Sunday 22 January 2012

How fast is fast enough?


Image courtesy of techline info


Rural Canada and rural Manitoba are experiencing an ever increasing Internet speed gap. Over the last ten years, broadband speeds have been increasing around the world with the leading countries increasing from 1.5 Mbps to over 50 Mbps. 

According to netindex.com, the average bandwidth speed globally is 9.9 Mbps. As a previous post indicated, Canada and Manitobas average speeds are slightly faster than the global average at 12.3 Mbps and 11.3 Mbps respectively. Most of the communities in Manitoba under 5,000 people are averaging under 5 Mbps and most out-of-town households average less than that. The target Internet speed still being used as standard for rural Manitoba and Canada is 1.5 Mbps. This standard for access was set 10 years ago in Canada and neither Canada nor Manitoba has revised this standard or put forward a new broadband plan.

While 10 years ago, 1.5 Mbps was considered leading edge Internet access, times have changed and now, Internet speeds of 1.5 Mbps are 10x slower than the Canadian average and 20-50x slower than what is available to many in Canada and Manitoba. While residents in cities have access to 25 and even 50 Mbps broadband, many rural residents are lucky to have access to 5 Mbps and for many out-of-town residents, it can be a struggle to even achieve the 1.5 Mbps broadband minimum.

Does speed matter - Is 1.5 Mbps fast enough?
Maybe the difference is not important. If rural Manitoba's de facto standard is 1.5 Mbps, an important question for rural residents and community decision-makers and developers alike is: Is this fast enough? Or, to phrase it another way, Is the speed of our rural Internet sufficient?

A 1.5 Mbps connection speed does meet minimum/recommended standards for many popular Internet activities, including voice and video calling on Skype, streaming audio and streaming video, accessing youtube and other social media sites. However, due to the fact that 1.5 Mbps is the minimum for many of these applications and that users very rarely achieve their advertised speeds, the quality of the experience and the content may be impacted, often requiring minutes to view a 30 second youtube clip or repeatedly experiencing lagging/dropped Internet calls.

As this table from broadband.co.uk illustrates, while 1.5Mbps meets the minimum requirements for many web applications, the quality of that experience and those applications will be substantially improved with faster speeds:

Internet Connection Speed
Time to load a typical web page*
Time to download a typical 5-minute song**
Streaming Video Quality
56K dial-up modem
14 sec
12 min 30 sec

256K broadband
3 sec
3 min
Low Quality
512K broadband
1.6 sec
1 min 30 sec

1Mb broadband
0.8 sec
41 sec

2Mb broadband
0.4 sec
20 sec
Medium Quality
4Mb broadband
0.1 sec
5 sec

6Mb broadband
Instantaneous
3.5 sec

8Mb broadband
Instantaneous
2.5 sec
TV Quality
Note: all figures are approximate and represent best-case download speeds. Actually speeds will generally be lower.
* Assumes a typical web page is 100 kilobytes of data.
** Assuming a typical song is a 5 megabyte MP3 file.

Needs to be faster
While 1.5 Mbps does allow for access to the majority of the Internet and Internet activities there are Internet applications and uses that are clearly beyond the capacity of 1.5 Mbps broadband. Streaming HD video for example requires 6-8 Mbps and for group video calling on Skype 2Mbps is the recommended connection. Unfortunately for rural residents, these are the types of applications and Internet use that are increasing in popularity and importance in areas such as online education, health and business activities.

Rural Manitoba clearly needs, and would benefit from, faster Internet access. While rural users with a 1.5 Mbps connection are currently able to use many of the same Internet applications that their faster counter parts are, they do so with a noticeable reduction in quality. In addition, more advanced and bandwidth heavy applications are simply beyond the limits of their access.

While 1.5 Mbps may meet the absolute minimum Internet requirements, this will not be the case for long. Increasingly rich media content on websites means that the Internet connection speed requirements are going to keep increasing and 1.5 Mbps will soon be insufficient for many activities it currently allows. Reflecting ever-expanding Internet and bandwidth requirements, the FCC in the United States has recently raised the definition of minimum broadband from 1.5 to 4 Mbps.

Improvements underway in Manitoba
Luckily for rural residents in this province, Manitoba is working hard to expand its Internet availability and speed in rural areas. The rural-focused initiative Manitoba Netset  is now to offering up to 7 Mbps connections in many parts of the province and is continuing to expand in its efforts to serve more rural Manitobans. Efforts such as this are a very important step in improving rural Internet access, but efforts will need to continue. While Rural Manitobans will definitely benefit from the doubling/tripling of their Internet speed, the Canadian average will still be more than 2x faster and city residents will still have access of speeds up to 10x faster than their rural counterparts. More initiatives like Manitoba Netset will be needed for rural residents to be able to keep pace with the changing Internet and to continue to shrink the access gap for rural Manitobans.


Sources

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