. The internet is useful but is also having a negative impact and it isn't essential for a home. Most people have internet access on their phones and tablets and affordable gas and electricity is more essential for a home than broadband speeds.
That said I have to admit after hearing the stories from people at work who are playing the latest Call of Duty online game together with VoIP so they can talk to each other with headsets I'm going to subscribe to a Virgin Media package in the new year. The download is 175Gb and I'll need to upgrade my graphics card and add more RAM first so it isn't going to be anytime soon. It would be nice if the internet connection was free but I don't see it as a priority and would rather the billions of pounds is spent on the NHS or subsidising energy costs.
I can remember when my Internet speed was 14 .4 kB per second (is that right?).
At this very moment, it's 76 Mb per second - which is 76,000 kB per second. That's about 5500x as fast.
(Acknowledgement: I got that calculation terribly wrong: Da Butt gave me the right answer! See his post below.)
It does download stuff very quickly indeed but for normal day-to-day running, it doesn't seem any faster than it was all those years ago when I was on dial-up.
Perhaps I'm mis-remembering?
I've got no idea what my internet speed is. I just know that it's OK and it used to take time to download games on a PC. But you just accepted it because that's the way things were.
Quote: Rood Eye @ 15th November 2019, 9:25 PMI can remember when my Internet speed was 14 kB per second (is that right?).
At this very moment, it's 76 Mb per second - which is 9500 kB per second. That's 125x as fast
A standard dial-up speed was 14.4 kilobits per seconds. You're getting 76 MEGAbits per second, or about 5500 times as fast as your old connection.
My current speed is 500 megabits per second, while my first modem did a whopping 300 bits per second - about 1.7 million times as fast.
Quote: Chappers @ 15th November 2019, 10:29 PMI've got no idea what my internet speed is.
You can check it here:
Good old days of a 56k modem and Napster. It could take hours to download one track so I would start a bunch of downloads at bedtime and they would have completed by the morning. The connection dropped constantly but Napster had a feature that would automatically resume the download until it completed.*
*=if the host server was configured to allow dropped connections to resume the download. Not all of them did.
I remember gaming online for the first time
quake 3 on the Sega Dreamcast
It had a built in 28k dial up modem!
Worked ok though
Quote: DaButt @ 15th November 2019, 10:38 PMA standard dial-up speed was 14.4 kilobits per seconds. You're getting 76 MEGAbits per second, or about 5500 times as fast as your old connection.
Bloody hell! You're absolutely right!
I've altered my above post accordingly.
Many thanks.
Quote: Teddy Paddalack @ 11th November 2019, 12:33 PMwho would win in a fight between Worzel Gummidge and Catweazle? As Catweazle has magic but Wurzel is wearing his Scouse head?)
Catweazle, obviously, because he is also the Crowman and therefore more powerful than Worzel.
Quote: Definitely Tarby @ 15th November 2019, 9:07 PMI don't get why the whole country needs super fast broadband as a priority.
I remember back to my childhood in Australia, when we still had traditional. hand-carved Aboriginal red-gum internet cables, and we had to have the "tucker box" brand stringybark modem running nonstop for a week just to be able to send a fax to Germany. Our phone bills were astronomical back then. So I for one am grateful that successive Australian governments have provided the entire nation with a magnificent national broadband network that uses the latest high-tech binder-twine string theory cables. The Aussies will be so busy waiting for their porn to download that they won't see the Asian invasion coming.
Quote: Definitely Tarby @ 15th November 2019, 9:07 PMI don't get why the whole country needs super fast broadband as a priority. Fast speeds are only important for online gaming and streaming and normal speeds that load web pages and can stream with the occasional buffering should be enough for anyone.
Bear in mind, this is a ten year roll-out.
Its hard to imagine the advances in scope and use of the internet by then.
Remote diagnosis by doctors and hospitals is just one that springs to mind.
It just isn't in the internet companies interest to keep everyone in the super-fast loop - yet, if our institutions and services require it, then it would be decidedly undemocratic if people outside of cities are excluded from what the rest of the country take for granted.
Currently we just have to put up with a constantly buffering iPlayer.
Not so funny if you're getting vital health-scan.
Not 100% convinced that Labour's plan is the best way to do it - driven as much by ideology as practicality - but the aim is laudable & necessary.
Quote: Definitely Tarby @ 15th November 2019, 9:07 PMI don't get why the whole country needs super fast broadband as a priority.
I don't know why the whole country needs no immigrants and chlorinated chicken as a priority either.
I don't get why Randy Andy's denial vid is yet to attract any derisory comments here.
Oh ok
He's a slimey creepy waste of space who we pay for out of our hard earned taxes
But I think we all pretty much know that by now