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I really don't understand the NBN meme. I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long) career, and access to high internet speeds ha

by regecks 11y ago

I really don't understand the NBN meme. I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long) career, and access to high internet speeds has never ever really been a problem. When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least 10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP? As someone who sorely wishes that a tech scene would actually take off here, issues that I believe dwarf the NBN are: small companies can't actually afford to fund hacking/R&D, risk aversion, a culture that is generally dismissive of [the] tech [scene], lack of encouragement in school education, and tax system (also the Australian Consumer Law) that will punish you for trying. I worked from a co-working "hacker space" for a couple of years and, uh, well, there was not a lot of hacking going on. I've recently gotten into this for myself, and while mildly successful, all our customers are overseas shrug. Edit: all good points made below. Quality of life will improve for us, still skeptical as to the degree to which it will address fundamental problems with the tech economy here though.

PebblesHD 11y ago
The key point is that as an Australian programmer living relatively close to Sydney in an area less than a decade old, I can only get 5mbps (that's megabits) internet at the best of times, this means I am almost entirely unable to work remotely and getting access to the latest software and libraries requires hours of downloading. I can't host my own test servers because my upload speeds are in the tens of Kbps and all Australian hosting providers are prohibitively expensive. It makes it very difficult to get anything productive done away from the office, where even then I have 15-20mbps peak in the middle of North Sydney.
catmanjan 11y ago
The benefit of NBN wouldn't be for employees, it would be for potential customers. I've heard so many times from so many people "I'd love to use X but my internet is dodgy/stops working when it rains/is slow between 5 and bed time" Where X is any number of internet reliant service
- imron 11y ago
  internet is dodgy/stops working when it rains Hah! This so much. Sorry <client>, we can't have our scheduled video call meeting now because it's raining and my Internet isn't working. This has actually happened to me. If it wasn't so embarrassingly awful, it'd probably be funny.
gelatocar 11y ago
> When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? There's a pretty long list actually. If you've got 10 people in a office sharing a 10mbit pipe then the internet is straight up prohibitively slow. On top of that, if your users are on slow internet then they are less likely to interact with whatever you are building, especially if it involves rich media interaction like uploading photos/videos (and upload speeds are even slower here). Then there are workflow collaboration tools like teleconferencing, dispatching of large files over networks that can take hours. It makes it harder to work remotely and adds a fairly large extra cost for small tech businesses to absorb in getting decent internet set up. And this is all going to get worse as the rest of the world speeds past us and starts creating content for gigabit internet while we are sitting here trying to get by on our promised 25megabits.
- saiya-jin 11y ago
  I think he meant a single person working remotely from home, for which, like it or not, a true 10 MBit/s connection is more than needed. Yes, 3.5 GB file download will take 1 hour, but I haven't met a single dev in past 11 years in +- 7 companies that would claim it prevents them from doing their work. Now if your work is rather unusual, OR you have to upload lots of stuff and that goes 100 KB/s max, that's another topic. This is not typical for most devs. Teleconferencing - for most devs, what is the above value over classic conf call (an honest question)? I see little, it's still far from having people sitting behind same desk and brainstorming.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    As a remote developer, I agree. I need low latency for calls and meetings, but I don't care much about file transfer speeds. I'm perfectly fine on 4 Mbit.
imron 11y ago
> what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? From personal experience as an Australian freelance developer who works mostly remotely, the difference is screencasts and video calls where the other party's screen is fuzzy and sometimes unreadable, with frequent call (or at least video) dropouts/stuttering, vs crystal clear clarity and no dropouts/stuttering. It's also useful if you are dealing with clients that have medium-large datasets (> 1GB) for you to use. It's the difference between a few minutes transfer or a few hours. I've had cases where the client was local and it was faster for me to catch public transport in to the city and back to pick up a USB with the data rather than transfer it online. That's the lucky case when the client was local - good luck if they're based overseas. I'm currently in Taiwan and have a 100mbps connection - the difference in doing these things vs doing it in Australia on a 10mbps connection is night and day. Killing the FTTH NBN was an incredibly short sighted decision.
