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Loading ...The case for high definition on the PC
combatus
I think most of us know that there is a battle going on between HD DVD and Blu-ray. Who wins most people don’t really care, and if both formats end up succeeding in some strange and ridiculous 50/50 scenario (come on guys get it together next time with one format please, it can’t be that difficult!) we’ve now got players that can read both formats.
What has interested me however, is the need for HD over standard DVD quality which has been mainstream since the mid 90’s and on the PC since the late 90’s. DVD still looks great considering screen sizes have expanded considerably since the days that 15” and 17” CRT’s were the norm. Clearly on a 17” screen DVD quality video or 720×576 in other words looks great. However, run this video on a 24” or even 20” widescreen like I have and you begin to notice a drop in quality. This for me was highlighted quite markedly when I downloaded the HD Transformers (2007) trailer last summer in 720p (1280×720). The increase in picture quality, even audio quality was clear even on my 20” screen. I would imagine that a 24” screen running a 1080p film (1920×1080) would look fantastic. So for those who watch DVD’s on their PC at the moment and have made the move to medium/large HD compliant TFT’s for high resolution gaming, there are clear benefits for making the rest of your rig HD compliant. Luckily LG have just released a drive that can read and write to Blu-ray and read HD-DVD disks. The LG GGW-H20L is available for less than £200 and seeing as the format war is far from over, it won’t matter what way it swings, you’ll be able to use both formats and have the advantage of being able to record to large Blu-ray recordable disks which are great for backing up large amounts of data.
So despite all the hype, HD is shaping up quite nicely and the benefits can clearly be seen on screens 20 inches or larger. With many modern TFT’s and GPU’s already being HDCP compliant, the addition of a BD/HD-DVD reader for a little over £150 is a fantastic investment which will vastly improve the quality of movies you watch on your PC. So forget about that Western Digital Raptor or 4GB of ram, you’ll get much more benefit from a High Definition optical drive!.
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Loading ...CPC Benchmarks Top 100 + Festive clocking
combatus
I set myself a little challenge a month or two back to try to stay in the CPC benchmarks top 100. - without spending any more money of course! All was fairly easy to begin with - my scores of 1100 and eventually 1200 were enough to keep me in the top 80. But now the heat has really turned up and now there are only a handful of Dual cores fighting amongst the Quads for position.
Following the dimise of my X1900XT, my watercooling is now minus a GPU in the loop and this means there is plenty more cooling to be had for the CPU, RAM and fuzion block system. I go through phases with overclocking. One minute I’m all for it and clocking the nuts of anything than has a frequency, other times I get tired of waiting for Orthos to do its rounds and with the occasional crashes in games no doubt related to a few too many Mhz on something or other!
However tonight I decided to see what I could push my E6600 and OCZ Flex RAM to as my CPU temps at 3.5Ghz (my cruising speed for 100% stability at just over stock voltage) were temptingly low and just begging me to start tweaking!
I completed the various tests of finding the max FSB, RAM speed and CPU speed and then set about finding a balance between them that was stable. I eventually ended up with 415Mhz x9 which pits it in at just under 3735mhz and the ram at 1240mhz. Voltages were pretty hefty by this point 1.57v to the CPU, 2.38V to the ram, but no need to raise anything else yet!
The CPU still idles at around 37′C and loads in the mid 50’s which isn’t too bad - a far cry from the 27′C idle and 44′C load at 3.5ghz though! This was enough to scrape me in at number 100 with a total score of 1324
All I can say is well done to anyone with a dual core system that can crack the top 100 at the moment. It’s very tough going indeed and I’m not sure how much more I can squeeze out of my poor E6600 before it spontaniously combusts!
A Merry Christmas to everyone, especially those who get up to a bit of festive clocking over the holidays, either with their existing kit or some shiny new hardware!
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Combatus plays with an ATI 3850
combatus
It’s been a wierd old couple of months in the world of GPUs. Quite a few cards have been released, hell even ATI have managed to get a couple of cards out the door! At once! Whatever next! But while previous generations have been a case of out with the old, in with the new, what seems to be the situation now is keep the old even though the new are far better value.
I’m speaking of course of the lack of new high end cards to replace the aging 8800GTX and Ultra and the 2900XT, and the recent introduction of the new Nvidia 8800GT, GTS and 3850 +3870 cards from ATI. The GTX and Ultra still hold the roost when it comes to the fastest possible performance at high resolutions - in this respect the new GT and GTS cards are very much high mid-range than high end cards as neither quite pips the GTX or Ultra overall although the GTS is basically on par. However the 2900XT is very much on par with the new 3870 and the 3850 is left bringing up the rear but offering fantastic value.
