In the last few weeks, particularly in the evenings, we have experienced a noticeable slow-down in our broadband speed. We received a letter yesterday from Tony Baird, Technology Director of Vodafone saying that we will see improvements in our broadband speed by August and then experience consistent and reliable fast speeds from September.

Vodafone say that they are seeing massive spikes in demand for data across New Zealand and that in fact, it's a 30% increase in data usage on their network every month. This is apparently, largely due to the "huge success of streaming video services such as Netflix and NEON". This has resulted in reduced network speeds as Vodafone tries to meet the demand.

We are about to upgrade our cable broadband to either 50Mbps or 100Mbps. We do quite a lot of high definition video streaming and we wonder whether it's worth paying the extra $10 per month to get 100Mbps instead of 50Mbps? We seldom use two devices at the same time.

When the network slows down due to heavy demand, would it be an advantage to have 100Mbps rather than 50Mbps?

When streaming high definition video, we sometimes get little "stutters" in the reception at our current 15Mbps. Would 100Mbps help to get a steadier video flow or is 50Mbps more than adequate for this purpose.

Thanks very much for your thoughts on this.

Fred