hartror 11y ago
I've worked in Melbourne in small tech companies for almost 15 years and have setup a few offices in my time. The biggest issue in finding and setting up a new office for a small tech company is the internet connection. One office the ADSL worked fine for the first week and then dropped out for a week. It did this every time it rained heavily, the Telstra techs informed us that the copper for the whole street was rotten. We had to run local servers to ensure everyone could continue working if the internet dropped out. Telstra never actually properly fixed it in our two years there. Another office took 3 months to get connected due to the age of the building, we had to pay two office rents for over 4 months. Then once the company grew to fit the office it outgrew the internet connection, but took another couple of months to get dual band in. All the SaaS services everyone relied on to do their jobs were barely usable, even after a `no streaming media` honor policy was put in place. This is amplified if you rely on your internet connection for VoIP to communicate with teams around Australia and the world. Important meeting with a client? Keep a 4G modem handy guys. All these things create risk and frustration for everyone, slowing down your and distracting from getting stuff done.
mb_72 11y ago
Some points made already, but this might be of interest. I'm on ADSL2 in Adelaide (South Australia), and my business partner is on the NBN in Hobart (Tasmania). One project we work on together is using the Outsystems platform, and this means a compile cycle involves (at the least) a compile and upload to a remote server; if there are clashing changes made, it's also necessary to download the 'other' version and an automatic comparison of the code changes is made locally. With his NBN speed he can effectively lock me out of making changes, as by the time I've downloaded his changes, he's already made more changes and uploaded them, and I can never 'catch up'. Also, it's not just the speed, it's reliability. I'm in the Adelaide hills, with old copper, and I'd say I have momentary drop-outs on a regular basis, and drop-outs of a few hours or more once a month. Very annoying when you want an 'always on' connection. I've found my tethered mobile phone is faster to use for uploading than my ADSL2 connection. Finally - I've also worked remotely based in Estonia, and the reliability, affordability and speed of the connection there eats my local Adelaide connection for breakfast; you don't even really think about, the quality of the connection starts tending towards that of a LAN connection.
beefsack 11y ago
> what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? I'd imagine you'd be less nonchalant about it if you were transferring gigabytes of data from a backup in an emergency.
- regecks 11y ago
  My backup strategy does not involve a residential internet connection so I cannot relate.
  - jsmeaton 11y ago
    Even at home? Do you backup your laptop/PC/NAS? Would your internet connection even allow that? I get 1.5mb upload at the very best of times.
imron 11y ago
> still skeptical as to the degree to which it will address fundamental problems with the tech economy here though. Fast, reliable Internet is going to be the beating heart of any modern tech economy. Fix all the other problems you mentioned (tax, education, risk aversion etc) and it will all be for naught if companies and freelancers are stuck on a 10mbps connection that drops out when it rains, because they won't be able to have meaningful and reliable collaboration with anyone outside their own physical location. You can't have a flourishing tech scene with that limitation. It's not just 'improved quality of life' for techies, it's about being able to conduct business or not in reliable and productive manner.
NamTaf 11y ago
>I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long) career, and access to high internet speeds has never ever really been a problem. When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? >Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least 10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP? If you could also include my place, 5km away from Brisbane's CBD, to be upgraded past 5Mbit that'd be pretty sweet too. And to achieve that I have to deal with slightly unreliable internet - rock solid is probably closer to 4-4.5Mbit. (You greatly overestimate the ubiquity of high-speed internet even in capital cities. It's not just the outback that has terrible internet.)
PhilWright 11y ago
My company has three sites in Melbourne and none of them have access to the NBN yet, or for the next couple of years. Two of those sites can only get around 3MB connections no matter how much money you pay. The copper connections are just that poor. Depending on where you are based if is like being in a third world country for Internet speeds.
manicdee 11y ago
I would kill for 10Mbps. That would reduce download times by more than a factor of two. I live in Canberra though, so it's not like high speed broadband is going to come near me in the next decade. Bandwidth requirements are increasi year over year, simply because once people can actually use slick media-rich sites, they actually do use them. Once people can VPN in to the Windows-centric workplace, they will. Once office based managers can successfully video-conference their teams, they will. Without high speed broadband, what hope is there for innovation?
