UK 1Gbps broadband incoming – want to see how fast it is?

1GBps-broadband-UK

With BT currently testing a 1Gbps broadband connection in the UK – over current fibre cabling – our geek sense is tingling. A few upgraded exchanges and routers could be enough to have you downloading 10 times faster then the quickest current connection – 83 times faster than the 12Mbps UK average. So we cracked out our eighties Stuff calculator (solar powered, obviously) and crunched the numbers on what that actually means for speeds of the past and future. Okay, so we might have used Wolfram a little...

MP3 at 3MB
56Kbps      54 seconds
12Mbps      0.25 seconds
1Gbps        0.0023 seconds

HD film at 1.4GB
56Kbps      426 hours (17 days)
12Mbps     2 minutes
1Gbps       1.4 seconds

1TB hard drive transfer
56Kbps     320,000 hours (36 years)
12Mbps   1.4 hours
1Gbps       17 minutes

Of course all these figures are based on an ideal connection. With contention ratios (oh, look it up) and external bandwidth factors they’re never quite as fast – but with a 1Gbps line there won’t be much that can slow you down. Just in time for 8K streamed TV then.

[via Telegraph]

Comments

EsoxLucius

25 weeks ago

1Gbps? That's a laugh, I can only get 1.5Mbps and that's official!

unique904

25 weeks ago

when they say 12mbp they actually mean 12MB/s which is virgins 120mbps

schauhan50

25 weeks ago

Your calculator didn't tell you that were wrong. Do you not know the difference between bits (b) and bytes (B). There are 8 bits in a byte. So a 12Mb/s connection would give you a download speed of 1.5MB/s.

So a 3MB mp3 file would take 2 seconds to download.

Please correct the others.

acchamb

25 weeks ago

This sounds fantastic but I would still like BT to provide speeds of greater than 1mbps download speeds.
BT's rollout is increadibly slow (almost as slow as the broadband!)

UK 1Gbps broadband incoming – want to see how fast it is?