What essential services for the home require high speed broadband?

Brendan Burgess

Brendan Burgess

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I asked this 4 years ago and probably didn't articulate it very well as I didn't get an answer. Anyway, 4 years later, the answer has probably changed.

What essential services for the home need high speed broadband?

Would satellite broadband or whatever I get on the phone work for most essential applications in the home e.g. sending and receiving email, doing my online banking, filling out my tax returns?

They might be a bit slower, but wouldn't they work fine?

Brendan
 
I've been using mobile broadband for the past few months. It's a dedicated router rather than tethering from phone, so connection is a lot better.

I need a stable connection for working from home - if I lose connection I have to reconnect VPN. Haven't had any issues on that front so far.

Use Skype, and Netflix without issues. I don't have lots of devices using it at the same time, but it's worked fine for the load we've put on it. You'd possibly notice some issues watching Netflix in high definition.

With satellite there are some slight delays that you might notice using video / voice calls, but you would definitely notice if you were a computer gamer.

Some interesting posts on the following thread: https://www.askaboutmoney.com/threads/phone-hotspot.205846/
 
I suppose the question is, does the ability to work remotely from home count as an 'essential service'?
 
For the vast majority of people, no essential services require broadband.

Email and banking are important, but they can be accessed on a smartphone, by telephone or in person.

For people working from home, the majority only required 10Mbps or less, which is relatively slow and in fact doesn't even meet the definition of broadband (25Mbps). My parents live down the country and do fine with 4Mbps. Realistically broadband speeds now are expected to be in the range of 100-300 Mbps.

Many family homes now have lights (Hue), TVs, voice assistants (Alexa, Google Home), house alarms, security cameras, and many other internet-of-things connections. These would require a reliable service of around 100Mbps.

High-speed broadband is 1Gbps, which is way beyond the requirements of most people. Some of us do require this if we have a business or hobby that involved streaming/uploading large amounts of videos/images, e.g. a graphic designer. Also people who do a lot of online gaming or who stream 4K video (requires around 25Mbps).
 
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arbitron said:
Many family homes now have lights (Hue), TVs, voice assistants (Alexa, Google Home), house alarms, security camers, and many other internet-of-things connections. These would require a reliable service of around 100Mbps
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Most of those services have pretty lightweight requirements in terms of up/download speeds. Even the HD CCTV streaming options will work with an upload as low as 1Mbps, the maximum possible usage for the various Nest camera systems range from 1.2 to 4Mbps.

You'll get into the need for bigger numbers in situations where you have multiple people streaming content. For example Netflix recommends 5Mbps for a HD stream, 25Mbps for UHD.
 
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I suspect i know where this is heading If you are working from home or running a business do you require high speed broadband in your area,
 
arbitron said:
They are individually lightweight but many homes now have multiples of each item and would struggle below 100Mbps.
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Some of the home automation options only rely on occasional internet access for updates or receiving remote commands, using RF or WiFi for internal system commands. They'll happily work away without external internet access, albeit without the remote command features.

If you look at the packet sizes for Hue messaging, or from other home automation like Nest, LightwaveRF, etc., they're tiny! Even running multiples of those systems would require less than 100Kbps up and down. Hue and LightwaveRF for example publish their API, so you can see the message sizes involved. Use WireShark or equivalent on your network so take a look at the traffic volumes involved.

Same goes for the home assistants, when recording and transmitting voice commands, they need about 300Kbps upload. Audio streaming on Alexa only needs 512Kbps.

Only two providers that I'm aware of here only offer anything beyond 'up to' 100Meg.
 
There's no one-size-fits-all. But definitely most bandwidth usage requirements are tiny compared to what's generally available. Almost the sole exception is video. Even then, the particular type of video is important. Things like Skype can accommodate themselves to the available bandwidth up to a point. If you don't use video and you don't have specialist requirements then you don't need high capacity broadband. For most of my usage, a couple of hundred kbps would suffice. But then I do high quality video from time to time. And occasionally for projects I need to do downloads running to hundreds of gigabytes. But even there, I've started to hire Amazon EC2 resources to do all that remotely, and only require a few bytes of terminal usage. Basically, it all depends.
 
Leo said:
Some of the home automation options only rely on occasional internet access for updates or receiving remote commands, using RF or WiFi for internal system commands. They'll happily work away without external internet access, albeit without the remote command features.

If you look at the packet sizes for Hue messaging, or from other home automation like Nest, LightwaveRF, etc., they're tiny! Even running multiples of those systems would require less than 100Kbps up and down. Hue and LightwaveRF for example publish their API, so you can see the message sizes involved. Use WireShark or equivalent on your network so take a look at the traffic volumes involved.

Same goes for the home assistants, when recording and transmitting voice commands, they need about 300Kbps upload. Audio streaming on Alexa only needs 512Kbps.

Only two providers that I'm aware of here only offer anything beyond 'up to' 100Meg.
Click to expand...

It is clear that having even dozens of Hue lights in your home will use only a small amount of your bandwidth, but if you have ever lived in a busy household you will know that it is not so simple.

We recently had 3 adult family members staying with us for a period, which meant at times there were 2 TVs streaming 4K Netflix (which alone requires 25Mbps per connexion), 5 smartphones on the go, 4 Nest cams activating as people walk in/out/around the house, 2 Echos + 3 Google Homes streaming Spotify and responding to commands, many of the 27 Hue lights going on and off (sensors/scenes/voice controls), occasionally a Playstation streaming to a 3rd TV, as well as Skype/FaceTime conversations...

All of those things would sometimes be running at once and you would not have had much change out of 80Mbps. If there was any lag we would all have been annoyed. The expectation now is that things will run speedily and on cue. Our household could not manage below 100 megs. As I said above, it's not required for the majority by any means, but for larger households with a lot of tech it's getting there.
 
llgon said:
In fairness, it doesn't sound like anyone in your house is busy.

God forbid
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Ligon, posts like yours that are inexplicably snarky discourage people from sharing info.

Leo made totally legitimate and reasonable points. I was explaining how in some cases it can be quite different, like our house recently.

I was just trying to help answer Brendan's question. Please don't be negative.
 
Sorry Arbitron, you're probably right but I couldn't resist. Your post does give an interesting perspective on the use of technology in some homes. However, I hope you can see that there is some irony in it and it doesn't really answer Brendan's question except maybe in a way you didn't intend it to.
 
Some types of remote working might require a better connection. Security video cameras maybe?

Many websites are painful to use on a slow connection because there's a lot of bloat on the web these days in general.
 
llgon said:
God forbid
Click to expand...

Hi arbiton

To be fair to ligon, I saw that last night and posted the same response, but, on reflection, I deleted it.

I think you, and the others, have answered my question.

There are no essential services for which a home user requires high speed broadband.

If it were switched off in your house, you would not lose access to anything essential. You would not be marginalised. You might not be able to watch Netflix. I don't understand most of the other stuff you were doing, but it does not sound essential to me. I am not denying that it must have been very nice to have, but it was not essential.

Brendan
 
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