Are We Heading At High Speed To The End Of Family TV?
Those who have common or garden home broadband on a BT copper phone line, and find it not quite fast enough, might note that Virgin have just announced a new top speed of 200Mbps under its new Virgin Vivid brand.
While the average domestic download speed is now about 24Mbs, many homes labour along with an Mbps rate stuck in single figures.
A decade ago that was pretty good going, but no longer.
The technology continues to develop to levels that were impossible to image a few years ago.
For example, a 940Mbps speed trial is taking place in the city of York!
As it rolls out the new service, Virgin will upgrade its customers on 50, 100 and 152 Mbps to new 70, 150 and 200Mbps speeds respectively, automatically and without charge.
It expects 90 per cent of its customers to be reached with the enhanced package by Christmas.
So folk might wonder why they would want such a throughput.
However, some content providers are making plans for the streaming at Ultra HDTV (UHDTV) 4K quality, which delivers 3840 x 2160 pixels.
Netflix is expected to first up to the plate with this offer, which reckoned to need a constant 15 Mbps of capacity on the cable.
If the inevitable underperformance against theoretical speed, other traffic on the line and variations in performance are factored in, some pundits expect a 50Mbps line to be required for reliable, uninterrupted UHDTV viewing.
The really interesting question is how these high speeds will change household viewing habits.
Are the days of family viewing around a big screen numbered when four people in a household can each simultaneously stream different UHDTV content to their own smaller screen with headphones?
