Tick. Tick. Tick. Hear that? That’s the sound of time slowly draining away as you sit silently, staring at a download that never seems to get any closer to completion. A movie. A game. A Linux distribution. It doesn’t matter. Every day, file sizes are getting bigger and media resolutions higher. You know what doesn’t keep getting better? My internet connection. I’m guessing yours probably doesn’t either.
Living where I do, and having tried three different ISPs over the last few years, I’m lucky to get 3Mbps out of my not-so-broadband connection. For the moment, that’s fine. It means leaving my PC on overnight every now and again to finish particularly big downloads, and then usually the next night as well because Windows went to red alert status and shut everything down to patch a crucial security hole in Microsoft Paint or something five minutes after I went to bed.
It means that streaming videos is more of an aspiration than something I actually do. It means trying not to cry at memories of people complaining about 3Mbps connections back in 2008, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and the game download I’m still staring at in my system tray promised it’d be finished in an hour or so.
I worry about the near future though, simply because the closest option most of us have to actually upgrading our connections is to up sticks and move house, which seems a little extreme as a means of speeding up the torrents that of course none of us would ever dream of indulging in.
Most of us can’t expect handy fibre connections, satellite uplinks or any of that other fun stuff. We can’t even expect what we’re paying for. In March, Ofcom announced that the average broadband speed in the UK at the moment is a less than speedy 6.2Mbps, compared to an average advertised speed of 13.8Mpbs – never mind those 20Mbps deals people are urged to buy, not realising that the benefit is being able to do more things simultaneously rather than downloading files at the speed of light. Unless they’re on fibre optics of course, but even then, only on an incredibly pedantic technicality.
When it comes to mobile broadband, things are even worse. A recent Ofcom survey looked at 3G connections in the UK, with an average connection of just 1.5Mpbs, and even basic webpages taking almost 10 seconds to load unless you happen to live in a major urban area.
Intrigued by this, I picked up my phone to compare my own mobile download speeds, and after only three short weeks, finally finished downloading the connection benchmarking tool. I tried running it. It just laughed at me. I deleted it and made an appointment to check my email some time in 2016.
Even ignoring the incoming failure of silly things like Google’s new Chrome laptops (the web-based computers that combine the unstoppable power of a netbook with the raw convenience of scissors designed to be gripped with your toes), all of this is quickly becoming a problem.
Right now, only the absolute most intensive streaming is a problem, even on a relatively low connection. As we all know though, that’s changing quickly, spurred by Silicon Valley types who probably drink their morning latte from the Cloud, and researchers with T3 connections plugged straight into their brains, yet with little word as to how those of us who don’t live in London or similar urban areas are going to take part in it all.
Instead, we hear the excuses, as valid as they are. Unfortunately, talk of how much it would cost to rip up the entire country and replace all our ancient copper wires with something – to use the technical term – ‘good’ doesn’t change the fact that we badly need something like that to happen. Right now, the future is all too clear: if you’re already lucky enough to have a great connection, you’ll be able to get a better one via new services like BT Infinity (40Mbps broadband), but if you’re on something rubbish, you’re likely stuck.
At the same time, services like iPlayer are going to get more and more important, online downloads are going to get bigger and worst of all, the amount of data being pulled by those lucky beggers with the good pipes is going to mean that all of us get less for our money.
Unlimited plans are already fading out (especially on mobile phone contracts) due to the amount of data being sent. The fact that technically we’ll be paying less due to not using as much doesn’t mean it’s likely to going to get any cheaper. How fair that is. How fun. Excuse me, I have a download to stare at until it finishes. Tick. Tick. Tick.
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