Tough luck, bumpkins! Blighty broadband speed gap misery worsens Speedy broadband networks in cities continue to infuriate country bumpkins who are running out of patience with their painfully slow internet connections. Sadly, the gap between broadband speeds for urban dwellers and people living in the sticks is set to widen. Communications watchdog Ofcom said today the UK's average fixed- …
OK, can you tell me where I can park my 100 dairy cows, 20 acres of crops as well as my pigs, chickens and lambs? You do want to be able to eat don't you?
Last time I looked the "city" is not a suitable place to undertake many of the activities that people in the countryside carry out or for people who provide services to people living in the country to live. On top of this if we all move back to the city, we'd have to knock down huge numbers of detached and semi-detached houses to build blocks of flats or move to multi-occupancy in existing properties in order to accommodate all those country bumpkins.
"OK, can you tell me where I can park my 100 dairy cows, 20 acres of crops as well as my pigs, chickens and lambs? You do want to be able to eat don't you?"
Can you show me the person holding a gun to your head forcing you to be a farmer?
"if we all move back to the city, we'd have to knock down huge numbers of detached and semi-detached houses to build blocks of flats or move to multi-occupancy in existing properties in order to accommodate all those country bumpkins."
No you won't, there's plenty of brown-fiield sites in the city. I have never understood the UK's obsession with destroying its greenbelt. Well, there are tax advantages to new builds - so I guess the Fat Cats in Westminster are to blame (again).
"Can you show me the person holding a gun to your head forcing you to be a farmer?"
There may not be one now, but when all the farmers give up and go to the city to... be unemployed I suppose... then there'll probably be one or two gun wielding persons who want to know where all the food has gone.
What I really fail to understand in all this is why it is so difficult to deliver decent broadband to the whole island. It is a small space with no truly rugged or wilderness areas. Is it just corporate infighting or political incompetence or a combination of those things?
"What I really fail to understand in all this is why it is so difficult to deliver decent broadband to the whole island"
The cost of provision is too high to make a return at current market prices. That price is going down, not up. Telcos have to borrow to do this stuff - investors consider it a poor risk, which pushes up the cost of borrowing, making it more expensive again. Shareholders would rather take a larger dividend than have those telcos make risky investments.
All right then, you do realise that urban living is heavily subsidised.
Question to those of you complaining about rural broadband. How willing would you be to pay the true cost of things like food, water and electricity etc?
Keep in mind that a lot of the funding is specifically earmarked for rural areas but BT are exaggerating the cost and using the remainder to subsidy their city rollouts. I believe The Register even did a story on it at one point.
I'm sure many community fibre projects could do a lot more with the equivalent money awarded to BT.
I live in South Harrow, guess what 2.5Mbps was about the best I could get (despite BT saying I should get 6), on a very good day, and then it would constantly drop (I wish we had Cu, it's all Al round here). Still seems like sometime next eyar before the cable gets laid, despite the fact that one street over it's already there. So I had no option but to go to Virgin.
The universal obligation is unlikely to work. USO doesn't oblige BT or KC to provide service at a loss, it says that they must provide service to everyone (within reasonable limits) and charge everyone the same rate, which is based on the average cost of provision.
Today's prices are based on making a small-ish and slow return on broadband service delivered only where it's profitable. If that was turned into a USO, the average cost would rocket and the price would rise to reflect that - do you fancy paying £100 a month for your 5M?
If I have 10 customers who cost £10 a month to serve today, I can charge £15 and make a profit, eventually. If I have those same 10 customers and then I add 'Mr Rural' who costs me £200 a month under a USO, my cost per customer just increased to £27. I've got to increase my prices to £40 if I want to maintain EBIT, or £32 if I'm prepared to reduce my margins.
So you're stealing next door's WiFi?
BT seem to be utterly useless at providing fibre connections. I live in a London borough, literally 5 minutes walk to a fibre enabled exchange but they won't provide me with Infinity. Fortunately we're cabled up so I've gone the Virgin route, and so far it is performing up to spec. at 60Mbits/sec.
That would be capitalism and market forces at work. Something which city dwellers should be all too familiar with and supportive of :-)
Why should BT rush to install FTTC in an area that already has cable? Particularly given that they are investing heavily in rolling out FTTC to the vast majority of the country ignored by cable companies.
Because VM are pissing people off round where I live. No VM Fibre here. Sill the old CO-Ax and we are less than 10 miles from a lovely shiny VM Office (Hook). There are so many people on it in the evenings that my neighbours piggy back onto my FTTC link just to be able to do a bit of surfing. Last time I did a speedtest for them at 8pm it was 300kb and that is on a supposedly 40Mbit connection.
Yet VM still keep bombarding us holdouts with all adverts/offers etc promoting this fancy VM Fibre stuff.
The FTTC up the street from me not has 10 users. Fab 80Mbits download.
anon coz I don't want yet more VM junk coming through my letterbox.
don't they understand that the more they send, the less likely I am to want to takeup any of their offers?
for those who don't get any adequate broadband or speeds above 4Mb, this "gap" sounds as relevant as describing a housing gap between availability of 5-bedroom houses and 10-bedroom (with pool) houses.
