100 meg

PapaLazaru

PapaLazaru

PapaLazaru

Soldato
Joined
23 Dec 2009
Posts
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Most of us can but dream of 50.

I get less than 2.

A gaming friend of mine in Estonia gets this -

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We are so behind the times. :(
 
Thats because our infrastructure is so old. Price you pay for being the first to have telecommunications I suppose.
 
Gog said:
Thats because our infrastructure is so old. Price you pay for being the first to have telecommunications I suppose.
Click to expand...

Actually much of it is the price we pay for choosing to live in houses. Lots of Europeans live in apartments in cities, in the UK it's fairly rare in comparison. Same story in a lot of Asian countries with good connectivity.

What that means is both modern buildings which are easy to wire internally (cable risers like in office buildings etc) and very high population density - which means wiring even a few apartment buildings is financially viable as it allows you to service hundreds of users for not much outlay. To deliver service to an equivalent number of 'average' users in this country you'd be looking at wiring up maybe two or three suburban streets including digging up the pavement, laying conduit in people's gardens etc. Guess which costs more.

Virgin media (or more correctly it's predecessors) tried and nearly went bankrupt in the process. Hence why they have a enormously congested network and piles of traffic shaping today as well as an incomplete national network. Not only that but they started too early and focused on TV so laid coax instead of fibre for the last mile. That last bit isn't so much their fault though as bad luck, nobody saw it coming.

Basically, as a business you'd have to be crazy to try and wire up any significant portion of the UK for those sort of speeds. It doesn't pay off at the levels people are prepared to spend (which isn't helped by plusnet or whoever selling xDSL for £5 a month or some silly tiny margin price).

Yes, our infrastructure is a problem, but it's not because of stupidity or lack of desire to fix it. You come up with a business plan that adds up and do. I've said before, I've worked for some serious ISPs and still do, I know the industry inside out and if I thought it could be done I'd be doing it.
 
to save digging up the streets why don't they use the sewerage system, surely it would be easier(just thinking out load, please feel free to laugh)
 
100Mb/s soon from Virgin and BT.

As for taxpayers spending billions of £s connecting up small town and villages at a massive costs, no thanks. I'm sure the rural population taxpayers will say the same thing about urban population investment, skipping them.
 
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Hopefuly the Govs new "Digital village Pump" combined with BT being forced to allow access to it's ducts and poles will help.
I'd love to be able to just pay a realistic one-off installation cost (<=£1000) to run fibre over the existing poles to my village (with a competitive market for installation suppliers It should cost far less than that in terms of materials and labour), and then get low latency contended bandwidth at a consumer rate (<£50/month).

TBH though I expect the gov't will mess it up, or Ofcom won't force BT to charge a reasonable rate and nothing will actually change. We'll be stuck for a decade or two until the government looks at how it's helped Korea, Japan, Australia, China etc, realises it's made a mistake and has to play catch up.
 
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I used to use a 100Mb/s connection 4 years ago when i lived in Sweden, this wasn't in a big city, smallish town in the north of Sweden, miles from the nearest big town/city.

The Uk is just so far behind Europe when it comes to speed, infrastructure and costs, im still stuck on a 5Mb/s connection, that won't change for many years, no chance of FTTC for many years, Virgin will never come here, they stoped years ago 11 miles away.
 
It makes me laugh sometimes the state of UK broadband. I've lived in Cyprus the last 2 years and even though they're just offering 8Mb/s and 12Mb/s broadband (I've have just been increased from 4Mb/s-8Mb/s) I actually get the speed stated.
The best bit was it only took them 2 days to deliver my router by an engineer and get my service up and running and then it only took a further day for a requested speed increase.
Although not 3rd world it certainly isn't on par with the UK with its infrastructure so how comes it take 7-10 days for your service to be activated and a further 7-10 days when you upgrade in the UK if these guys can do it in a day or two.
I will say though the biggest downside to ADSL out here is the cost, it is ridiculous at €54 for now 8Mb/s (previously 4Mb/s), thats not including line rental.
 
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As mentioned, the cost of trying to connect lots of rural areas is just huge. Countries which have more dense populations and live in large blocks are much easier to upgrade than spread out towns and villages.
 
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