Government "Fibre hub in every rural community by 2015" plan

Zarf

Zarf

Zarf

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11922424

Looks good initially, but the devil will be in the details. I'm hoping that this will be what it sounds like - A fat, non-profit backbone connection to every village (no idea how large a "rural community" will have to be in order to qualify yet) and then allow local businesses and communities to sort out the last mile. Without the need to pay through the nose for a BT leased line the economics of these sorts of businesses become a lot more viable.

I'm hoping that in a few years time I'll just be able to pay my local and flexible local company/ISP a few grand for them to run Fiber over the telephone poles between this "Digital Hub" and my house.
 
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It does sound too good to be true, but I suspect they will build the infrastructure and then sell it off at a later date to bring in some more cash.

I suspect they will run fibre over the existing telephone poles and into the houses as thats the obvious way to do it. A better long term option(although a lot more expensive) would be to replace all the existing telephone cables with fibre so a single line can carry both voice and data.
 
It'd be great to get more ISPs involved in "super-fast broadband" really. Currently the cheapest options are BT + Primus (40/10 Mbps for £33) or Virgin Media (50/5 Mbps for £37.24, minor throttling). BT's looks the best right now but as soon as Virgin Media's 100 Mbps is available it'll probably be a different story!
 
What I'd love to see is BT's ducts+poles and Fibre rental being brought under their own separate divisions, similar to what Openreach did with regards to exchange access. Since BT gets special treatment and only pays around 1/20th the amount of tax that any other company would pay for it's Fibre network It's only fair that other companies have the opportunity to make use of them at the same rates that BT charges itself.
 
Will be interesting to see how this applies to Hull with our monopoly telecoms provider. I would be happy with any decent improvement on my current 2mb.
 
a reliable 2mb connection is more than enough for 98% of people that would be a better target, only a few % of people want 10/20/50mb connections.. and of those most dont actually need it and a majority of the rest only need it to pirate stuff...

reliable 2mb ish is a very good target... forget 50mb...
 
2 Mbps is only just about good enough for iPlayer streaming, people will not be content with that for very long. Everyone will want to stream HD video to three or four devices at the same time in a few years.
 
edscdk said:
a reliable 2mb connection is more than enough for 98% of people that would be a better target, only a few % of people want 10/20/50mb connections.. and of those most dont actually need it and a majority of the rest only need it to pirate stuff...

reliable 2mb ish is a very good target... forget 50mb...
Click to expand...

Sure, 2Mb is just about sufficient for how many people use the web currently (as long as you stick to SD on streaming video ... ), but that's missing the point. A horse and cart on dirt tracks was considered sufficient for people at one time too.

The point of next generation access is that it pushes development of new technologies and ways to use the web, just look at how the advent of ADSL changed the services that are available and enabled things that weren't even imagined a couple of decades ago. A proper Fibre to the Home network would also massively lower latencies to the <5ms range across the whole of the UK making virtualised and remote computing services like On-Live really feasible, not to mention Hi-Def and 3D content delivery benefits from the bandwidth. It'd be pretty naiive to think that the consumer entertainment world is going to stand still at 1080p, a decade from now we'll have larger TV's running "retina" style displays at 4 times the resolution and 3D thrown in to make it interesting. Even with efficient codecs a 100Mb pipe would struggle with that.

You can bet that forward-looking countries like Japan and Korea are going to find new and interesting uses for their superior infrastructure that haven't even been imagined yet, the question is how many years behind the curve do we plan to be when that happens and how many of our citizens will be left behind? NGA will take years to implement, the sooner we start the better.
 
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Can someone give a technical perspective on why a national highspeed wireless network isn't viable? Is it purely a lack of bandwidth? As from what I have read, there is far more wasted / unused radio bandwidth (e.g. between TV frequencies) than there is used.
 
Robbie G said:
Can someone give a technical perspective on why a national highspeed wireless network isn't viable? Is it purely a lack of bandwidth? As from what I have read, there is far more wasted / unused radio bandwidth (e.g. between TV frequencies) than there is used.
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- Lack of bandwidth
- Issues with distance
- Issues with cost of equipment
- Its a broadcast medium so the performance degrades the more users there are
- Issues with interference
- Security

etc. etc.

- Pea0n
 
This report is aimed at the final third, the towns and villages that BT / VM don't want to touch or deem uneconomical.
It's pointless BT or VM going out on a limb to install into an area that may not have any demand for it.
Let the communities decide what kind of broadband they want.
Personally I think it's the best way of doing it.

It will start off slowly, but once the first few installations have happened, many lessons will be learned. Costs will go down and we'll start seeing progress for these people who would otherwise not be getting broadband (rightly or wrong) from the main telcos.
 
Robbie G said:
Can someone give a technical perspective on why a national highspeed wireless network isn't viable? Is it purely a lack of bandwidth? As from what I have read, there is far more wasted / unused radio bandwidth (e.g. between TV frequencies) than there is used.
Click to expand...

LTE should go a long way towards this, It's specified at being sub 5ms latency on small IP packets, and peak download rates over 300Mb/s (86Mb/s upload)
The spectrum isn't even sold off yet in the UK, so we won't see deployments starting until 2013 or so. In addition one of the carriers has launched it over in America and in real life conditions its not looking much more impressive than existing 3g (>150ms latencies, <10Mb/s throughput)
IIRC in the UK it's destined for the frequencies that old analog TV used to run on, so it should at least have decent building penetration and go over/around hills.
 
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lol Aren't they still a way off getting just 'broadband' rolled out to all communities? Look up north some people don't have any option than expensive sattelite, with dialup uplink.
 
Sounds like subsidised installation of FTTC to me. The only question is "Am I in the 90%?". If yes great, if not BT are scum of the earth burn in hell etc etc.
 
whitecrook said:
lol Aren't they still a way off getting just 'broadband' rolled out to all communities? Look up north some people don't have any option than expensive sattelite, with dialup uplink.
Click to expand...

You can now get two way satellite, and the new Ka band satellites are launching which can provide nice throughput of up to 50Mb/s. As always though, latencies are killer - It's something like a 37000 KM round trip and physics is a bitch. With the way HTTP browsing works even a 50Mb Satellite link will totally crawl thanks to the request latencies (at least 130ms to get to the satellite and back, then your normal land based routing latencies on top). Gaming is right out of the question though, and It's not great for two-way communication either. for these sorts of things people would actually be better off with a 128Kb/s ISDN link than 50Mb satellite.
Streaming media and bulk downloads are awesome though, which is something - but caps and usage limits are far worse than for a landline.
 
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