8Mb/s is bad??? Seems to me, the faster they make it these days, the
more people expect and the less happy they are with what they have.
It really depends on three things, what you do on the net, how congested
your part of the net gets and your future needs. I have never had ADSL,
I skipped that part and went straight from dialup to HFC Cable when it
was introduced in Nunawading
I have 6Mb/s and it seems plenty fast enough for me at this point in
time.
I have 25 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up. When I had HFC cable in Melbourne I
had 20 Mbps down and 256 Kbps up. The bottleneck for me was my uplink
speed. I couldn't use video when on Skype chats with people as the
uplink video stream would saturate and eventually overload the
connection. You must note that your uplink is your backchannel for
everything else you do on the download side. If your backchannel is
saturated it affects everything you do on the downlink including making
webpages downloads impossibly slow. Voice alone was ok, no saturation.
Now, with NBN, I am paying for the middle tier speed (10 up 25 down).
Another $15 per month and I can bump that up to the top tier (50 up 100
down) but I simply don't need that kind of speed for what I do. In fact,
I would have been happy with my HFC cable connection had the uplink been
even a mere 5 Mbps as it would have coped with my needs.
By the way, another term for Bandwidth Throttling is Bandwidth Shaping.
Optus used to "Shape" my download bandwidth to 256 Kbps if I went over
my 500 Gigabyte allowance - and I did on occasion. It was enough to do
email and basic web browsing but youtube and bandwidth heavy websites
were out.