Plan could bring super-fast internet links to York (From York Press)

"Free"??

Whilst I understand the need for speed, this is getting silly. I have a 10mb connection at home, which rarely (if ever) exceeds 2mb. Yet when I ask for a web page I get it near instantly (i.e. less than a second), so why do I need to have the same web page displayed 50times quicker? I don't. Does anyone? Only the persons who regularly download illegal movies would require such access. But as that's not legal, why should they be supported?
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York Fox. Everyone is invited, for free, at the moment to have whatever broadband access they fancy. It's clever wording. The invite is free, the use is not.

you see mr genius this is where you are wrong. There are a few reasons that people my need access at that speed mainly down to streaming (legally) of 1080p content at the proper bitrates found on a bluray media.

Bluray bitrates vary between about 15 and 35Mbps others can hit 40Mbps!

so if you want to watch and download or do something else at the same time then you need the bandwidth. Many large company's are trying to move to digital distribution for their products and there is a big drive towards IPTV as well. All these things require more bandwidth.

mystic_genius wrote:
Whilst I understand the need for speed, this is getting silly. I have a 10mb connection at home, which rarely (if ever) exceeds 2mb. Yet when I ask for a web page I get it near instantly (i.e. less than a second), so why do I need to have the same web page displayed 50times quicker? I don't. Does anyone? Only the persons who regularly download illegal movies would require such access. But as that's not legal, why should they be supported?
`
York Fox. Everyone is invited, for free, at the moment to have whatever broadband access they fancy. It's clever wording. The invite is free, the use is not.

For the past few years the television and computer have/and will continue to become one unit. In the future we will watch TV as an on-demand service with the option to choose what to watch when you want. Services such as BBC iPlayer and YouTube already exist and this is the way it will go. There won't be TV channels as such it will be a menu of what's available to stream from the internet and faster internet speeds will allow this to be possible. We will also have hover boards and flying cars!

100 megabytes a second, or more likely 100 megabits (around 10 megabytes a second)?

Although the investment is apparently being made by the private company I would worry that some Council money will be wasted on this somewhere.

“This connection would also be capable of delivering local services from the council and partner organisations direct to the home or business.

“There is therefore the potential for the council to use the network for a range of services, for example online learning, telecare, communication, consultation and engagement.”

You don't need fibre connections to deliver the above services. You can do it fine right now with a 2mbit ADSL connection which most if not all of York will currently have access to.

mystic_genius wrote:
Whilst I understand the need for speed, this is getting silly. I have a 10mb connection at home, which rarely (if ever) exceeds 2mb. Yet when I ask for a web page I get it near instantly (i.e. less than a second), so why do I need to have the same web page displayed 50times quicker? I don't. Does anyone? Only the persons who regularly download illegal movies would require such access. But as that's not legal, why should they be supported?
`
York Fox. Everyone is invited, for free, at the moment to have whatever broadband access they fancy. It's clever wording. The invite is free, the use is not.

Speed required for streaming media, the way TV is going it's only a matter of time before your TV is through your broadband. Also BBC Iplayer Sky etc also require fast internet. The UK has very slow internet when compared to other countries in the world, including third world countries.
Yes 2mb is ok for some users not all, especially as a low bandwith also means that comanies like my own require faster upload speeds, when uploading information to the web.

Another way in which this article is misleading is it suggests that York residents will get fast free Fibre optic connections in their homes.

However, doing a cursory 2 mins googling on the company suggests that although it will be paying for the investment (hat's off on that), residents will (not surprisingly) have to pay a line-rental fee to one of a select few service providers. These service providers will no doubt have fair usage policies which will probably limit the actual usefulness of all that bandwidth.

