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End User olympics Weekend

Jenny Jones wins bronze – drives up internet bandwidth

olympics_headerJenny Jones drove up internet bandwidth use as people watched her take bronze online.

I thought the London 2012 Olympics were great. I’ve not given any real thought to the winter Olympics other than to note the run up in which the media hit us with “terrorist” stories and then tales of unfinished hotel accommodation, presumably for journos. I didn’t even watch the opening ceremony. I think I was down the pub.

Now the games are in full flow I’m getting into the swing of it, especially with programmes like the one about Torvill and Dean being shown last night. Yesterday I followed @jamienichollsuk and @billymorgan89. I don’t normally do that sort of thing but they both seemed like such nice guys.

This morning we watched the women’s freestyle snowboard competition and cheered Jenny Jones to her bronze, also cheering loudly, though of course sympathetically, every time someone who might have knocked her off her podium spot fell or made a mistake.

Eventually we, the kids gathered in the kitchen to watch on my Chromebook. A Full English was on offer by request of Kid 4 just returned from the breakfast wasteland that was the School skiing trip to Bormio in Italy – quite topical.

Prior to that the snowboarding was on the TV in the TV room, the Chromebook in the kitchen and Kid 3’s laptop upstairs. I dare say were they awake, Kids 1 & 2 would also have been watching on their own laptops in their garrets in Oxford and Durham.

Watching habits have changed forever. If my wife wants to watch a TV programme and a kid is watching some other junk (all junk whatever the prog and whoever the person – Duck Dynasty excepted) she will revert to the iPad in the kitchen. Unless it’s me who already has possession of the TV in which case I just have to put up with “I’m a celebrity watch me bake a cake, paint the house and do other inane acts in which they add no value other than pander to the insatiable thirst of people up and down the country who are watching the programme because they liked said celebrity when they were on Eastenders, Coronation Street and On The Busses (woteva).

My usual response is to bury my head in my laptop and then annoy Anne when she makes a comment about the programme “we” re watching only to find I haven’t been listening and have no idea what she is talking about.

Watching TV is meant to be a communal exercise didn’t you know? Maybe in the pre internet days. Now it is something done on your own, possibly with headphones plugged in so that nobody else is disturbed by your addiction. Headphones are particularly essential when catching up with the Archers which I know is not a TV programme but is particularly offensive to many of us.

That isn’t to say there aren’t times when it is good to watch TV together – watching the rugby in the pub for example.

Back to the Winter Olympics it will be interesting to see whether they affect bandwidth use in the same way as the London 2012 games. I only have anecdotal evidence thus far – I wouldn’t normally be watching iPlayer on a Sunday morning. I’ll report back when I have more specific data.

Anyway gotta go. It’s Sunday morning and Sunday stopped being a day of rest since the kids arrived – I have a jobslist.

Well done Jenny Jones. Proud of you:)

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

5 replies on “Jenny Jones wins bronze – drives up internet bandwidth”

You are lucky in your house. You currently have the bandwidth to do all that. I don’t know if you will have the capacity in the future, because who knows what future needs will be? You must be fairly close to a cabinet and using a good ISP who doesn’t ram too many customers on to its feed. Your cabinet will last another few years, but it isn’t upgradeable. FTTC isn’t futureproof.

Think now of all the people who are not going to get even this sort of connection. For decades. Those on long copper line lengths, or villages without cabinets, or townsfolk whose line goes up and down several streets before it gets to those estates. Their televisions will remain their only link to the world of ‘choice’ and they won’t have the choices your family has, yet statistically if their cabinet/exchange is enabled they have access to ‘superfast’. What a farce this homes passed business is.

800m from cab gets me 30/7 on an 80/20 line. FTTP isn’t goingto be a realistic proposition because it now seems to be aimed at businesses at a price point that a consumer is unlikely to touch.

Exactly so.
Who is going to explain this to all the councils who were assured cabs were futureproof? There are gonna be some sorry looking councillors come re-election time.

I would think there is plenty of mileage in the cabs – FTTP on demand comes from your cab after all and at least the fibre run has already been made from the exchange.

but like you said, its only for business and its now out of the reach of most SME because the price has trebled.
Also there isn’t much fibre capacity in the cabs. I think Walter has done a lot of research on this. Also the excess construction charges make it unaffordable for anyone who really needs it, ie those a fair distance from the cabs. Its all done to keep people tied to the phone lines. It isn’t the future.

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