The Big 3 recently began offering data plans that did away with overages. Instead of charging you an absurd amount to refill your data bucket when it runs out, the plans simply slow down your speed till your monthly cycle resets.
So how slow is slow? When you go over your allotment, TELUS slows your connection down to 512Kbps - note the lowercase “B” in kbps. In this context a lowercase “B”, kbps indicates kiloBITS while an uppercase “B”, Kbps means kiloBYTES. 8 Kilobits makes 1 Kilobyte so 512Kbps is a nicer way of saying 64KBps. Would you rather have a dollar or 100 cents?
64KBps used to be pretty fast - around 14 years ago when the cutting edge was literally, an EDGE network.
Anyways I figured I jump on my time machine and subject myself to these speeds. I loaded up TMeter on my Windows 10 laptop, and made it so Firefox would be limited to 64KBps.
Why did I use a laptop instead of a phone? A rooted Android phone can also be setup to do this but it’s easier on a laptop. I could have also done this with a WiFi router but mine doesn’t have the necessary QoS settings.
Long story short, all that work was for naught as the bandwidth meter routinely showed the speeds spiking above 64Kbps. While they only spiked to just over 100Kbps it’s enough that I wasn’t comfortable drawing conclusions from it.
Next I decided to see just how good or bad a 64Kbps video looked. I haven’t dabbled with encoding in quite some time but I opened up Handbrake and decided to use its most efficient codecs. In this case I took a quick video and then encoded it using H.265 with the HEVC codec with a resolution of 480p, a bit rate of 448Kbps and an audio bitrate of 64Kbps (448+64=512).
The result isn’t amazing but it’s very watchable. I don’t know what codec’s streaming sites like YouTube, Netflix are using but H.265 is the future.
Here’s a link if you want to view the samples:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2xhvklhwa...BuDpXU1ya?dl=0
Note that you’ll need to download the videos first before you view them. If you just view them from your browser you’ll get heavily compressed versions. The original shot from an iPhone is the .MOV file while the mp4 is the one I put through Handbrake.
Anyways, the video doesn’t look amazing but it’s very watchable, the sort of settings you’d be fine with if you were watching while sitting on a bus or walking around. Video compression has come a long way.
If you’re sending a lot of video or images it’s going to be a similar situation. They’re usually heavily compressed so while sending and receiving them won’t happen instantly, it will still be relatively quick because they’re usually heavily compressed.
Aside from the drop in image quality, you’ll also notice a difference if your phone is sending and receiving data from multiple apps at once. That’s where the 64KBps bottleneck will be really noticeable.
I was hoping I could say something witty like 512kbps is infinitely slow or endlessly slow but in the end, while 64Kbps isn’t ideal it’s usable in a pinch.
Looking at the bigger picture; carriers are always advertising how fast their networks are or how they’re the fastest. When was the last time you wished the network was faster? If you did, remember network speed is only part of the equation of how fast a phone feels.
Until something disrupts the way we currently use their networks the real story is that they’re able to have greater capacity. That plus the fact that carriers could always raise their “after unlimited” speeds means at some point, those speeds could be good enough that many users will choose to save their dollars (or 100’s of cents) and choose smaller data buckets and just deal with the reduced speeds.
I also wonder when we’ll reach the point when carriers feel confident enough about their capacity that they’ll begin offering plans that have maximum speeds like wired providers.
Or maybe I should be more skeptical and assume carriers are already at this point and are just waiting for as long as possible before plans catch up.
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