Shouldn't they be worrying about a minimum available speed for all and accept that some areas will get higher due to geographic, financial and other reasons.
I got a perfectly acceptable streaming of Nokia music to my phone across the 3G mobile signal as I drove home last night. It played better than Spotify on my laptop when connected to home wifi.
the UK government seems to be insistent on getting us online for accessing government (national and local services) but unless it plans on delivering my neighbours planning application for a kitchen extension as a full HD video presentation with 5:1 sound, I don't see that a very fat pipe is needed.
"Great idea that, so long as those stuck in the slow lane get a discount."
Provision costs the same, regardless of the speed you receive. If discounts for slow speeds became mandatory, expect to either find ISPs refusing to serve people, or the 'discounted' rate being today's price with those getting higher speeds paying more.
and all that.
At the present moment in time, what are you planning on shoving down a pipe bigger than 10Mbps that is worth looking at?
This smacks of the mildly irrelevant clock-speed wars that finally came to a halt in the naughties when everyone realised that their computer could do stuff much faster than they would ever need it to do and....of look, new shinies: phonez!!!
Flah!
Rosie
Perhaps downloading or even uploading files for work purposes?
Perhaps downloading (non-streamed) video purchases/rentals?
Perhaps you live in a house with your family or other people in a shared house... multiple video-streams will quickly suck up 10Mbps
in a shared house... multiple video-streams will quickly suck up 10Mbps
So buy more phone lines. Would you expect all the people in a shared house to use only one car, or phone, or bed, and still get the same performance as they would have if they had exclusive use?
"Would you expect all the people in a shared house to use only one car, or phone, or bed..."
Yes. Yes. Well maybe 150 years ago.
The one car question depends on where you live, but 20 years ago most people I knew only had one phone.
> but 20 years ago most people I knew only had one phone.
And so they shared it. Sometimes they got no use because someone else was using it. If they wanted an unlimited phone that was theirs to use fully, 24 hours a day, they had to get one just for them.
Why should internet in a shared house be any different?
Its shoving stuff UP to my hosting server that gets me. 448k is a miserably slow way to post a cameras worth of pictures to give to someone else.
But he came, and we burned a DVD instead. problem solved. BMW faster than internet!
> At the present moment in time, what are you planning on shoving down a pipe bigger than 10Mbps that is worth looking at?
Erm, you do remember this is Reg readers? We mostly work in computers, therefore we mostly use computers heavily, therefore we probably have lots of important stuff on large hard drives (build trees, databases, etc) never mind photos and videos - one RAW file from my camera is 17 MiB.
So, exhibit A: Off-site backups that take less than a lifetime to finish uploading?
No chance of me using cloud backup here with 3 Mbps down, 320 Kbps up. Yes, that single RAW file takes around 7 minutes for me to upload to a cloud backup server. If I go out for the day and take 200 photos, it'd take the best part of 24 hours to upload the sodding backups...
Well, I'm "in the sticks" and getting 7.2 on my ADSL 2+ connection. "In the sticks" is relative because I am 3 miles from the centre of a major city but for reasons long lost in the mists of time they built a small local exchange to serve the village which my area technically is. So being classed as a small rural exchange it has been way down the list for upgrades every time - System X, ADSL, ADSL max, 21 CN etc. Then I have a long and tortuous route from that exchange to my house. What makes it even more irritating is that if I drive exactly one mile towards the city centre I am face to face with fibre cabinets left, right and centre all plastered with "Fibre Broadband is here" stickers.
"1MB in not very rural Anglesey. No options for anything better."
On the island too. I was on about 1 until I did the ring wire thingy - getting about 3.8 now, according to my router. SNR 9 dB - think that's bad, from stuff I was looking at when I did it a few years ago (comms isn't really my thing.). Might be worth a go, depending on the phone wiring in your place. And assuming oyu haven't already tried it - sorry if I'm insulting you with the suggestion.
Can't agree about "not very rural Anglesey", though. Can't think of anywhere here that isn't rural, strictly speaking :)
I live somewhere relatively-remote and my SDSL is delivered via a couple of miles of overhead phone-line: I get about 2Mbit/sec in each direction - when the weather's good.
Alas with the recent thunderstorms the router's been disconnecting rather regularly so the path is currently retraining itself s-l-o-w-l-y back towards 2Mbit/sec which it'll probably reach by the weekend.
In winter or when it's windy, it's trees bringing the overhead line down.
[Paradoxically, I also have BT fibre-to-the-premises: each night I park my car on top of a dirty great concrete-manhole with several inch-thick trunks running through it.. I'm sure if I offered them a kidney or two BT could dig a 30-foot-long trench to run some fibre up to the house then provide me with a whole slew of MPLS services over a 40Gbit/sec circuit...]
A bit like our broadband. Village near Cambridge, 600m from the exchange, 20Mbit/s connection but frequently 0Mbits/s actually available because of massive conention for a feeble total bandwidth. I am paying for something I don't get - I call that fraud. I have a great idea, I will buy from an ISP who does not use BT for wholesale connections. Hang on - oh.