Now the odd thing here is that the 8800GTX, Ultra and 2900XT are still around and going for crazy prices. I say crazy because these new mid range cards are firstly far cheaper, they also run cooler (especially in the case of ATI) and offer very similar performance. Take for example the ATI 3870 - its actually faster than the 2900XT in a number of benchmarks yet it costs nearly £80 less. The same is true of the 8800GTS - It easily performs on par with the GTX yet it too costs at least £50 less.
There is light at the end of the tunnel however with “propper” high end cards due out in the Spring which will hopefully tame Crysis. In the mean time, or if there is no way in hell you’re going to spent the crazy amounts of cash for these monsters just before Easter, then it’s a pretty good time to grab a bargain.
Following the death of my X1900XT, I wasn’t prepared to wait for Easter to play games again. So I decided to opt for a mid range card with the hope it might see me through till the new year. The 8800GT was tempting, but seeing as it, like every other card, cannot max out Crysis, I saw little point getting more than I needed to play UT3, COD4 and BF2. Following some recomendations on the CPC forums, I decided to go with ATIs budget offering, the HD3850. I was concerned however about the impact Antialiasing has on the frame rates - a critical flaw I feel has plagued the new DX10 offerings from ATI.
Sapphire HD3850 - at £100 it’s probably the best deal in the world of GPU’s we’ve had for a long time.
(compared to the X1900XT 512MB - less than half the height and the cooler is incredibly quiet - practically inaudiable above the rest of my system which is watercooled)
Once I had it installed I ran 3Dmark 06 to see what performance was like compared to my X1900XT. I was amazed…
ATI HD3850 Score 10294
ATI X1900XT score 7010
Clearly the new ATI cards eat 3Dmark for breakfast. But how about game performance?
Crysis
I wasn’t expecting a lot as this is a very difficult game to run well, but I was able to have several options like shaders and textures on high and still get over 30FPS while with the X1900 everything had to be set to medium for playable frame rates - this is at 1680×1050. However, AA absolutely kills the 3850 - I was using the demo and setting AA from 0x to 8x in game made the FPS drop from 35 to…..3. May as well be 0.3 really! The difference was also quite marked in the game, from what I could tell anyway as it looked like a slide show. While the 8800GT 512MB also struggles in Crysis, it would definitely be a better option.
Unreal Tournament 3
This is somewhat of a contradiction. Here I manually set AA and AF to 8x and 16x respectively and at 1680×1050 and max in game settings, the HD3850 coped well-just. The minimum FPS never dropped below 30 and in more open levels they regularly got into the 40’s which is ample. Turning AA off didn’t seem to make that much difference to the image quality either and also added to the FPS.
No AA
8xAA
Battlefield 2
Battlefield 2 was another success story. In Catalyst Control Centre 7.11 (which actually opens in a few seconds rather than a few centuries, well done ATI) I upped the AA to 8x (24x sampling), 16x AF, Mipmap Detail level to quality and enabled quality Adaptive Anti-aliasing. With default settings I got between 80-100fps again at 1680×1050. With these absolute max settings the minimun frame rate dropped to 30fps when running through smoke granades but stayed mostly between 40-60fps. The game itself looked fantastic. I noticed if I had max settings with my X1900XT that when crawling in prone through grass, the fps dropped below 20 but after a few hours play I concluded the game totally playable at these settings on the 3850.
UT3, BF2 and COD4 for that matter certainly run well on most modern systems but if you have an older card that struggles at max settings then you could do a lot worse than the HD3850 and seeing as you can pick them up for less than £100, it is an absolute steal, overclocks quite well too and is the quietest actively cooled GPU I’ve ever used. The only downside is a drop in fps when enabling AA and in Crysis this is crippling…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Unreal Tournament 3…if Crysis is a bridge too far…
combatus
Crysis won’t run on my PC. That’s a fact. Despite all the watercooling and all the overclocking, if I put everything on max it’s a juddering mess. Well I suppose I’m asking too much of my X1900XT which I’ve had for 2 years now, but the £300 I spent on it then has been well spent indeed. However, I’m not upgrading just for one game. Oooh no. Not even for two (FSX can’t be maxed either, god dammit). The simple reason is I still play plenty of older games like Hl2, BF2 and IL2 Sturmovik which run fine on my system. However, if you’re in the same boat and dissapointed with frame rates in Crysis then don’t fear, Unreal Tournament 3 is here and IT’S AWESOME!!!!!!
