Hunt vows: 'UK will have fastest broadband in Europe by 2015' The government's pledge to provide countrywide broadband access by 2015 has received another boost from the Culture Secretary, who has promised the "fastest broadband of any major European country". In a speech at Google's Campus in East London, Jeremy Hunt said that speed was the most important aspect of the government's …
The fastest broadband in Europe....
Only available between MP's houses and their local exchange.
The rest of us will continue to manage with 'up to 20Mb' or 2Mb in the real world.
Fast broadband has the biggest impact in the towns and villages the furthest away from metropolitan centres. Exactly where they won't be putting fast broadband any time soon.
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You mean coming 4th out of the 200ish countries on the entire planet isn't enough? (The Netherlands is currently 4th.) We should instead waste billions upon billions trying to get better speeds than Hong Kong, which is rougly the size of my left shoe, out to every Shetlands farmer who hasn't even heard of the interweb, let alone needs/wants it?
Do you apply this total lack of perspective to the rest of your life? Do you insist on only drinking Kopi Luwak coffee, and eating beluga caviar with solid platinum cutlery and crockery, because if it's not the absolute best it's just not worth doing at all?
Oh, and regarding your 'Where's the IT angle?' icon - it's an article about broadband. How much more 'IT' can you get?
"We should instead waste billions upon billions trying to get better speeds...out to every Shetlands farmer who hasn't even heard of the interweb, let alone needs/wants it?"
Speak for yourself.
I live on an island, and yes I have heard of the internet, I was an IT professional, and I DO want something faster than the pathetic connection speed I get at the moment ( approx 300Kb) Why should I not not get the same as other people? I pay the same taxes and charges for a phone line plus the charge my ISP demands. Or is it really that you want everyone else to subsdise you?
"Why should I not not get the same as other people? I pay the same taxes and charges for a phone line plus the charge my ISP demands. Or is it really that you want everyone else to subsdise you?"
You misunderstand me. I think that you absolutely should get the same as everyone else. My issue is with people unable to accept that something can be excellent, and more than adequate, even if it's not the absolute 'best'.
4th is a realistic goal - the Netherlands are much closer in size and population density to the UK than Hong Kong, so getting that speed broadband out to your house is relatively achievable. Claiming that trying to do that is somehow aiming too low is what I take issue with.
"I live on an island, and yes I have heard of the internet, I was an IT professional, and I DO want something faster than the pathetic connection speed I get at the moment ( approx 300Kb) Why should I not not get the same as other people? I pay the same taxes and charges for a phone line plus the charge my ISP demands. Or is it really that you want everyone else to subsdise you?"
And if you were to fly to Singapore from your island airport you'd pay the same travel taxes, too, so why aren't 747s landing there? Sorry to be facetious, but if you're getting the benefits of living on your island (air that's breathable, for a start!) then you must've accepted the inevitable trade-offs some time ago.
You might want to take a look at this then, they're not all farmers up there in Shetland, many oil engineers, and the farmers are pretty bright anyway, maybe it's all that fish and fresh veggies and fresh air ;)
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2011/08/31/shetland-islands-begin-laying-superfast-fibre-optic-broadband-cable-to-scalloway.html
http://www.shetlandtimes.co.uk/2012/01/13/with-fast-broadband-weeks-away-communities-are-urged-to-join-up
http://www.shetlandtimes.co.uk/2012/05/15/broadband-link-proves-its-quality-with-puffin-show
They also have a rather nice almost-castle fort thing (at the middle of the town Lerwick) which was burnt by your guys when it was empty last time they came a-raiding in 1673! (apart from that lots of trading went on)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Charlotte,_Shetland
And many Dutch yachts, racing and otherwise, come to Shetland, so I am sure you are very welcome there.
Additionally, a certain Mr Topiary was arrested there ;)
http://www.shetlandtimes.co.uk/2011/08/01/man-accused-of-hacking-grew-up-in-yell
Have you any idea of the cost of laying fibre to every premises in the country? If you're in the .01% of the nation that needs FTTP, you're free to pay for it yourself. If you're living in a tower block with hundreds of others (like many people in Japan or S Korea, it needn't be all that expensive.
If fibre is already available in the cabinet then premises can be fibred to the cabinet. As long as the cabinet has enough back-haul to the exchange there's no need for every property to have its own fibre back to the exchange.
I doubt the length of fibre costs much more than the length of copper the real costs are in the terminations and the transceivers. With a system like this though you could use cheaper multimode and still get 1Gb connections within 500m of the cabinet.
I think BT already have a system like this on trial in some areas, at the moment targeting businesses but there's no reason it couldn't be extended to homes for those that want more than VDSL is providing.
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> For the community at large SDSL is what is required not ADSL
Not so.