Currently on 2mbps adsl. Theres a small startup installing WiMAX masts in Cambridgeshire, apparantly they are deploying to my village because of interest, so in a couple of months should get 30mbps. 100 quid prob for aerial, but this could be a good option for rural areas, down with 4g and expensive tariffs :p
Now I'm on BT Infinity 2 I get just under 80mbit, and I'm practically in the countryside (I look out my windows and see fields and hills & homes, not a cold concrete cityscape)
You just gotta be in the right part of the countryside to get the best of both worlds.
Basic broadband in my top 10 city here in the US avgs 3 down and 0.5 up. On a good day.
You want anything faster, you are going to pay $50+ per month. Faster being 6 down and 1.5 up. If, IF, you can get it at all.
12? We can only dream. Or be very wealthy.
Belfast (NI's capital city) has fibre optic broadband precisely nowhere, and the average speed of the standard broadband is ~8Mb.
Head out into the countryside/small towns/villages and you will find fibre galore, around 40Mb is the norm, and I know one guy with 100Mb at his house! Go figure!
NI is a microcosm of the UK as a whole, it has the same proportion of people in the A/B/C marketing classes, is small, and is eligible for all sorts of EU subsidies. It makes a great test bed, so companies love to test new stuff there. It was one of the first places that BT rolled out fibre in the main phone network.
Belfast suffers like any city, it's a lot more expensive to dig up city streets than country roads.
Gap? How about this little nugget… Between 1999-2002, I lived in a teeny tiny town called Kinosaki in Hyogo, Japan and had all you can eat access to ISDN at 128kbps. In 2002 I moved to Adachi in North Tokyo I was on a plan, IIRC called USEN-Broadgate 01 and they rolled a fibre to my home on condition of 6 month contract Actual speed was about 85-90Mbps for about 50 quid a month. After about two years or so, they offered me a monitor program of USEN-Broadgate 02.. for 9800 yen (About 150 a month at the time). It was GIGABIT fibre and achieved an actual speed, if I recall of 93MB (BYTES!) per second… I remember at the time I had to RAID my hard disk to download disk images from Microsoft Dev at full speed…. And with a Pentium 2.8 C single core, it was serious overkill...
Kinosaki was just moving to 1.5Mbps/8Mbps two tier provision.. That gave an approximate 60~125:1 ratio between countryside and city.
Sometimes, things really are just too far ahead of the curve… (after three months and many prodigious downloads, I opted for 01, despite the bragging rights 02 gave)…
Soon after, they discontinued 02 for home use.
Now, since I live in a shared building not a detached, a one gigabit fibre has to serve all 10 or so apartments, so at night when everyone is streaming 4KFAP.COM videos, things can get a little bit sluggish.
I'm in a suburban area 2km from the exchange - but the line is long so I only get 1MBps.
Too far from the cab for FTTC.
5 metres too far from line of sight for WiMax class broadband 24MBps (my end of terrace next door neighbour could have it, and so could I if I could get his permission for an antenna on his roof grr).
Satellite limits too low / expensive
3G signal luckily available but data limits suck for 3G routers.
I know some Rural users are completely out of luck for all those options but I think BT et al are happy to settle for less than 75-90% coverage even in towns.
I moved from Nottingham where I have over 100mb of stable service from Virgin (terrible customer service, but great broadband) - to Melksham in Wiltshire. I am a mile from the exchange and have Sky "unlimited" Fibre and have at best 3.5mb of flaky service. All this after 5 visits from a Sky "engineer" who did not seem to know his arse from his elbow. Get a faster and more reliable connection from my (definitely not unlimited) Orange 3G Hotspot from my trusty iPhone. GRRRR
In the centre of Sheffield I get 160 mbs from Dick Branson, quite often more. I've moved house to Killamarsh (10 miles away and the last suburb before rolling hills, and can only get BT toss, still 76mps though, so no major scrote throbbing there. The rents live in a tiny town outside of Matlock with no urban centre for 30 miles in any direction, they still get 36mbps.
Are you sure that everyone realises they actually have to pay top whack subscription to get decent service? some of the figures here seem pretty unbelievable.....
12 miles north of Watford, England, I get 430kb/s over copper and have done so for the last decade or so. To move to fibre I would have to accept (and pay for) all the other crap Virgin stuffs in the package. There's an effective duopoly (cartel?) here, as only two companies own the physical infrastructure.
"There's an effective duopoly (cartel?) here, as only two companies own the physical infrastructure."
It's not a Cartel as that would mean organised collaboration on pricing - but BT's are set by Ofcom.
Normally in a Cartel you'd expect to see high pricing - but UK broadband pricing is low - which is partly the problem. It's too low to make anyone else want to rollout a network - the return is too little, over too long a period - unless you're prepared to run your business like a utility.
I would love to get 9.9 average. I get 2mb where i like which is about 6 mile from Carlisle. In Carlisle I have two offices and they are both Fairly central one gets 4.5mb and the other gets 5.mb. The problem for me is that the wife uses it and so does my son and daughter (6 and 8) we are at a complete stand still.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