I'm sounding like a nay-sayer but will welcome this if it happens. I just wish it was reported better and that the council don't spend too much money on it.

mystic_genius wrote:
Whilst I understand the need for speed, this is getting silly. I have a 10mb connection at home, which rarely (if ever) exceeds 2mb. Yet when I ask for a web page I get it near instantly (i.e. less than a second), so why do I need to have the same web page displayed 50times quicker? I don't. Does anyone? Only the persons who regularly download illegal movies would require such access. But as that's not legal, why should they be supported?
`
York Fox. Everyone is invited, for free, at the moment to have whatever broadband access they fancy. It's clever wording. The invite is free, the use is not.

If you've ever needed to download a large file from a software house, or watched BBC iplayer, or streamed music from Napster, you begin to appreciate the value of fast-as-possible connections. All legal, but all might require a lot of bandwidth.

Looking to the future, being able to watch live council meetings, and actively participate from home, or use your laptop instead of a Sky+ box.....

Time was, we all managed with a 56k modem connection. Try doing anything at that speed now!

YCC will balls it up for us, watch this space.

Only the persons who regularly download illegal movies would require such access. But as that's not legal, why should they be supported?

Agreed with earlier comments: the audio-visual industries would like IPTV to become the norm, and ultimately for terrestrial broadcasting of all descriptions to be phased out.

The BBC is already lobbying hard for home internet connections to be covered by the TV licence: i.e. if, like me, you have broadband internet in your home but no television, you'd still have to buy a licence.

mystic_genius wrote:
Whilst I understand the need for speed, this is getting silly. I have a 10mb connection at home, which rarely (if ever) exceeds 2mb. Yet when I ask for a web page I get it near instantly (i.e. less than a second), so why do I need to have the same web page displayed 50times quicker? I don't. Does anyone? Only the persons who regularly download illegal movies would require such access. But as that's not legal, why should they be supported?
`
York Fox. Everyone is invited, for free, at the moment to have whatever broadband access they fancy. It's clever wording. The invite is free, the use is not.

Read that and thought we'd been whisked back in time to about 1998! I think the internet is used for more than just loading up the odd webpage now - and as for the 'illegal films' comment; priceless!

Fully support the idea of upgrading my connection. Whilst yes I do use youtube and other sites to watch things legally. I'd want a better connection for things like games, when you're playing a game and you suffer from "lag" which means your connection isn't as fast as others you're ending up in a difficult position as you can react only to what you see and if the connection is slow your gaming experience is lessened.

i live in huntington and am lucky if i get more than 0.365mb

Silver wrote:
Fully support the idea of upgrading my connection. Whilst yes I do use youtube and other sites to watch things legally. I'd want a better connection for things like games, when you're playing a game and you suffer from "lag" which means your connection isn't as fast as others you're ending up in a difficult position as you can react only to what you see and if the connection is slow your gaming experience is lessened.

no lag isnt to do with one persons line speed been faster than yours its to do with the ping thats the time it takes for a packet of data to do a round trip to the other player or server.

not all games work on a p2p system most use a central server that controls the game so the changes are sent to there rather than the other player.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. But it’s worth getting at the front of the line.
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But, if the upload speed remains under 1Mbps then it won't be very useful for file transferring between businesses. We currently get around 270Kbps upload which is useless for transferring large video or media files. High quality conferencing would still be jerky.
I fear most e-mail post boxes can't tolerate large files either so the faster download speeds are only useful for collecting 100+Mgb files or watching streamed TV, and little else.

peepod wrote:

mystic_genius wrote: Whilst I understand the need for speed, this is getting silly. I have a 10mb connection at home, which rarely (if ever) exceeds 2mb. Yet when I ask for a web page I get it near instantly (i.e. less than a second), so why do I need to have the same web page displayed 50times quicker? I don't. Does anyone? Only the persons who regularly download illegal movies would require such access. But as that's not legal, why should they be supported? ` York Fox. Everyone is invited, for free, at the moment to have whatever broadband access they fancy. It's clever wording. The invite is free, the use is not.

For the past few years the television and computer have/and will continue to become one unit. In the future we will watch TV as an on-demand service with the option to choose what to watch when you want. Services such as BBC iPlayer and YouTube already exist and this is the way it will go. There won't be TV channels as such it will be a menu of what's available to stream from the internet and faster internet speeds will allow this to be possible. We will also have hover boards and flying cars!

