Internet in the UK - getting worse (relative to EU + world)

Soldato
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Tell me about it. Sat here in the middle of a city and I don't even have a date for when any sort of fibre will be available and Virgin refuse to install at the property. So currently stuck on 1MB/s ADSL2+ which absolutely sucks when you consider how large games are these days and how you can no longer get hard copies.

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Associate
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Ask yourself the same question in the late 90s but subtract gigabit for 20Mb.

Things move on, you might not need gigabit this moment in time, but in 5-10 years when more and more of your white goods and home electronics are on IoT, streaming is 8k+ and multiple streams are concurrent...

Exactly this, back in the 90's we didn't have huge file sizes for things, like games etc on 700mb cd-r, but now things are huge, some games over 150gb in data and as you mention 8k etc.
 
Soldato
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I live abroad, I have an 800mb fibre connection to my apartment which costs me 20 euro a month. It's rock solid, has never failed and never seems to slow down. Comparably my father in the UK pays a lot more for a 300mb connection with Virgin Media but it feels a lot slower at peak times.

Also, genuine question, will 5G have suitable latency times for gaming?

I wouldn't count on it really, wireless has never been all that stable. Higher pings and packet loss are expected. Also 5g is short range, so there will be a lot of dead spots.

Anyway the problem we have in this country is the government only seem to care about London. It hoovers up all the cash for infrastructure.
 
Soldato
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I like OR but they have been slow off the mark with the next step of technology. Mainly because they won't deploy it until there is competition.

When ADSL2+ came in on an isp called Be it took BT/OR 8 years to bring it on to their platform. Now it looks like we're going to be around 6 years behind on FTTP, unless you're lucky enough to get a good G.fast connection, be in the early plans for native FTTP or you can afford (and have the opportunity) to buy your own fibre with Fibre on Demand.
 
Soldato
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Internet in this country is dire by many others standards.

5g may help some but home has barely 1 bar on 3 and EE so wouldn't count on it solving the massive lack of investment/modernisation in UK comms infrastructure.
 
Soldato
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5G being the norm is still light years away for the average user in an average town. I didn't get 3G here until about 2009 and it took until 2016 to have solid 4G.
 
Soldato
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Yeah the state of broadband in this country is a mess really. Spending far too much time and money making the best of out of date infrastructure. The big cities that already get pretty good speeds are the ones that are getting fibre trials when there's still a lot of people on <5mb connections with no other options. I get 30mb down and that is the only option I have. It's perfectly good enough most of the time, but there are occasions where more would be better.

5G is not the option, it barely has any more coverage than a wifi access point.
 
Caporegime
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To the people saying, "What do you need gigabit for?"

Well it's not just the speed.

Today, stuck as we are with FTTC (at best), we're also stuck with a rapidly degrading "last mile" local loop. If you're lucky it's copper. For many is aluminium (because it was cheaper at the time, and the internet wasn't invented).

OpenReach are absolutely 100% useless at fixing faults with the line going into your house. Anything like a high resistivity fault caused by a dodgy joint somewhere, will guaranteed take them about 3-5 visits and several different engineers. Most of whom will simply say "no fault found" and try to charge you/your ISP £50 for the trouble.

As one OpenReach engineer candidly told me, they have 30 mins to investigate per callout, absolutely no more under any circumstances, and that he had almost zero chance of finding anything in that time, if the fault didn't jump out and hit him over the head.

For many the only real reliability and speed comes from ditching the ancient 19th century cabling. The extra speed of FTTP is no doubt welcome. But so is the fact that you're no longer using a positively ancient line which BT/OR just aren't capable of maintaining/fixing.

I'm sure most of this is incorrect considering at least 3 cities are trailing Gbit broadband.

You also have to remember that our cellular networks are far better than most European countries, significantly cheaper too and with the advent of 5G, home broadband could almost be a thing of the past.
Because all we use the internet for is browsing on our phones? You might do but I hardly ever use my phone (for anything), let alone stare at a tiny screen website rendering where everything is squashed up and awful.

Then when you try to tether your phone to your PC you find that all the carriers have really cracked down on this; your "unlimited data" only applies to your phone usage, and you only have something daft like 5gig of tether allowance per month.

So how will home broadband be a thing of the past? 5G is not going to be the saviour if the same strict restrictions apply to 5G as to previous gens. Mobile carriers just aren't able to provide the sort of data allowances that we take for granted with home broadband. Or they start to make losses (so they tell us).
 
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Man of Honour
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You're thinking about this the wrong way IMO.

Given another decade, low earth constellations such as OneWeb and Starlink should be operationally mature and providing flexible connectivity on a scale completely impossible today. Sure, plumbing fibre in the ground will still be required for backbone infrastructure but it won't need to be rolled out on a per-premises basis as it is today.
 
Caporegime
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I have 10Gb up and down in the mountains of Switzerland for £25 a month. Yep, the UK infrastructure, monthly limits, throttling and prices are a joke.
I hear this all the time from friends who now live in Europe.

It's just a shame that attitudes in this country are "What do you want a good service for? You'll have BT's copper network and you'll like it. Because I'm happy to pay £35/month for ADSL speeds you should be too. If you don't like it move to Finland or Iceland or France, if it's so important to you. Rar rar rar UK is best country eva."

I just don't think people realise how far behind we've fallen, and continue to fall, behind our EU neighbours.

I'm sure Brexit will help us fall behind even faster.

You're thinking about this the wrong way IMO.

Given another decade, low earth constellations such as OneWeb and Starlink should be operationally mature and providing flexible connectivity on a scale completely impossible today. Sure, plumbing fibre in the ground will still be required for backbone infrastructure but it won't need to be rolled out on a per-premises basis as it is today.
Maybe, maybe not. Lots of technologies look promising and then disappear off the face of the Earth. FTTP is available at a comparatively low investment cost compared to other UK govt white elephant projects.

Also I'd put my money and investment in ground-based infrastructure every day of the week. Becoming completely dependent on satelites for essential communication would be madness. Utter madness.

Scientists are still very worried about space debris taking out an entire section of our satellites (tho I forget which kind/which orbits are most in danger).

e2: Oh lol it's an Elon Musk thing. Next! It'll never happen.
 
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Caporegime
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@FoxEye, it's clear to see you don't really have a good understanding of it all. I implore you to do a little more research and you'll see that it's perfectly viable.
Sorry I'm not a "Musk Believer".

So far they have two satellites, and Musk just fired most of his management team working on StarLink :p

I'm sure it'll be rolled out mid-2019 as Musk claims. Sure.

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

Can we keep the discussion to tech that actually exists and is proven? I couldn't give two craps about anything Musk is doing.
 
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