Since late February, Proximus has been offering the fastest internet in Belgium through its new Ultra Fibre offer, increasing its original speed tenfold. But is the price worth it and is it really necessary to have such fast internet speeds?
For €30 per month, customers in five major cities - Brussels, Liège, Namur, Ghent and Antwerp - can enjoy a speed of 8.5 Gbps for downloads and 1 Gbps for uploads, RTBF reports. Add to that a €12 Fibre Gigabit option, which is the intermediary between the basic offer and the premium speed of Ultra Fibre, and customers could be paying €42 per month to take advantage of the new Proximus product.
On the one hand, this is a marked improvement in general for Proximus customers who have been left behind by those who use competitors Telenet and Voo which have benefited from new technology that allows higher speeds.
This offer is a first for Proximus and puts the provider and its customers on the top of the pile, drastically improving its service that for many years has run on xDSL technology, transmitting through existing telephone lines.
Is it needed?
On the other hand, in terms of necessity, it is questionable that people actually need the speed the new Proximus fibre network could deliver.
According to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), standard-definition video streaming consumes, on average, 3 to 4 Mbps of the bandwidth of your internet connection. In high definition (HD), the required bit rate rises to 5 to 8 Mbps. Even in 4K, the highest definition generally available on platforms, the necessary bit rate needs only go up to 25 Mbps.
This means that even with 4K content, you'd need to watch more than four video streams simultaneously to saturate a connection capped at 100 Mbps. Ultra Fibre can provide a connection of 8500 Mbps (8.5 Gbps).
Requires compatible devices
In addition, to benefit from the ultra-high speeds, as well as being fitted with a Proximus Internet Box +, equipped with a 10 gigabit Ethernet port, your home will need to be connected to the new provider’s fibre network and you will need to have devices that can deal with such speeds. These are still rare and components such as network cards remain expensive.
Wi-Fi connections will also not be greatly improved because the main benefit of the offer is based on a cable connection.
The offer will undoubtedly attract technology fans willing to pay the price for something they may not really need but it appears that those to benefit the most from Ultra Fibre will be independent or business customers. Indeed, a single Ultra Fibre connection would be enough to connect, for example, several computers, the Wi-Fi connection of a waiting room, or several servers running in the cloud.
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At the moment at least, the offer is only available in the five major cities. Additionally, the current coverage of fibre also remains quite limited with only 21% of Belgian households and companies being connectable.