- spangry 11y ago
  Have you checked out iiNet's VDSL2 (using the fibre they acquired with TransACT)? I had no clue it existed and only recently stumbled across it. Getting about 60/20 now.
kalleboo 11y ago
I work remotely/online and I'm visiting my parents in rural Australia for 2 months right now. I can live with the 5/.5 Mbit 3G connection they have (roof-mounted antenna), often with clever use of a shell on a remote server (e.g. doing big file downloads/video transcodes on a server instead of my laptop). I've actually had a more stable/high quality connection during our weekly Skype group meetings than a coworker on a 100 Mbit/s comcast connection in NH... The real issue is the cost - around $8/GB. Things are a lot better in cities, but costs are still higher than elsewhere and caps are still prevalent. It gets even more ridiculous that just down the valley (a 30 minute drive down winding dirt roads, but as the bird flies not too far, and it's the origin of the 3G signal they get now) there's an LTE signal where I got 100 MBit/s on speedtest. At that speed you're spending $8 every 10 seconds!
spangry 11y ago
Interesting that this debate always centres on current bandwidth capability. I think the two biggest economic advantages of 'fibre to the home' are actually lower latency and future upgradability. On latency, the round-trip time for a packet between Sydney and LA is about 2-3x slower than one would realisticly expect from the transmission medium. Why? It's the routing hops that introduce the additional latency. So it stands to reason that FTTH == fewer routing/repeating hops == lower latency. This is in contrast to 'fibre to the node', which requires additional routing hops, more resending and error correction, and, if you want to use fancy technologies like VDSL 'vectoring', more active processing of communications in transit (to calculate the correct cross-talk cancelling noise to push down all lines). In addition, wave-division multiplexing with latency at 99.7 per cent the speed of light in a vacuum has been achieved on fibre (admittedly in a lab/academic setting) over a distance of 310 metres (source: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.45 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.45). Why is lower latency desirable, from a national economic perspective? Because it creates larger scope for distributed computation of non-parallel processing and higher IO for geographically distributed storage. So data-centres can be located on cheaper land, further away from the CBD. Perhaps in future it also means someone in Darwin could utilise the idling processor, or spare hard disk space, of someone in Sydney via something like Etherium. All of this becomes harder and less efficienct as latency creeps up. For general background, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Comparison_with_electrical_transmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Comp... On future upgradability, I'd argue we're reaching the upper bandwidth limits of what copper can provide (as a real world, fixed line infrastructure). This seems to be around 100-150mbit non-symmetric under the most ideal conditions, using some pretty fancy tech (on both the carrier and consumer ends), although the hypothetical maximum is supposedly around 10Gbits (achievable in LANs, unlikely to be achievable in WANs with current copper assets). How long until this is not 'enough'? In contrast, for single strand fibre, NEC have achieved 101Tbit/s over 165km, and NTT 69.1 Tbit/s over 240km. Cisco projects the volume of global IP traffic to grow at a compounding annualised growth rate of 23% between 2014 and 2019; in other words global IP traffic volume will triple in 5 years (source: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/VNI_Hyperconnectivity_WP.html http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-pr...). Keep in mind this is strictly global IP traffic. Alcatel-lucent and Bell Labs, factoring in 'metro' (non-backbone) traffic (e.g. office to datacentre, consumer to CDN), forecast a quadrupling of bandwidth volume between 2015 and 2020, with an apparently exponential growth rate (source: https://mc-11560-1882305812.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/sites/default/files/dm2015019535_fig01_june1.jpg https://mc-11560-1882305812.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/site...). By opting to 'destroy' the original NBN, our government has knee-capped Australia's future economic prospects. Perhaps Lee Kuan Yew was right and Australia is destined to be the 'poor white-trash of Asia'.
scrupulusalbion 11y ago
>When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? While you asked about programming, I think it is the non-work stuff that matters, namely entertainment. If you play video games and/or watch Netflix, then a greater than 10mbps might make those things easier and thus more enjoyable, afaik. I presently have a 1Mbps connection, which is consumed mostly by YouTube videos. All my other internet usage could be satiated with 1/3 of my present bandwidth. If I cared to watch Netflix or played video games, then I would be unhappy unless I had a substantially better connection, perhaps >10mbps.