I’ve been a massive fan of the Unreal series and still love UT2004 to death. Perhaps the most appealing feature of the games is that they are so well polished by Epic before they are released, that you can run them on pretty mediocre PC’s yet they still look good and are perfectly playable. To be able to max out UT3 on a a 2 year old card is a credit to both the game’s developers and to ATI who did build a great card. For further info on how other cards fared check out CPC Issue 52 P18.
Now down to the gameplay. Well actually the graphics which are the first thing that hits you when you run the game at high settings. It really does look gorgeous and is streaks ahead of UT2004. The weapons feel more real when your blasting them and modelling detail is quite amazing with little levers and cartridges moving about all over the place yet create the illusion of a real purpose.
Rocket Launcher
Link Gun
My favourite part of the new style of UT is Vehicle combat, however you need something to take out vehicles when your on foot. The Avril is back, this time called the Longbow Avril, and it’s far more deadly with a lazer sight that locks onto occupied vehicles and knocks most of the small ones out in one shot.
You can collect weapons from the usual weapon outlets found at bases. There are also “deployable weapons such as EMP, Shaped-charges and shield generators - basically more hardware than you can shake a stick at and it’ll probably take you some time to actually use all of it, never mind master it.
Another bonus for those moments where you just can’t find a gun-laiden vehicle to jump into is the Hoverboard. Pressing “Q” makes your character jump onto his integrated hoverboard which speeds you along much quicker and is very useful when tanks suddenly appear and you’re on foot. It’s also the only mode of transport you’re allowed to use if your running your arse off with the flag stolen from the enemies base.
You can also hitch a ride via an energy beam onto a nearby friendly vehicle to speed things along a bit!
In “warfare mode” which is basically the same as the old style “power node” gathering gameplay, you now have the option of carrying something called an “orb” to the next node. If you make it and drop the orb into the node’s power circle you’ll immediately capture that node which saves the endless pounding you usually had to do. Getting the node into a well protected base is another thing - again you can’t use vehicles although you can use the hoverboard.
Vehicles, vehicles vehicles! This is one area that has had a serious overhaul. Not only are the usual fixed turrets and vehicles from 2004 in the game (Manta, Goliath and Leviathon etc), but a whole new range of “Necris” war machines is available. They are pretty exotic and have very different features to the original vehicles but are just as, if not even more devastating.
Leviathon is still an awesome site and works much the same as it does in UT2004.
Tha Manta is still removing people’s heads.
One new vehicle called the Paladin has a sheild as it’s defensive/secondary function. I haven’t tested how effective it is but it looks very cool indeed!
Now for for one of the things that blew me away the first time I saw it - and is a somewhat familiar site from “War of the Worlds” with Tom Cruise and to some extend the tripods on HL2, a new walker is ready to make history in the “scariest gaming walkers” category. The Necris Darkwalker is an awesome site to behold, especially if it’s not on your side…
Totally awesome as is the rest of the game and what’s best about it is that you don’t need a cutting edge PC to play it, even at high settings. I guess this isn’t a review of the game as there’s so much I haven’t included like game modes and online play but what I’m trying to say is if you haven’t already got Unreal Tournament 3 then why the hell not!!!! Hopefully some of these pictures will persuade you!
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Loading ...All in one devices - they’re here! Or are they?
combatus
I’ve been blabbing on about these for years and must have bored people silly on the Custom PC forums. I think I even did a poll at one point - didn’t go to well! Basically I’m after an all in one device. No it doesn’t transform from a Aston Martin into Jessica Alba and then into a £3k PC depending on what mood I’m in (that’s no particular order by the way but of course the PC would win every time!……yeah right!) Anyway, what I’m really after is something that can meet my digital needs. These are of course a multimedia phone, MP3 player, digital camera and Sat-Nav device.
Now before you all start jabbering on about seperates winning everytime, I’m not talking about replacing a digital SLR camera, I mean simply having something in your pocket that can take a good snap at 3MP or above which could happily sit on your widescreen desktop. Likewise it might not replace your MP3 player for long journeys but Sony’s Walkman phones and indeed the iPhone have sound quality pretty much the same as an iPod so this isn’t impossible.
It is essentially a device that will allow you to leave all these separate bits at home, or maybe not buy them at all in the first place. Now isn’t that sounding at least a bit tempting in terms of convenience? How about ditching your TomTom too and there is of course no need for a separate phone. You have everything you need in a single device that can fit into your pocket.
