I currently enjoy 8mb ADSL, it's great. Latency for games is good too. We're house hunting. We've just found a real nice house. It has 1mb ADSL according to a few postcode checkers. BT have no plans to upgrade it (this should be a criminal offence). The thought of going from a super fast silky smooth trouble-free connection, to 1mb makes me sweat ... Any advice what to do?
Take a peek at the closest exchange. See roughly how far you are as the crow flies, and consider where you might be as the cable lies. For reference, my phone line claims to be up to 6mbit, but I see 16mbit.
Dude if your buying a house the internet connection should not be a deal breaker. I did a very similar move this year from a city centre exchange with 8mb ADSL to a small village with no LLU or ADSL2 and according to BT i would get 1.5-2mb. I get 6mb. Unless your a torrent junky the speed reduction isn't that much of a grind and remember it was not that long ago that we though 1mb was fast!
If the house is in an area which isn't going to have much growth, then there's not much demand, for things like high speed Internet or more importantly, increases in value. I'd much rather a crummy house in a nice area, than a nice house in a slow area.
Build a mahoosive wifi antenna and point it towards the exchange. There's bound to be a business or two that offer a free connection.
Don't always rely on the figures quoted from the postcode type checkers. I was told I would get no more than 3.5mb but when I tested what I was getting with Be Unlimited it was actually a gnat's cock over 5mb with an upload of 0.99mb.
This. When I was checking my new postcode it said no more than 2mb, when I was on 13mb, but I now have a stable 5/6mb. Quite chuffed. Sam
I'd find it very difficult having to drop that much in speed, but I hope it goes well for you and you get more than what the checker says. Also, from experience from using any ADSL checker, I've found it to report my line could get 3Mbps, when I was actually synced at 3Mbps at the time. Ever since I got a BT 2700HGV router from ebay (which does wonders for squeezing out an extra 1Mbps of speed compared to my Netgear DG834Gv4) I'm now synced at 4Mbps and the checker is reporting the same - 4Mbps. The checker is actually pulling the data based on what I'm synced at, so if that house is not currently connected to ADSL, you can expect the estimate to be wildly inaccurate. Good luck!
I've got a 1.2 mbps connection. Download speeds are ~72 kilobytes per second and upload speeds are ~45 kilobytes per second.. And I'm charged 35 euros a month. (Yeah I live in the boondocks). Anyways the point I'm making is: If I could live with those speeds for over 4 years then you should have no reason to not be able to to live with a 1 megabyte connection. Note 1.2 megabits = 0.15 megabyte.
I have a 1 meg connection at home and honestly, it isn't that bad. Sure it takes longer for things to download. But you-tube and hulu videos stream just fine, Games take nothing for bandwidth anyway so they run fine too. The only thing you really lose is some multitasking ability. So if you have lots of people in the household it could be a pain. But honestly, your about to buy a house, which is not a small investment. And your crying about a tiny expense like internet? I'm pretty sure your internet will be eventually upgraded, and if it's that big of an issue for you, just factor in a business internet connection into the price of the house. Hey you could go live where my sister does, they didn't even have internet until relatively recently.
Mine's worse. 0.56mb/s download. Download speeds hover around 60KB/s if I am lucky. I have lived with this since I was 14, and we upgraded from dial up. So about 5 years. I would kill for a 1mb connection right about now. It would be nice to watch Youtube 360p videos without having to pause. What has been said before is very true. If you are a... sampler of backups downloaded through a client of some kind, shall we say, you will suffer. If you play MMOs, you are likely to suffer, especially if you Vent at the same time. Games like TF2 may take a little longer to establish, but you'll not notice anything in game. I'd say that if the house is nice, and you'd like to live there... then ignore the internet. 1mb will suffice for all but the naughtiest of uses.
