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

[FoxEye]

So we're currently behind (in terms of % population with decent speeds) 25 other EU countries, including places like Romania. And we're slipping down the league tables each year.

The govt is spending up to £80 billion on HS2. To shave 30 mins off a journey from Manchester to London.

Their "ambitious" broadband plan is to invest £3-5 billion to get everyone on "fibre" by 2033. Oh and "fibre" means FTTC. So still copper/aluminium to your house.

So by 2033 you might be able to get 80 Mb/s. In 14 years time, most other "G20" countries will have gigabit speeds virtually universally.

How does the current UK govt understand things so badly, that they still think moving people physically around the country (slightly) faster is 16x more important in terms of money spent, than improving our digital infrastructure?

I just don't get it. Surely someone at the top must understand how bad it is that we're increasingly stuck in the stone age, compared to our neighbours - and our economic rivals.

 

[FoxEye]

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).

 

[FoxEye]

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.

 

[FoxEye]

@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

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.

 

[FoxEye]

Well I still think it's foolish to forego installing ground-based networks because you're pinning all your hopes on satellite based networks.

I'd rather we just lay fibre.

It's not an astronomical cost. It's a few billion. It's less than CrossRail. It's less than HS2.

And it's available now, not in future. It's proven, it's reliable. And it can't be disabled by a hostile government. If all our comms is provided by satellites owned by foreign govts or corporations, then yeah, we're at their mercy.

A fibre cable in the ground is much better. I just don't see why we aren't going for it.

@Zefan. Would you be happy is Musk (et al) had the power to switch off our comms at the touch of a button?

 

[FoxEye]

OK, do individual households *need* 20Mb internet?

This time last year I'd have said yes, of course you need it. Since then I've moved house, my 60-70Mb FTTC is gone. I still have FTTC, I still pay much the same as I did before but seeing as the cabinet is about a mile away I get a whole 8Mb down. At first I was nervous about how bad it was going to be but in reality I haven't noticed any difference day to day. Sure, on the rare occasion when I need to download a large file it takes a little longer but everything I used to stream still works just as well. It's brought home just how much talk about internet speeds is just about chasing bigger numbers for little real-world improvement in service.

Spare a thought for those of us who work from home and have to upload and download large files quickly.

I guess if you don't work from home or download anything then ...

But the point is we've fallen behind and people seem absolutely fine with that? We pay more than elsewhere in the EU and we get waaaaay less for it. And that's fine?

Do people in this country enjoy being shafted? I'm beginning to think they do.

 

[FoxEye]

What on earth are you jabbering on about? I lived in Germany for 5 years, and broadband was a lot worse than it is here, from price, ease of installation, time of installation, latency an a bandwidth perspective. We are still in "Europe", it's a big place, so which part of "Europe" are you comparing the UK too and that you have experience of? And which part of the UK?

I see you're asking me to limit it to only places I've lived in... I already said it's from what friends and others have described to me, and articles I've read.

I don't believe you should expect me to have lived in every other EU country to be able to read and comprehend statistics compiled and presented by others.

So anyway, Finland, France, Switzerland, to name a few. As said earlier, in the league tables we're behind 25 other EU countries now including Romania. No, I haven't lived in Romania. Is that important?

 

[FoxEye]

I never said it was a human right.

But we pay more and get less.

There is also the opportunity cost of being in the slow lane compared to everyone else.

If the majority don't care/ are fine with it, then so be it. Perhaps people in this country just don't like to complain, even when they get a bum deal.

 

[FoxEye]

Can you give us a comparable offer in somewhere similar, say in Germany, Spain, Italy or France and tell us why we're having a bum deal? It would be nice to see some figures.

France is way ahead of us, as they had a massive roll-out of fibre in ~2013/14 (continuing).

And a lot of apartments in France (I read this yonks and yonks ago) have full fibre, TV and phone for something crazy like 20 Euros a month.

Apparently the very rural areas are stuck on ADSL. But then so are we.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.p...untry-ranking-by-average-broadband-speed.html

10 places below Germany; 12 below France; 19 below Spain. We only fared better than Italy from your list of countries.