by regecks 11y ago

PebblesHD 11y ago

The key point is that as an Australian programmer living relatively close to Sydney in an area less than a decade old, I can only get 5mbps (that's megabits) internet at the best of times, this means I am almost entirely unable to work remotely and getting access to the latest software and libraries requires hours of downloading. I can't host my own test servers because my upload speeds are in the tens of Kbps and all Australian hosting providers are prohibitively expensive. It makes it very difficult to get anything productive done away from the office, where even then I have 15-20mbps peak in the middle of North Sydney.

catmanjan 11y ago

The benefit of NBN wouldn't be for employees, it would be for potential customers. I've heard so many times from so many people "I'd love to use X but my internet is dodgy/stops working when it rains/is slow between 5 and bed time" Where X is any number of internet reliant service

imron 11y ago
internet is dodgy/stops working when it rains Hah! This so much. Sorry <client>, we can't have our scheduled video call meeting now because it's raining and my Internet isn't working. This has actually happened to me. If it wasn't so embarrassingly awful, it'd probably be funny.

gelatocar 11y ago

> When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? There's a pretty long list actually. If you've got 10 people in a office sharing a 10mbit pipe then the internet is straight up prohibitively slow. On top of that, if your users are on slow internet then they are less likely to interact with whatever you are building, especially if it involves rich media interaction like uploading photos/videos (and upload speeds are even slower here). Then there are workflow collaboration tools like teleconferencing, dispatching of large files over networks that can take hours. It makes it harder to work remotely and adds a fairly large extra cost for small tech businesses to absorb in getting decent internet set up. And this is all going to get worse as the rest of the world speeds past us and starts creating content for gigabit internet while we are sitting here trying to get by on our promised 25megabits.

saiya-jin 11y ago
I think he meant a single person working remotely from home, for which, like it or not, a true 10 MBit/s connection is more than needed. Yes, 3.5 GB file download will take 1 hour, but I haven't met a single dev in past 11 years in +- 7 companies that would claim it prevents them from doing their work. Now if your work is rather unusual, OR you have to upload lots of stuff and that goes 100 KB/s max, that's another topic. This is not typical for most devs. Teleconferencing - for most devs, what is the above value over classic conf call (an honest question)? I see little, it's still far from having people sitting behind same desk and brainstorming.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  As a remote developer, I agree. I need low latency for calls and meetings, but I don't care much about file transfer speeds. I'm perfectly fine on 4 Mbit.

imron 11y ago

> what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? From personal experience as an Australian freelance developer who works mostly remotely, the difference is screencasts and video calls where the other party's screen is fuzzy and sometimes unreadable, with frequent call (or at least video) dropouts/stuttering, vs crystal clear clarity and no dropouts/stuttering. It's also useful if you are dealing with clients that have medium-large datasets (> 1GB) for you to use. It's the difference between a few minutes transfer or a few hours. I've had cases where the client was local and it was faster for me to catch public transport in to the city and back to pick up a USB with the data rather than transfer it online. That's the lucky case when the client was local - good luck if they're based overseas. I'm currently in Taiwan and have a 100mbps connection - the difference in doing these things vs doing it in Australia on a 10mbps connection is night and day. Killing the FTTH NBN was an incredibly short sighted decision.

