KC connects first homes to its fibre network
For people who have only every used ADSL for broadband and never been exposed to faster business quality services, the step up to a full fibre to the home connection will be very surprising. The latest people to experience this joy appear to be residents who have signed up for the KC fibre trial in Woodmansey.
Kingston Communications has two forms of fibre roll-out, FTTK (Fibre to the Kerb akin to FTTC) and Fibre to the Home (FTTH), the former offering up to 40Mbps and the later up to 100Mbps speeds. The big advantage of FTTH being that the fibre will provide a stable connection speed with any throughput variation down to congestion rather than limits of the 'last mile' connection.
"I went on iPlayer last night and it seemed to load up a lot quicker and YouTube is a lot better.
Our internet was really slow before. When I was using iPlayer, I would wait for it to buffer then it would keep stopping through the programme.
It took a couple of hours to download a music album."Comments from Abigail in Woodmansey on the new 100Mbps fibre service
The comments from Abigail on The Hull and East Riding website are interesting, since generally iPlayer and YouTube can already play HD content quickly and smoothly on a reasonable 6Mbps (Mega bits per second) connection. Therefore one can only assume if a connection was taking a couple of hours to download a music album, the ADSL line was one of the longest and thus slowest that KC provided. One minor correction is needed, a full HD movie on the XBox or PS3 movie rental services weighs in at some 8GB and would take a bit longer than 2 minutes to download, more like ten minutes, assuming no contention. Some HD movies from other sources may be faster to download due to a smaller file size, but that is because while they are at HD resolution, the quality of the picture may result in a picture that is barely better than Freeview picture quality.
Comments
Abigail wasn't exactly blown away was she? Still, it's better than the usual mindless "awesome".
Awesome :D
Trail? Don't you mean trial?
otester wins todays prize :-)
- andrew
- over 5 years ago
The video clip on the KC website shows nice spacious ducts they have available in there trial area (quite a prosperous lookign area too).
Others will be in them like rains in a drainpipe once KC has to open up :)
@Gman
Only if the rats don't get there first! ;-)
rains in drainpipe? lol yes rats I mean :D
The thing is, the people going on the trial will probably have had a broadband connection that worked, so the new connection won't be that awesome. yet.
In the next year or two new apps will come along that need the capacity of fibre, and they will be ready for them. Everyone stuck on the exchanges will start to howl. And history will repeat itself, for the third time in my life.
Not really as the ISPs won't have the capacity for these new apps if everyone uses them, so everyone will be howling.
Surprisingly no-one has given any hints about these apps, other than HD video.
Video is going to be big over the coming years it will make up a large portion of Internet traffic, but saying going from ADSL to 100Mb isn't awesome? Hmmm
Super HD is already being tested. 10 years ago nobody forsaw HD. Everything that can possibly be connected to the Internet will be in the future. How much bandwidth are you going to need when everything in your house is talking to a server?
Current HD video to be uncompressed needs 1.6Gbps, and an amazing picture if you see it too.
Upgrades from HD to 4K etc by content produces will be slower, as many used HD to get rid of their last old kit, thus a few more years before money available for new production hardware.
- andrew
- over 5 years ago
I've read that the minimum screen size needed to appreciate "4k" is something like 12 feet. So why do we need it? You really do get to "what's the point" eventually.
From my experience with KC, Abigails problems with iPlayer are nothing to do with the state of her line but KCs arbitrary throttling of connections down to about 64kbps at peak times.
I really doubt they are going to be able to sustain fibre speeds if their back end can't even support ADSL.
20Mbps max for 1080p rip, the difference between the rip and source after 15Mbps (1hr 30m movie) is just not worth the extra bandwidth.
Great news, the people who get a fibre into their home are the lucky ones, as its easy to upgrade the connectivity to terabits one day.
Better to get it now and be done and be futureproof. Well done KC. And lucky lucky Woodmansey.