Well these devices are here - just! I got my Nokia N95 about 6 months ago and while it has the dream spec of 5MP camera, inbuilt GPS, music player and is of course a fully featured media mobile, it doesn’t do any of these things particularly well.
The camera is grainy and when looking at full size pics they appear smudged. Indoor or low light scenes are a nightmare as with most camera phones. Image quality is well below what I could produce on my 5 year old 3MP Canon Powershot. Video is good however and blown up it can nearly be compared to a propper camcorder. Presuming you have a decent sized MicroSD card then all is peachy, well nearly. This brings me on to the next below par feature which is battery life. I can sum this up using various four letter words but being polite it’s pretty damn effing bleeding sodding useless to be honest. How does 1 day standby and 2 hours talk time sound? And thats without using any features like GPS or video - if you even look at these the phone will be dead in an hour, or less, usually less.
Needless to say music isn’t much better even with high bit-rate MP3s and the default player can’t read anything over 300kbps anyway. GPS - well. It just about works in that if you have 5-10 mins to spare you can find out where you are using the inbuilt Nokia Maps system but unfortunately it’s sat nav feature leaves a lot to be desired. If travelling from Bristol to London via Inverness sounds like fun then THIS IS THE PHONE FOR YOU! If not, like me then it’s a crying shame TomTom don’t support integrated GPS units with their Mobile version of the famous SatNav program otherwise the Nokia Maps software would have been deleted quicker than you can say “i’ll get you there but twice the time”.
That said, the Maps software is pretty useful for local navigation. By that I mean you can search for a location or an address and get an immediate picture of it’s surroundings and the phone’s screen is just about big enough for this to be effective. When my TFT died a few weeks ago and Viewsonic mucked me around with the warranty and I had a weekend of BF2 and writing the “How to clean a watercooling system” article in CPC issue 51 planned, I used the phone to find www.yoyotech.co.uk who are based in London off the Tottenham Court Road to pick up a new one the same day. I also used it to give directions to one of our engineers at work who was new to the area. Pretty useful in that respect. However the drawbacks prevent me from recommending this phone to anyone who is away from a charging source for more than 24 Hours which I am as you’ll be carrying a brick around with you most of the time.
There is another device however that fits the bill and is much more substancial, quite literally as well as very promissing in being able to function more fully as an all in one device. The HTC TyTN II, otherwise known as the MDA Vario III.
What this offers over the N95 is much better battery life due to the larger battery (duh) far less fiddly, the GPS actually works well and uses third party software like Copilot but can actually use TomTom while the N95 can’t. A 3MP camera is also in the mix and from samples I’ve found online they are easily as good as the Nokia. What’s more, the phone uses Windows Mobile 6 Pro which is very versatile and has a full suit of office applications just for starters.
This is just one phone out of many that will undoubtedly come over the next few months and years and I wouldn’t underestimate the power of the “all-in-one device” especially if it actually works. Cameras will get better as will other functionalities which are already knocking on the doors of cheap cameras and MP3 players in terms of quality. Expect one in a pocket near you in the not too distant future!
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Backup and storage - when two copies are not enough.
combatus
Losing important files is one problem that is still a thorn in the side of the PC industry. While many factors like hard drive’s failing or a super deadly virus attack are over-hyped somewhat (I’ve only had one drive actually fail in the last 10 years) so long as there is a possibility of losing data, backup is essential.
I consider myself to be pretty good at backing up. I have one large drive in my PC where all my programs, files and photos are stored and I sync this with an external drive every week or so. I’ve lost data once or twice when fiddling around with RAID arrays or formatting drives when installing Windows (completely my fault of course) but on the whole it’s been fine.
Until a few weeks ago…. I was reinstalling Windows and when I ran into problems with a new motherboard recognising a hard drive I decided to try another. I tried both my back up drives – neither of which worked as it turned out to be a faulty board, but in the process I had swapped the data between the two and back again.
All seemed fine – I got a new board and everything installed as it should. Then a few days later I was looking at some photos and found that some wouldn’t open. On further inspection and advice from various forums it was decided that they had become corrupted!!! Not uncommon either apparently and the reason for this was transferring them from one drive to another, in particular amongst large amounts of data (the folder I transferred had all my videos and photos – over 15GB).
Luckily I only lost a handful of photos but this proved to be a dilemma. If when transferring a few files from one drive to another this kind of thing can happen, my back up procedure isn’t enough, as indeed any two drive system isn’t.
