As Exeter Hits 90% Gigabit Speed Availability, What Does This Mean for Users?

More than half a decade since full-speed fibre internet first arrived in Exeter, the city has finally crossed the 90% penetration threshold. This means that nine out of ten homes within the city limits have access to gigabit speeds, with more added to the network every week. This plays an important part in the modernisation of any area, granting access to the full range of modern online technologies we increasingly rely on for professional and personal use.

As of writing, the current fibre penetration in Exeter reaches 90.4%, above the UK average of 87.8%. Far from the days of dial-up and 56k connections, many of us still find ourselves taking the speeds we can access here in Exeter for granted. To gain a better appreciation of how far we’ve come, it can be better to take a look back and measure against the performance many readers grew up with.

Gigabit By the Numbers

The best illustrations of gigabit’s speed potential come from comparing it to the classic 56k modems many of us used in the past. For a point of reference, consider an average movie streamed from a platform like Netflix. These weigh in at about 2.5 gigabytes.

At the speeds offered by a 56k modem, a film of this size would take around four days and ten hours to download. In other words, you wouldn’t be streaming it. On a full gigabit speed connection, this movie would download in a mere 21 seconds. Streaming in this instance is not much of an issue.

Work and Home Applications

Speed in home streaming can be an advantage enough in itself for Exonians. Aside from the help it demonstrates for the individual, having access to so much overhead also means a system can host many more active users and devices. Since connection speed is essentially shared between all active users, the more people using a network, the slower it will become. With gigabit, the amount of overhead is so extreme that most normal households never need to worry about slowdown through overuse.

These benefits extend to the business sphere, such as physical businesses that offer free Wi-Fi. Older connections could become unusable for patrons quickly, where again, gigabit provides enough raw speed that no reasonable use cases will suffer.

Even online businesses benefit from faster speeds thanks to the ease of integrating with online business systems. Consider working with an iGaming aggregation platform as an example. This particular platform works through a single API integration, centralising everything users need in one space. Whether selecting games or checking data reports and analytics, better speed means avoiding issues of crashing and disconnects through slowdown. Such advantages apply to any industry relying on online connectivity.

While we have a while before we hit the 98+% penetration of places like Kingston upon Hull and Luton, Exeter is still among the fastest-developing cities in the UK for gigabit speed. Even if you don’t upgrade, the lower prices of all plans through more competition should affect all users. Just remember to think back from time to time to appreciate the pain Exonians used to feel when they heard that dial-up screech.

Main image by Panumas Nikhomkhai from Pixabay