Look at the typical user's pattern - he will download at least an order of magnitude more than he will upload. ADSL is exactly right for that sort of user
Now of course, you can find exceptions - I am one myself. But we are the atypical users; almost everyone else needs ADSL. Repurposing bandwidth from downstream to upstream would simply mean their access would become slower for no improvement elsewhere, as that extra upstream bandwidth will simply be wasted.
Vic.
...Jeremy isn't taking something wild and giving us spouted rubbish. He better start injecting some government cash to BT and co to make this even possible. Would of made more sense to inject the billions of pounds that saved corrupt banks to create tech/infrastructure jobs to do this years ago and catchup with the likes of Eastern Europe and Asia. Currently, the fastest speeds are compromised by VMs stupid traffic shaping and lack of capacity at the local exchanges.
OFCOM don't care as long as we get the bottom line in an acceptable fashion. The only way to get low-latency, "ultra-fast" broadband is to buy some Tier 1/2 ISP grade connections at data centres. Might as well, you get your air-conditioning thrown in.
My parents live 5km outside Barnsley. Granted Barnsley is not a high tech hub but it's not a idle backwater. The entire estate they live on can *just* get 1MB on a good day, more usually .5mb or .25mb. Sometime there are days the modem just can't connect, and multiple ISP's have said it's all down to distance and the line quality.
Barnsley is part of the "Digital Region" that was another goverment scheme to bring superfast broadband to orifinally 97% of the people in the area. Guess what, not the part my parents live in, they are too far from the exchange, and the targets now dropped to 80% of the population due to cutbacks.
My Parents don't want 1billion mbps internet, they don't stream music and video around the house, they don't do online gaming, and they certainly don't do any major downloading other than Windows Secutiry patches. They do want a reasonalby fast, reasonaly cheap (read sub £15 a month) package that works reliably and consistantly.
Lets fix what we have before promising these blistering speeds that will only be accessable to the folks living closest to the exchange or are lucky enough to live on the streets that the the project decided to fibre up..
whereas for comparison, in a house on a pretty much deserted road 7km from a little town of 4K people in the logging district of central sweden I can get a reliable 8Mb down and 0.8mb up.
The local ISP doesn't even need you to have a current landline subscription, just that a telephone cable has been installed by someone, at some point.
Imagine the reaction you'd get in Britain if an ISP were to offer the option to add an extra £100 on the install fee and never have to deal with BT ever again....
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Usain the bolt... get it right :). Doesn't help anyone that is infrastructurely buggered. Government aren't putting pressure on BT to get green boxes in distant places enabled so that they can go directly to FTTB rather than ailing with ADSL forever. Even Virgin are strapped for cash to even bother stealing customers from BT to push their coax/fibre to new streets.
Will 4G actually cover stuffed communities in the short-term? OFCOM better get on with it if they want to sprinkle magic over broadband connections in the next 3 years.
I presume this statement is just a coincidence, coming the day after my "8Mb" Plusnet connection's down-speed recorded a new low of just 1.8Mb. Approx 4 or 5 years ago it would run at around 4Mb and even peak at 6-7Mb on occasion, and has gone downhill ever since. Maybe Mr Hunt should aspire to restore speeds to their historic levels to start with.
(apols to all those who can't even get these, er, heady speeds)
It'll be a future consideration when you buy a house.
If you like a particular school that allocates places by catchment, you buy a house in the catchment area
If you're old and don't want to be 50 miles to the nearest hospital, you buy a house nearer the hospitals.
2 Mbit/s in a rural area is fine for communication (banking, emails, shopping). If you need high speed broadband then make sure you don't live in the middle of nowhere. If you don't want mains sewerage and don't want to heat your house with oil, don't live in the middle of nowhere.
I don't expect the NHS to build a hospital near me when I retire, I don't expect British Gas to lay a pipe to my house or the local water authority to offer me mains sewerage for free. Why do we expect to all have high speed broadband ?
" I don't expect British Gas to lay a pipe to my house or the local water authority to offer me mains sewerage for free. Why do we expect to all have high speed broadband ?"
There are alternatives to mains sewerage [1] and piped gas but there isn't a sensible alternative to fast broadband. I'd love to have 2Mbit and I'd orgasm at 100Mbit. For now though, I usually trudge along at around 800Kb.
[1] My septic tank works well and costs a lot less to run than the water people charge you for sewerage :)
Why do the politicians prioritise 'superfast broadband' for business? If (and it is a big if) a business requires a super fast high speed link why on earth would it rely on a shared broadband connection whos speed varies with the number of users and time of day and usage by the porn baron next door? Shouldn't any business reliant on such technology be sited where it's available in the first place and looking at leased lines, FTTP and similar dedicated business connections?
Seems like a government excuse to throw silly money at a (very) few private infrastructure companies as a means to repatriate some more hard-earned tax-payer wedge ...
I'll pick the easy ones first.
