So much of the broadband debate is about a numbers game, and streaming TV or video over the Internet, that it’s instructive to compare some “gold standard” broadcasts with the online equivalents and alternatives. As broadcast over the air, a BBC full HD TV programme requires an average 3 to 6 megabits with short peaks up to around twice this; broadcasts may, on occasion, also include surround-sound, especially on films and some live sport: Football and Cricket regularly comes with unadvertised surround-sound on BBC HD channels!

The same content requires a variable amount – often a lot less – on the iPlayer, as it doesn’t actually provide full HD (1920 x 1080) or surround sound yet – have you noticed ? It provides a range of quality levels which currently top out at “720p”  (i.e. 1280 x 720 – what used to be called “HD Ready” or 2/3 of HD resolution, still subjectively pretty good), and they have experimented with up to 4K, presumably to complete with commercial broadcasters.  Britbox will deliver full HD at a max. 8M and Netflix may run up to 16M in-extremis on 4K material, but is actively re-encoding material to reduce this.

To put this into context, your correspondent’s very original 15-year old router, bought in the day when just 8M was a “good service”, now reports a reliable 22.5 M (94% of the theoretical max.) here in W6 with just “conventional” or what is now termed basic broadband, a round-trip “ping time” to BT (to measure THE LOCAL CONNECTION) of 6 to 8 milliseconds – enough to reliably deliver a handful of HD channels, or a 4K Netflix show with a Zoom or two running in parallel, and play interactive games with the best of them (20 ms is considered exceptional, “low ping”). This, the pundits would have it, is now verifiably steam-powered tech.  Those further from the local exchange than your correspondent’s ~1km will fare a little worse.

Even a good Wi-Fi connection adds 50-100%+ to these delays plus a large amount of variability – gamers beware – and Wi-Fi speeds can easily drop down to 6M, or lower, under adverse conditions.  Yet more context is provided by Einsteinian inconveniences such as the speed of light, responsible for at least half of transatlantic ping times, around 70ms, ten times the local connection delay of that steam-powered ADSL.

The Achilles heel is limited 1M upload speed, though ADSL technology is capable of 2.5M if providers offered it.  But they’ve moved on to FTTC, now available to 95% of the population, and its variants like G.Fast, offering rather more symmetric speeds of 40/10 (“VDSL”) or 80/20 (“VDSL2”), and 330/50 (“G Fast”), all using the existing copper phone lines.

Despite the numbers showing your correspondent’s service languishing in the bottom 20% or so, at less than half current local averages, and less than a tenth of what’s already available on the rusty old wires, as it can handle any service currently available – and likely to be available for some while – yet is so obviously technologically ancient, it’s hard to understand why homes might need so much more than FTTC’s 4x (download = a dozen or more simultaneous HD channels) and 20x (upload) – already available at almost no additional cost, or G.Fast offering 15x/50x, for a fair time into the future. It’s a racing certainty that anything more will be offset by improved data compression technologies anyway.

Here are some common real-world problems to consider before blaming your broadband provider:

1. The last few metres inside your home, caused by common urban problems such as poor Wi-Fi coverage often hampered by having to fight with – in your correspondent’s case – 19 other base stations as reported last year – or really any form of Wi-Fi if you care about sustained speed and response time.  No amount of fibre or holes in the garden will improve that.  By the way, Zoom really dislikes the variable delays of Wi-Fi too, and prefers the trusty Ethernet cable.
2. You have a rats nest of historic internal phone wiring causing poor performance – excess wiring that is probably unsightly, and that you no longer need as you barely use the landline, and anyway, you’ve got wireless handsets now in addition to your mobile.  Disconnect anything past the master socket if possible.
3. You’re not expecting lightning performance from that lovely Arthouse website full of large photos that’s actually hosted on lowcostwebsites’r’us.com for $0.99 a month, along with 10,000 other sites, and insists on loading adverts and Google analytics for every page you view (hmm, even large sites like Facebook often do this…).  The other end of the connection matters.. Check the relative performance of some local well-resourced sites with few trackers or ads – saywww.bbc.co.uk – is it quick? Right, so the problem isn’t your broadband.   A recent performance check on www.hammersmithsociety.org.uk showed unexpectedly dismal performance… until the location of the testing server was checked – Vancouver!  It was transformative when the right test server in London was selected.

The broad “industry” looks both ways when arguing that “next generation” (?) gaming, interactive TV and home working needs full fibre’s speed – 1000M – rather like saying you must have a Ferrari to go to the supermarket – nice as that might be, it hardly warrants a government subsidy. It turns a blind eye to continuing work to assiduously reduce bandwidth requirements generally with improving tech, the result of a growing mass of users likely to be on the end of 3G or 4G mobile connections in developing countries.  Those selling high speed Internet are rarely the same as those trying to reach the maximum number of people with a good streaming service.

An example of this closer to home – Crystal Palace – originally delivered a single 405-line grainy black-and-white channel, eventually Standard Definition TV, then Freeview (now 25 yrs since its birth as ON Digital) and since 2014 HD, and has been demonstrated to be able to deliver 4K (if needed), using latest HEVC compression technology.  In fact, despite cutbacks as TV bands are sold off for 5G, there’s so much bandwidth available that there are several shopping channels in full High Definition !

A comparison of films broadcast simultaneously on BBC1 and BBC1-HD reveals the HD versions are just 20-50% larger, because HD uses more up-to-date compression technology – though not HEVC – which is actually capable of making them smaller than decades old Freeview.  Note the chasm – an order of magnitude – between the measured requirement for “next gen” (1.2 to 1.5) and the PR (12).  Other broadcasters may offer different ratios and features: ITV notably use less bandwidth than BBC on plain old Freeview, but just as much on HD, and they have yet to discover pleasures of surround sound.