"We will have hover boards and flying cars....!!" What about bikes?

I just hope York Council don't rely on their own knowledge in this field. The first thing to warn about is this "connection speed". Ok, it might digitally clock at this speed but what usually happens is that you just get short bursts at this speed with big pauses in between. This is especially true of services like virgin-media where the pipe is 'shared'.
The next thing to consider is RTD or 'round-trip-delay'. If you are downloading a data-file then the transfer mechanism has to use TCP to ensure that no data is lost or corrupted. So, every packet has to be acknowledged (of its safe arrival). Most TCP 'stacks' allow a number of packets to be transmitted in advance of acknowledgement to improve performance, usually up to a limit of 64kb(this is called dynamic pacing and is a specialised subject that needs real craft to optimise). The upshot of this is that no system can dowload more than one lump of 64kb (500 kilobits) in one RTD. If that RTD is 200 milliseconds (about the norm for broadband) then you'll never get better than 2.5 megabits per second regardless of pipe size.
To overcome the inherrent performance restriction in TCP, most streaming technologies use UDP not TCP. With UDP there is no acknowledgements and therefore no guarantee of delivery. They depend on reliable 'low-loss' network trails for quality transmissions. Unfortunately, these streamed services are usually connected in the heart of the internet core where there are really super-fast dense wave fibre connections (we're talking 40 or 10 gigabits here). At some point, they have to 'step-down' to relatively slow pipes on the trail to the user. It's in the buffers of the routers where these trails 'step-down' and there is a risk of 'buffer spill' and there is no means of recovering this data (coz we're using UDP) and the quality suffers.
I write the above as somebody who made a career trouble-shooting networking performance issues in the big league and hopefully, have demonstrated why I think CYC will be totally out of their depth.

I wish they would just stick to emptying dustbins.

Someone knows how gullible CofYC are when it comes to surveys and consultants. Out of the UK who would pick York as it's first enterprise?

Unit fail. 100Mbps = 100 megabits per second, not 100 megabytes per second. You're a factor of 8 out. Do some basic research, you hacks.

This thread is starting to get geeky, can we just go back to moaning about cyclists please? ;-)

oldgoat wrote:

mystic_genius wrote: Whilst I understand the need for speed, this is getting silly. I have a 10mb connection at home, which rarely (if ever) exceeds 2mb. Yet when I ask for a web page I get it near instantly (i.e. less than a second), so why do I need to have the same web page displayed 50times quicker? I don't. Does anyone? Only the persons who regularly download illegal movies would require such access. But as that's not legal, why should they be supported? ` York Fox. Everyone is invited, for free, at the moment to have whatever broadband access they fancy. It's clever wording. The invite is free, the use is not.

If you've ever needed to download a large file from a software house, or watched BBC iplayer, or streamed music from Napster, you begin to appreciate the value of fast-as-possible connections. All legal, but all might require a lot of bandwidth. Looking to the future, being able to watch live council meetings, and actively participate from home, or use your laptop instead of a Sky+ box..... Time was, we all managed with a 56k modem connection. Try doing anything at that speed now!

Yes, yes and yes!
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I'm 24, I know all about Napster thank you very much, and survived perfectly well with my parents old dial up connection when I had my Napster subscription (it's recently turned rubbish so not bothering anymore).
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My 2mb is more than ample for watching Lost re-runs on Sky Anytime or online, or whatever it's called online. It can even (believe it or not) download some music at the same time as watching my Lost re-runs.
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If I want to download a large file, I'll set it in the morning and know by the time I finish work it'll be done. If I need a file so desperately, I'll do the good old fashioned thing and GO TO THE SHOP.
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Those who read my initial comment will note the words "at home". I'm not denying the benefits for business-business interaction, I'm questioning the need for "...every home and business..." to be included in this trial.