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Old 11th February 2019, 07:44   #1451  |  Link
iwod
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Posts: 756
Quote:
Originally Posted by soresu View Post
As someone who comes from a village in northern England, I can tell you that it only just got upgraded to VDSL from the 3 mbps ADSL 2 it had been at for 5-8 years.

Thankfully it is only 1.5-2 miles from the closest exchange, but many rural communities are much further out than that and still lack the FTTC/VDSL upgrades that have existed near the exchanges for over half a decade (therefore stuck with ultra low ADSL data rates). Expensive 4G mobile broadband data is sadly a bad option if you plan to consume any significant amount of video per month.

All this adds up to the fact that low/ultra low bitrate video is far from corner case, even in first world countries - mainly because rural areas being lower population density are treated like third world countries by BT/Open Reach.

It wouldnt surprise me to find out that many rural places in Europe and the US suffer from similarly slow uptake of landline fibre based broadband technologies.
I know this is slightly off topic, but I can assure you, comparatively speaking BT isn't doing such a bad job at rural areas. They are actively investing into G.Fast and VDSL 35b. One of the earliest implementor of ADSL2+, ( That is up to 5000M from exchange ). The future is that once 5G matures, setting up Gigabits wireless network using Microwave as backbone should be way cheaper than layering out fibre. So I am optimistic in rural area's broadband.

But yes, ultra low bitrate ( Sub 1Mbps ) is still required in many places, especially if you are doing video which is hogging a lot of the capacity. There is a huge capacity difference between constantly hanging on to a 1Mbps Data stream than doing once in a while 6Mbps Speed test.

So hopefully as both Network Technologies improves and Compression improves, the long tail of world population can all enjoy online streaming video within the next decade. I just hope future codec focus more on sub 2-4Mbps bitrate,
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