Internet television. A television. What additional options does iptv digital television provide?
Russia has very good and, no less important, affordable home Internet. Seriously! In villages and very deep provinces, things are, of course, worse, but take any city, even a small one, in the European part of the country and look at the tariffs. For 300–400 rubles a month you can bring Internet to your apartment at a speed of around 25–50 megabits per second, and with some promotion even 100 megabits.
For comparison: in “civilized” countries fast internet(both home and mobile) costs an order of magnitude more. And the concept of “monthly data limit” still lives there. We only have this left with mobile operators.
However, being cheap is not a reason to pay for something you don’t use. Even a hundred rubles saved warms your wallet, and therefore the tariff for your home Internet must be chosen based on your real speed needs. Let's figure out how many megabits per second are required in different situations, and start with the basic concepts.
Megabits, megabytes and real speeds
Data size is usually measured in bytes. For example, an HD movie weighs from 700 megabytes (megabytes) to 1.4 gigabytes (gigabytes), while a Full HD movie weighs from 4 to 14 gigabytes.
Data transfer rates are usually specified in bits (not bytes!) per second, and sometimes this causes misunderstanding.
Byte ≠ bit.
1 byte = 8 bits.
1 megabyte = 8 megabits.
1 megabyte per second = 8 megabits per second.
If the user does not distinguish between bytes and bits, he can easily confuse them or mistake them for the same thing. In this case, it will calculate the approximate time for downloading an HD movie via torrent something like this:
- The film weighs 1,400 "megs".
- Internet speed is 30 “megas” per second.
- The movie will download in 1,400 / 30 = 46.6 seconds.
In fact, the Internet speed is 30 megabits per second = 3.75 megabytes per second. Accordingly, 1,400 megabytes must be divided not by 30, but by 3.75. In this case, the download time will be 1,400 / 3.75 = 373 seconds.
In practice, the speed will be even lower, because Internet providers indicate the speed “up to”, that is, the maximum possible, and not the working speed. In addition, interference, especially over Wi-Fi transmissions, network congestion, and limitations and characteristics of user equipment and service provider equipment also contribute. You can check your speed using, and increase it using.
Often the bottleneck becomes the resource from which you download something. For example, your Internet speed is 100 megabits per second, and the site sends data at a speed of 10 megabits per second. In this case, the download will occur at a speed of no more than 10 megabits per second, and nothing can be done about it.
What internet speed do you really need?
Obviously, the above table requires clarification.
Questions and answers
What to do if the Internet is used on two or more devices at once?
Let’s say you are watching Full HD streaming video on a smart TV, your wife is surfing YouTube on a laptop with an HD screen, and your child is watching something from a smartphone or tablet, also in HD quality. Does this mean that the numbers from the table need to be summed up?
Yes, that's absolutely right. In this case, you will need about 20 megabits per second.
Why do different sites have different speed requirements for watching videos of the same resolution?
There is such a thing as bitrate - the amount of information with which an image is encoded per unit of time, and, accordingly, a conditional indicator of the quality of picture and sound. The higher the bitrate, the, as a rule, better picture. This is why on torrents you can find versions of the same movie with the same resolution, but different sizes.
Additionally, there are super-smooth 60fps videos. They weigh more and require faster internet.
Is it true that online games are so undemanding of Internet speed?
Yes, for most games like CS, Dota 2, WoT, WoW and even GTA 5, just one megabit per second is more than enough for multiplayer, but in this case, ping becomes decisive - the time it takes for the signal to travel from you to the game server and back. The lower the ping, the lower the latency in the game.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to know in advance even the approximate ping in a specific game through a specific provider, since its value is not constant and depends on many factors.
Why during video calls does the picture and sound from my interlocutors go normally to me, but not from me to them?
In this case, not only incoming, but also outgoing Internet speed becomes important. Often, providers do not indicate the outgoing speed in the tariff at all, but you can check it yourself using the same Speedtest.net.
To broadcast via a webcam, an outgoing speed of 1 megabit per second is sufficient. In the case of HD cameras (and especially Full HD), the requirements for outgoing speed increase.
Why do Internet service providers start at 20–30 or more megabits per second in speed tariffs?
Because the higher the speed, the more money I can take it from you. Providers could keep the tariffs “from the past” with a speed of 2–10 megabits per second and reduce their cost to 50–100 rubles, but why? It is much more profitable to increase the minimum speeds and prices.