hartror 11y ago

I've worked in Melbourne in small tech companies for almost 15 years and have setup a few offices in my time. The biggest issue in finding and setting up a new office for a small tech company is the internet connection. One office the ADSL worked fine for the first week and then dropped out for a week. It did this every time it rained heavily, the Telstra techs informed us that the copper for the whole street was rotten. We had to run local servers to ensure everyone could continue working if the internet dropped out. Telstra never actually properly fixed it in our two years there. Another office took 3 months to get connected due to the age of the building, we had to pay two office rents for over 4 months. Then once the company grew to fit the office it outgrew the internet connection, but took another couple of months to get dual band in. All the SaaS services everyone relied on to do their jobs were barely usable, even after a `no streaming media` honor policy was put in place. This is amplified if you rely on your internet connection for VoIP to communicate with teams around Australia and the world. Important meeting with a client? Keep a 4G modem handy guys. All these things create risk and frustration for everyone, slowing down your and distracting from getting stuff done.

mb_72 11y ago

Some points made already, but this might be of interest. I'm on ADSL2 in Adelaide (South Australia), and my business partner is on the NBN in Hobart (Tasmania). One project we work on together is using the Outsystems platform, and this means a compile cycle involves (at the least) a compile and upload to a remote server; if there are clashing changes made, it's also necessary to download the 'other' version and an automatic comparison of the code changes is made locally. With his NBN speed he can effectively lock me out of making changes, as by the time I've downloaded his changes, he's already made more changes and uploaded them, and I can never 'catch up'. Also, it's not just the speed, it's reliability. I'm in the Adelaide hills, with old copper, and I'd say I have momentary drop-outs on a regular basis, and drop-outs of a few hours or more once a month. Very annoying when you want an 'always on' connection. I've found my tethered mobile phone is faster to use for uploading than my ADSL2 connection. Finally - I've also worked remotely based in Estonia, and the reliability, affordability and speed of the connection there eats my local Adelaide connection for breakfast; you don't even really think about, the quality of the connection starts tending towards that of a LAN connection.

beefsack 11y ago

> what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? I'd imagine you'd be less nonchalant about it if you were transferring gigabytes of data from a backup in an emergency.

regecks 11y ago
My backup strategy does not involve a residential internet connection so I cannot relate.
- jsmeaton 11y ago
  Even at home? Do you backup your laptop/PC/NAS? Would your internet connection even allow that? I get 1.5mb upload at the very best of times.

imron 11y ago

> still skeptical as to the degree to which it will address fundamental problems with the tech economy here though. Fast, reliable Internet is going to be the beating heart of any modern tech economy. Fix all the other problems you mentioned (tax, education, risk aversion etc) and it will all be for naught if companies and freelancers are stuck on a 10mbps connection that drops out when it rains, because they won't be able to have meaningful and reliable collaboration with anyone outside their own physical location. You can't have a flourishing tech scene with that limitation. It's not just 'improved quality of life' for techies, it's about being able to conduct business or not in reliable and productive manner.

NamTaf 11y ago

>I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long) career, and access to high internet speeds has never ever really been a problem. When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? >Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least 10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP? If you could also include my place, 5km away from Brisbane's CBD, to be upgraded past 5Mbit that'd be pretty sweet too. And to achieve that I have to deal with slightly unreliable internet - rock solid is probably closer to 4-4.5Mbit. (You greatly overestimate the ubiquity of high-speed internet even in capital cities. It's not just the outback that has terrible internet.)

PhilWright 11y ago

My company has three sites in Melbourne and none of them have access to the NBN yet, or for the next couple of years. Two of those sites can only get around 3MB connections no matter how much money you pay. The copper connections are just that poor. Depending on where you are based if is like being in a third world country for Internet speeds.

manicdee 11y ago

I would kill for 10Mbps. That would reduce download times by more than a factor of two. I live in Canberra though, so it's not like high speed broadband is going to come near me in the next decade. Bandwidth requirements are increasi year over year, simply because once people can actually use slick media-rich sites, they actually do use them. Once people can VPN in to the Windows-centric workplace, they will. Once office based managers can successfully video-conference their teams, they will. Without high speed broadband, what hope is there for innovation?

spangry 11y ago
Have you checked out iiNet's VDSL2 (using the fibre they acquired with TransACT)? I had no clue it existed and only recently stumbled across it. Getting about 60/20 now.

