BT unleashes 6x Mother-of-Broadband

When Virgin pumped a huge pay cheque into the account of one Samuel L. Jackson Esq, it bought itself huge publicity. Seeing Jules ‘My name is the Lord' Winnfield declaring that this was, indeed, the Mother*** of all broadband – was enough to get techies, up and down the country, seriously aroused. BT is now saying that the time for 50Mb Virgins is up, cos the Daddy is back in town.

From duplex dial-up modems running at 1200 bits per second to the 56k fax/modem card and then the BT/Alcatel ADSL frog modem, we felt that the world was becoming smaller and smaller. Yet that movement from 1.2kbps to 512kbps took many, many years.

The movement from the frog to ubiquitous, always on broadband for next to nothing has happened very quickly indeed.

So how fast is ‘fast enough'?

Personal experience tells us that when our carrier drops to around 1-2Mb, everything feels sluggish. That feeling disappears around 6-8Mb and everything after that feels like it's for ‘ego only'.

The Samuel L. Jackson advert was for 50Mb broadband – which seems stunningly quick. Unfortunately, the upload speeds on many of these offers can be 10% or less than the download speed.

So where does that leave us, in terms of usage model?

According to Virgin's own data, uploading a film shot in HD is likely to take around 4 hours on it's cheapest package and almost 1.3 hours on its top package.

The deployment of BT's full 300Mb fibre services will have a significant impact on these numbers – which is good news for those working in video processing.

With the initial roll-out aiming at 100Mb, BT is also planning to have some premises connected at 300Mbps by the end of Summer 2012.

KitGuru says: The ability to upload a 1.5GB video file in something like 2 minutes, is enough to make KitGuru walk around with a dazed expression and slightly flushed cheeks. Note: Almost NONE of the home networking kit installed in the UK will be up to this kind of job. Expect to see HUGE increases in the sale of top end routers etc.

Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.

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