I considered a RAID 1 mirror array but then that’s not totally safe from something like a power surge and clearly with watercooling in the system as well, the chance of a bad leak is always there too.
Luckily Custom PC had just reviewed a few online storage companies and after a bit of discussion on the forums I signed up to a site called www.Mozy.com where for about £2 a month you have unlimited storage. I tried a few services before signing up but this proved to be the quickest and the only one where you can easily restore files via several methods (including getting DVD’s sent to you) as well as restore the files+folders in their original organisation and hierarchy – not just individual files.
It takes an age to upload the few gigabytes of data I already had, but once it’s done it’s done. The only downside is that you can only upload from one PC – to do so from another will cost you another subscription. You can however transfer a subscription from PC to another but you have to delete the original backup.
Of course you can just make sure you keep the data on the drive in question and don’t move it like I did and not bother with online storage but what about a fire? Unlikely yes but a possibility.
So this is pretty much solved for me – not only does online storage offer 99.99% security but combined with a basic backup at home it should be all you need and for less than the cost of an 80GB hard drive per year you get unlimited storage. Some other services are free and there are new ones being setup all the time so there might be better ones than the one I’m using.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...New Watercooled Board from MSI
combatus
It looks like more high end boards are getting the watercooling treatment as MSI releases a watercooled board based around the X38 Chipset. It differs from the Asus Blitz and Maxiumus designs of having a single block cooling other chips via heatpipes buy using the hole heatpipe system as a large waterblock with a threaded hole at each end.
This should provide better cooling than the Asus boards as each chip involved has water passing through it. However it’s debateable how well the design will work with air cooling which will more than likely mean a high price for the board as it might only be aimed at watercooled systems.
Asus Blitz
This also raises the question of what will happen if your pump fails but there are ways round this - pumps like the DDC range from Laing have a 3 pin fan connector which you can use to monitor the pump and alert you if it stops working. Chances are you’ll be cooling your CPU too so this will heat up far quicker than the chipsets and would be the first point of instabilty should things get toasty.
The benefits are clear though. Watercooling the CPU puts most heatpipe systems under a fair bit of strain as they are designed to use residual air from cpu HSF’s to cool themselves. Asus have included small fans to counteract this but they are not the quietest things in the world. The central heatsink on my Asus P5K Deluxe is too hot to touch after the system has been on an hour or two and I dare not increase the northbridge voltage.
Having integrated waterblocks on a motherboard also saves you the hassle and expense of finding and buying some that fit your board and plumbing them in.
Rated: 80% (1 votes)
Loading ...Pirates of the Burning Sea
combatus
I’ve been following this game for a while but the recent announcement of a release date (Jan 22nd 2008) made me look up a but more detail on the site (www.burningsea.com)
It seems very similar to pirate sims like Age of Pirates: Carribean Tales but obviously leans to the MMORPG genre and all that this entales. What amazed me is the internal economy of the game. Everything you use will have been made by another player.
Your cannon balls would have been made by another player using materials sourced from yet another player in his mines. Even the rum you drink would have been distilled by another player in his factory. It seems everything has value and can be made, sold or traded or used to cut someone’s throat! Pretty amazing stuff - not sure how it compares to other games like this but the icing on the cake is that it’s a fully fledged pirate combat simulator too with small skirmishes ranging to huge battles, both sea and land based.
The graphics from the stills I’ve seen look good too, not Crysis good but certainly enough to keep those few brain cells not selling, buying or trading or fighting happy.
If you haven’t already done so, pop over to the site or read Phil’s review for CPC here. It’s gonna be big!
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Why Hard Drives Suck
combatus
I love and hate the hard drive at the moment. It’s very rare that I feel this way about a piece of hardware but I’m definitely in two minds about this magnetic storage device which has been about for what must be two decades.
Lets start with the good points. First has got to be size. Drives have increased massively in size over the last 10 years. I still remember struggling with a 1GB drive in the early/mid 90’s a time when I had to delete one game in order to fit another on the damn thing.
Then all of a sudden the storage space exploded and we now have drives 1000 times as big which are far more spacious than many people need but are still relatively cheap – you can get a 1000GB (1TB) drive for a little over £200. It’s very rare that there is an excess of performance in this industry but hard drive space is definitely one area where you don’t have to spend a fortune to get loads of headroom.