kalleboo 11y ago

I work remotely/online and I'm visiting my parents in rural Australia for 2 months right now. I can live with the 5/.5 Mbit 3G connection they have (roof-mounted antenna), often with clever use of a shell on a remote server (e.g. doing big file downloads/video transcodes on a server instead of my laptop). I've actually had a more stable/high quality connection during our weekly Skype group meetings than a coworker on a 100 Mbit/s comcast connection in NH... The real issue is the cost - around $8/GB. Things are a lot better in cities, but costs are still higher than elsewhere and caps are still prevalent. It gets even more ridiculous that just down the valley (a 30 minute drive down winding dirt roads, but as the bird flies not too far, and it's the origin of the 3G signal they get now) there's an LTE signal where I got 100 MBit/s on speedtest. At that speed you're spending $8 every 10 seconds!

spangry 11y ago

Interesting that this debate always centres on current bandwidth capability. I think the two biggest economic advantages of 'fibre to the home' are actually lower latency and future upgradability. On latency, the round-trip time for a packet between Sydney and LA is about 2-3x slower than one would realisticly expect from the transmission medium. Why? It's the routing hops that introduce the additional latency. So it stands to reason that FTTH == fewer routing/repeating hops == lower latency. This is in contrast to 'fibre to the node', which requires additional routing hops, more resending and error correction, and, if you want to use fancy technologies like VDSL 'vectoring', more active processing of communications in transit (to calculate the correct cross-talk cancelling noise to push down all lines). In addition, wave-division multiplexing with latency at 99.7 per cent the speed of light in a vacuum has been achieved on fibre (admittedly in a lab/academic setting) over a distance of 310 metres (source: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.45 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.45). Why is lower latency desirable, from a national economic perspective? Because it creates larger scope for distributed computation of non-parallel processing and higher IO for geographically distributed storage. So data-centres can be located on cheaper land, further away from the CBD. Perhaps in future it also means someone in Darwin could utilise the idling processor, or spare hard disk space, of someone in Sydney via something like Etherium. All of this becomes harder and less efficienct as latency creeps up. For general background, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Comparison_with_electrical_transmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Comp... On future upgradability, I'd argue we're reaching the upper bandwidth limits of what copper can provide (as a real world, fixed line infrastructure). This seems to be around 100-150mbit non-symmetric under the most ideal conditions, using some pretty fancy tech (on both the carrier and consumer ends), although the hypothetical maximum is supposedly around 10Gbits (achievable in LANs, unlikely to be achievable in WANs with current copper assets). How long until this is not 'enough'? In contrast, for single strand fibre, NEC have achieved 101Tbit/s over 165km, and NTT 69.1 Tbit/s over 240km. Cisco projects the volume of global IP traffic to grow at a compounding annualised growth rate of 23% between 2014 and 2019; in other words global IP traffic volume will triple in 5 years (source: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/VNI_Hyperconnectivity_WP.html http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-pr...). Keep in mind this is strictly global IP traffic. Alcatel-lucent and Bell Labs, factoring in 'metro' (non-backbone) traffic (e.g. office to datacentre, consumer to CDN), forecast a quadrupling of bandwidth volume between 2015 and 2020, with an apparently exponential growth rate (source: https://mc-11560-1882305812.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/sites/default/files/dm2015019535_fig01_june1.jpg https://mc-11560-1882305812.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/site...). By opting to 'destroy' the original NBN, our government has knee-capped Australia's future economic prospects. Perhaps Lee Kuan Yew was right and Australia is destined to be the 'poor white-trash of Asia'.

scrupulusalbion 11y ago

>When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? While you asked about programming, I think it is the non-work stuff that matters, namely entertainment. If you play video games and/or watch Netflix, then a greater than 10mbps might make those things easier and thus more enjoyable, afaik. I presently have a 1Mbps connection, which is consumed mostly by YouTube videos. All my other internet usage could be satiated with 1/3 of my present bandwidth. If I cared to watch Netflix or played video games, then I would be unhappy unless I had a substantially better connection, perhaps >10mbps.