Your opinion for the minimum speed to define broadband

[japlytic]

In the US, "broadband" is defined as any service faster than 200Kbit . But this should be at least be 1Mbit in my opinion.
There are high speed services in Japan going at 50 and 100Mbit - ideal for Pay TV.
What is your opinion on the minimum speed to be defined as broadband?

[stevo1210]

Re: Your opinion for the minimum speed to define broadband

I think that standard broadband speeds should be equal to ADSL 2+ speeds. I use ADSL 2+ and it is supposed to run at 24000K (24Mbps).... problem is that it only gets to around 10-15Kbps at max.... sometimes it will even run at 4kbps too.

[Logistics]

Re: Your opinion for the minimum speed to define broadband

Poll = fail for not enough choices.

Anything faster than 56k... except that ridiculous shotgun technology thing which is like two 56k modems in SLI. lol

[willawake]

Re: Your opinion for the minimum speed to define broadband

i am pretty happy with 768, as long as it is reliable which it is then I am ok. Would be nice to have a faster upload though.

[Harvey]

Re: Your opinion for the minimum speed to define broadband

IIRC here in the UK its 128Kbps and above that's classed as broadband.

[toastygoodness]

Re: Your opinion for the minimum speed to define broadband

yeah, anything that's above 56kbps should be broadband. i always thought broadband meant broad bandwith? anyway comcast is pretty fast here, 6mbps and i get a constant 1 mbps upload with powerboost sometimes.

[linuxguru]

Re: Your opinion for the minimum speed to define broadband

Actually, broadband has nothing to do with speed, at least as per its original technical definition, which is related to the nature of the carrier frequencies that are used.

Any transmission technology that uses some form of carrier frequency that allows it to be multiplexed with other signals at different carrier frequencies, i.e. Frequency-Division Multiple-Access (FDMA), and sent on a common transmission medium is technically broadband - e.g. CATV or Cable TV on a coax cable. A data signal of even 110 Baud (say an electromechanical TTY) modulated and MUXed onto cable appropriately is still broadband - the defining characteristic is multiple carrier frequencies, not necessarily clustered together in a narrow frequency band.

If the carrier(s) are very tightly clustered together in a narrow frequency band, that's narrowband. e.g. 2-way Satellite comms (note that the data transmission rate could be much higher, maybe Gb/s, than most examples of broadband).

If there's no carrier at all, but just a (possibly channel-coded) signal on the line, that's baseband, e.g. 10/100 Ethernet or GigE or Fibre Channel. Here again, the data transmission rate could be much higher than broadband.

The confusion that broadband == high-speed internet access has arisen because of the early attempts to provide shared-bandwidth net access through the coax cable TV network. These used FDMA to mux both the cable TV signal and the data signals on the same physical media, so it was technically broadband. It also offered high-speed net access, at least in comparison to dial-up. Hence the erroneous association.

Hence, my answer to the poll would have to be: 0 bit/sec, as long as it uses FDMA.

[stretch0069]

Re: Your opinion for the minimum speed to define broadband

then you have to throw in FIOS.

they offer 30Mbit down, 1.5Mbit up in this area, but I don't really need it. 15 is fine for me.

[Shroomie]

Re: Your opinion for the minimum speed to define broadband

As far as I'm concerned, it's "fast enough to load a low-quality video faster than you can watch it". I have 1.5 Mbit down, and it's a bit above that - I think 1 Mbit is probably a sufficient download speed for "broadband".

However, I don't believe any upload speed lower than 256 Kbit qualifies. 384K is bad enough! I'd also like to see some sort of maximum latency (ping time)...I guess this knocks satellite out of the running.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Your opinion for the minimum speed to define broadband

I define broadband as a low latency connection that is always on and flatrate (i.e. you have a 24/7 connection and unlimited download for no extra cost)

I lived for the longest time on dialup, it became so expensive it was insane!

I was so pissed that you could not get flatrate via (than GPRS) but now you can (in Sweden) via 3G (and I guess GPRS too if there isn't coverage)

So right now I actually have 2 broadband choices out here all of a sudden (not counting satellite)

Oh, I'm on a 8/1 ADSL connection

[Topcat]

Re: Your opinion for the minimum speed to define broadband

I have a T1, which is 1.5mbit both ways. It's amazing how many sites have their connections throttled to less than that... I find it rather useless to have a blazing 20mbit+ connection when half the web won't even let you use it. My T1, by today's standards, is relatively slow, but for the sites I have on it, it does fine. There's no huge downloads, videos, files, or insanely large pictures on it. To answer the thread though, I think somewhere in the 2mbit both ways range should be the standard, but that's of course just my opinion.

[willawake]

Re: Your opinion for the minimum speed to define broadband

I lived for the longest time on dialup, it became so expensive it was insane!

me too and it took a long time for adsl to come here, in the office even longer cos they had optic cables in the streets and had to dig up old copper and connect it for adsl lines. the service is pretty reliable though (a hell of a lot more reliable than dialup was) and thats great. It really improved things, with imap mailserver, everyone online in the office when they want, updating computers automatically, downloading huge drivers quickly, hardware firewall.

GPRS and 3G is still extremely expensive though and thats bad. The government has put a few token wifi nodes in tourist places but generally wifi is available for tourists at very expensive hourly rates.

The future is going to be online and mobile apps. Open source will play a big role as it gives smaller companies access to enterprise level stuff that they could not afford. But still we have some subcontractors on dialup and GPRS is expensive, wifi is poor coverage/expensive.