Now the downside? Downside you say? Yes this stems from the fact that there are two sides to every hard drive. There is space, and one other crucial factor – PERFORMANCE. This is something that hasn’t improved to the same extent as the space or any other factor in the average PC. In fact the speed at which hard drives can transfer data has only increased by two or three times at most in the last 10 –15 years quite appalling considering the thousand fold increase we’ve seen in other components. Modern 7200rpm drives can transfer data at an average of 50-60MB/sec and have average seek times of around 8-10ms. This is not a massive increase compared to older 5400 speed drives around 10 years ago. I don’t have a 10 year old drive to test but you only have to look at benchmarks to see how fast they were. Below is a comparison between my drive (a 1 year old 250GB Hitachi 7K250) in red and some older drives using data in the Sisoftware Sandra benchmarking system.
Yes the difference would be noticeable moving from a 10 year old drive to a Western Digital Raptor X but imagine moving from a 600Mhz Athlon that was a quick chip 10 years ago to a 2.6Ghz Intel Core2 Quad, or maybe a 16MB Creative Banshee Graphics card to an 8800 Ultra. The difference then becomes much more marked.
This lack of improvement has meant that the hard drive is a massive bottleneck and by far the slowest, most archaic component of modern PC systems despite all the bolt-ons it’s had over the last 20 years like faster spin speeds, larger caches etc etc. The consequences are that transferring files that take up just 1% of a 500GB drive’s space can leave you sitting around for several minutes in some cases. Games and other demanding programs also suffer – stuttering and startup/loading times are greatly effected as is the time taken to boot into Windows. A simple task like transferring two 500MB files at the same time requiring a drive to read and write makes everything grind to a halt.
The multitasking prowess and raw power of an Intel Quad Core processor puts these devices to shame. The technology behind Hard Drives, (using changes in magnetisations) still has plenty of headroom and we have only used a fraction of it’s speed potential. Processor technology for example has had to adopt new materials recently which allow for smaller manufacturing processes and faster, cooler chips as a result.
I don’t care how they do it, but something significant has to happen in the storage industry in the next few years, be it flash based or holographic technology. Either way I really do hope the days are numbered for the Hard Drive.
Rated: 100% (4 votes)
Loading ...The case for high speed “Next generation” internet in the UK
combatus
Lets face it. Broadband in the
UK has been a complete farce the last few years. The initial boom has slowed, and while it was great to move from 56K to 512k, finally browsing the Web the way it was meant to be browsed (affordably) 6-7 years ago if you were quick off the mark, recently it’s been a far less pleasant experience.
The “up to xMbits†slogan left many feeling as if they’d been taken for a ride with far lower speeds than advertised. “Fair usage†policies now mean that doing anything more than switching on your PC will land you a snotty letter or email and see your speed reduced even further, especially god forbid if you surf during the evenings when you’re home from work or school (workers call in sick and kids bunk of school please). Ever increasing contention ratios due to over-subscribing and generally poor service add to the list of complaints nearly all of use have had at one time or another.
The situation has stagnated for nearly 5 years. While faster download speeds have meant those big game patches come a little quicker, very little benefits are felt from anything over 3 Mbits. Torrents or anything to do with file sharing rarely go above this speed (3Mbits is equivalent to 375KB/sec) that is if your ISP hasn’t capped torrent download limits already in which case half a megabit would be more than enough for you!
Browsing certainly isn’t any faster on my 20Mbit Virgin Cable Broadband than it is on a 2Mbit ADSL line we also have in the house. The upload speeds for a vast majority of
UK ISPs is still absolutely appalling so we are still left hanging around sending those 5MB emails of holiday pics.
So what is the way forward? Well I’d like to see the same situation with broadband as with do with hard drives. Plenty of room for manoeuvre and keen prices. There is one problem with this though. The outlay for fibre networks would top £15Billion. Now, the companies that would benefit from this have the money to invest but they are reluctant to do it. Why? Because the main feature of this so called “next gen†broadband is WebTV. Internet based streaming TV is already a big hit in Asia and in better-equipped EU countries. It is in my opinion, it’s the future of television and the internet.
Millions of people already download programs over P2P and watch TV programs on applications like the BBC iPlayer. With Internet TV streaming through 50+Mbit broadband connections, HD TV is definitely on the cards too.
Clearly one or two TV companies would be a bit disgruntled with this, namely Sky and Virgin Media, who already hold healthy numbers of subscribers to their services.
Until they back down and let broadband take it’s own course, the UK will be stuck in the Dark Ages as far as the internet is concerned. We are approaching the limits of what the current networks can provide so the crunch time is only just around the corner.
I just hope we do the sensible thing and go all-out for a decent fibre-based broadband network and not a piddley speed upgrade to 30 or 40 Mbits which will benefit no one.