 

[FoxEye]

It depends what one means by decent speeds'; if we look at one of the links you posted https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.p...untry-ranking-by-average-broadband-speed.html we can see that whilst UK may have low average speeds, we are actually 7th in the EU when it comes to meeting the 30Mbps standard, leaving the likes of Germany, Spain, Italy and France trailing in our wake.

Average speeds don't tell the whole story, what we can see is the UK is actually much better than most at ensuring equality with 94% coverage, I think this is more important than average speeds because people not getting 30mbit makes a massive difference to what they can do, whereas whether you get 50mbit or 100mbit or 1000mbit is less significant.

There are plenty of people on FTTC who can't even get >10 Mb.

FTTP isn't just about pure speed, as I've said repeatedly.

OpenReach just can't be arsed to find and fix faults with the copper/alu coming into your home. They're awful.

 

[FoxEye]

I reckon 20mb enough for most tbh

Forever? For the next 14 years? For the next 100 years?

 

[FoxEye]

1950s house here. FTTP courtesy of CityFibre.



No longer need my old phone line. £48/month.

That would have been impressive earlier on in the thread.

But I've since learned that nobody needs more than 10 Mb. Or 20 if you use a lot of BBS. But 10 is fine for most as it's good enough for TeleText.

 

[FoxEye]

I watch a lot of YouTube in 4K, 10Mb is not going to cut it at all. I just about managed to watch content without having to wait for it to buffer on BT 78mb fibre.

Nah you just have to click the button which says "Perfect 4k over 10Mb connection". Then it all just works.

We all know nobody needs more than 10Mb. I think Ed Milliband chiselled that on a stone tablet somewhere.

 

[FoxEye]

I hope nobody is missing my obvious sarcasm It may be the lowest form of wit but it's all I got!

 

[FoxEye]

Only in the broadband world do retailers say to the customer "you don't need that". In any other industry that wouldn't happen.

The more people move on to FTTC the worse service end customers will get. This old copper network is on its last legs, costing more to maintain, and under performing on G.fast.

If people on this forum (for techies) are trotting out lines like "20 Mb is all anyone should ever need", then you can see why in this country we have no hope of getting anything better.

BT will continue to milk us until we're 6ft under.

Copper 4 life, homie.

 

[FoxEye]

Where have people said that?

I reckon 20mb enough for most tbh

@Em3bbs Thread is only 6 and a bit pages long. Come one, dude It wasn't just DW a couple people said that already.

 

[FoxEye]

Of course, if you don't game (the gaming industry is now bigger than the music and movie industry combined) then you'd be happy with a dialup ADSL2+ (upto 24Mbps) connection.

If you don't...

* game
* work from home
* upload to YouTube
* video chat
* use OneDrive/DropBox/Google Drive
(etc)

Then you might be happy with ADSL+.

The upload (<0.5 Mb average) kills it for most.

 

[FoxEye]

I'm enjoying 1GB up/down with £30 a month FTTP. I don't see why the public should fund 100Mb broadband for people who live in the middle of nowhere.

Yes, they should be funding fibre instead Throughout the whole country.

It would be one of the best infrastructure projects in terms of reward for money spent.

And it would come in at a fraction of the cost of HS2...

 

[FoxEye]

Pretty soon the mobile network is going to overtake BT's infrastructure outside of London.

What about data limits tho?

Tethering especially tends to be something minuscule like 5GB /month or whatever.

Haven't heard much about fixed wireless. Hmm a quick Google suggests 5G fixed wireless will deliver about 80-100Mb. Better than a kick in the teeth, I guess. No info about upload speeds.

e: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.p...do-100mbps-broadband-replace-fixed-lines.html

Looks like a poor substitute for FTTP to be honest. Hugely variable speeds, congestion a real problem (read: "Fair Use" policy will demand you basically not use it at all).

 

[FoxEye]

You seem to be arguing against progress. "What we have is good enough."

I don't understand anyone who would ever argue against progress. Does not compute to me.