1. Define, in empirical terms, what Hunt means by 'fastest'.
2. What are Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities ?
3. Given that Hunt's department has estimated the cost if the state manages the project to be £25bn over a period of 10 years, who does he think can do it cheaper and in 4 years ?
4. Where is the RACI chart ?
5. Who will find the upfront investment ?
6. From the Akamai survey, The Netherlands and Latvia are the top two EU countries based on average connection speed. Given that they are not mentioned in Hunt's speech, who are the 'major European countries we are competing against ?
7. What is his plan to support the Digital Agenda for Europe target (50% of households having 100 Megabit/s or higher)
8. Given 'Kensington and Chelsea, have deprived their residents of superfast broadband', how does he plan to get the service to more remote areas of the UK ?
But only when:
- not torrenting
- not skyping
- not surfing between the "peak" hours of 00:00 and 23:59
- not sending large attachments. ie bigger than 92k.
- the contention ratio number doesn't look like the same chances ratio of being struck by lightning
- using an approved router. Even if it's shittier than the one you actually have.
- using a PC. Slow internet connection? That not your router or the clogged upstream, oh god forbid...it's your MAC.
- downloading, not uploading
- using UDP, not HTTP. Ignore the quality, watch the speed! Garbage or not, it's still 20mb!
I live inside the M25 on a recently fttc'ed exchange - except my cabinet ain't been done. Looks like BT will need a hefty boot up the fundament to get the whole country done by 2015. Even when, so a cynic tells me, they make so much flogging the surplus copper it more than pays for the work
As for remote rural areas, we have cross subsidies for postage stamps - arguably justifiable - and other things. There are times when the cost and risks of distorting the free market are worth considering.
Would it be cross subsidy? Our 11,000 line market 1 exchange, ADSL enabled over 10 years ago is STILL on 8meg only. Given the higher charges that OFCOM have historically allowed over the frequently invested Market2/3 adsl2/2+ exchanges, Id say the disproportionate pricing has been subsidizing areas where BT have thrown upgrade after upgrade at customers that are paying a fair bit less on a service over upgraded & newer spec equipment. than those of us on ancient outdated 8 meg equipment.
In a fibre area, I could get a far faster service with a comparable data allowance for just a couple of quid more than I am paying for 8meg via a fairly decent provider.
The Phone line requirement needs to go too, I only have a voiceline for broadband. How much money are we blackmailed into paying for a service we neither use nor want when other countries CAN provide a data only line without us having to pay for voice services - the equipment for which MUST form a part of the pricing
British Broadband - The year round pantomime!
That article gives a more pleasing view of what the Lords said. I have no object to the general thrust of this article. We shouldn't concentrate purely on high speed for a few. I only take umbrage with those who say we don't currently have good coverage. Some people might only have half a meg but it's rare not to have anything at all and the high take-up of internet services in the UK proves that.
It's a balancing act. The drive for higher speeds will produce technology that eventually trickles down to the more remote users. Also those currently on poor services need to be aware that there's no malice behind it. It's just that for whatever reason they are not as financially viable as someone who's just had a 100Mb/s fibre plugged into their house. A well run society will seek to address that through subsidies and incentives but there comes a time when you have to accept that equality for all is impractical.
Harison Bergeron found that out the hard way :D
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
20 years ago, they cabled where I lived, in Harrow (Videotron as 'twas). Dug the pavement up, and laid fibre. Meanwhile, on a brand new estate (where they hadn't laid the roads yet) a friend was told they wouldn't lay cable within the next 5 years. I really couldn't understand how they could miss out on an opportunity to effectively lay the cable for free, but would rather pay much more to dig the road up again.
Where I live now (built 1962), we have true fibre cable. Yet a mile away, the in Laws (built 1997) don't.
Can't the utilities local authorities and highways agency get their sh*t together, and lay fibre as roads are repaired, or replaced ? A few miles up the road from me now, Transco have just replaced miles of gas main in an un-fibred area. Surely they could have dropped a fibre alongside it ?
Sod the speed whats with the cost!!! If usage is an issue and that's why we pay so much for broadband, why on earth do the fibre lines pretty much cost the same!!!
It should be proportional to the highest speed available so if they get gigabit in london mine should be 1000x cheaper :P. In fact broadband in my area is so crap i should get a disability and have it paid for by the government, then we would see them get off their asses.
INFACT, all goverment staff should be limited to speeds as fast as their slowest constituent.
IN a time when Britain is crying out for meaningful infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy, there's an opportunity for the government to invest in a national fibre infrastructure which it could then lease space on to various private entities.
Unfortunately that would take courage, imagination and commitment. Things that our politicians do not even understand, never mind possess.
"the average speed for a UK residential broadband internet connection reached 9Mbps in May"
Amazing how those averages can be bumped up by connecting a few hundred people at Gigabit speeds isn't it?
Maybe they should start quoting standard deviation as well as average, you'd see the real picture.
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