UK tech quango eyes 10Gbit broadband

Networking researchers will get a £1m funding boost to develop technology capable of delivering internet access at 10Gbit/s to homes and businesses. The pot of cash for projects costing between £30,000 and £100,000 was today allocated by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), a quango sponsored by the Department for Innovation, …

[Lan ser]

£29billion

£29 Billion works out at £500 per person in the UK spread that out over the 10 years or so it's take to complete and thats £50 a year a single solitary british squid a week, sounds like a bargain to me for a 10gb connection.

Paris because she'd like a big pipe too.

[Duncan Carter]

All very well and good...

But as has been said time and again, useless without the backhaul capacity and while the current 'Fair Use' policies are still in place...

[Billy]

29billion?

With that sort of money you could pay for a couple of decent sized middle-east wars or some more trident-style "toys for the boys". Why spend it on incredibly useful domestic technology instead? Don't these people realise we have banks to bail out and foreign countries to interfere with? The fools.... ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the human bandwidth?

I remember reading it was about 10mbps:

http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2007/05/17/ftth-in-france/

Which appears to be the practical limit for the user of internet.

[MinionZero]

Higher bandwidth

"internet access at 10Gbit/s to homes"

I guess that means the ISP's can cap usage at 3GBytes/Month, so users would be lucky to get 4 seconds before the ISPs excess charges kick in. :)

"would cost up to £29bn"

At the rate the UK is upgrading to faster Internet, £29bn won't be worth the price of a loaf of bread by the time they finish installing it. We need a higher bandwidth broadband but we also need a higher bandwidth of broadband installers.

[Tom]

10Gb broadband for everyone for £29b?

Sounds like a better return than we get from nationalising Northern Rock.

[michael W]

Not needed...

No one except ridiculously large companies/universities needs 10Gbit/s to their premises.

What we need is 100Gbit more added to the backbone network so that we can actually fully use the 10Mbit/s connections we CURRENTLY HAVE.

There is already technology out there for cable's 100Mbit/s on DOCSIS3, and BT will be able to manage VSDL in a few years for a decent 40Mbit/s.

But as long as the core backbone is left like it is, none of these increases will mean a thing.

[Tony Hoyle]

OK

Hands up everyone who's got 10Gb/s LANs to carry the traffic on.

Thought not.

[Simon Painter]

quangos

Of course by the feasibility study money will be used on lots of powerpoint bullshit and a nice office for the quango. Then they'll write some crappy report that has the same level of technical insight as digital fucking britain.

[Joe Montana]

Other uses...

If you have 10GB to every building in the UK, then all internal traffic throughout the country could travel over that network... Coupled with some intelligent caching for international traffic and people would still be much better off.

But with 10GB of bandwidth to play with, everything current could use the fibre, think HDTV over IP (streamed from locally located servers), VOIP, and whatever new technologies people might be used in the future.

[SynnerCal]

I'll take that money...

They don't need a quango to decide this - just post an article here and I'm sure they'd get enough info/opinion to justify the usual massive expenses.

My suggestions - break up BT; make the backbones a 'national asset' and actually put some action behind the works. Like other folks have already said - apart from big business, there's not many folks who need more than 100Mb/s and heck G'bit would be nice to have.

Sheesh, you know you're in a digital dungheap when Vermin Media looks technically competent. And at the moment they do - 10-50Mb/s (very theoretically!) to the cabled houses - with 200Mb/s being discussed (not for my area though).

And what do the Phorm-whore's at BT give me - 2Mb/s (maybe!) with maybe 8Mb/s when 21CN goes live locally sometime in 2012-2013. Big effing deal!

Anyhoo, back to the point. If we get rid of the daft speed assertion then I'm pretty damned sure that the cost to implement will come down to a far more reasonable figure. So don't bail out the next pigopolist bankers, scrap the daft ID card scheme and HO megadatabase and DPI wet dreams and the infrastructure will be all paid for.

[aNthraXx]

About time

It's about time some investment was made into this type of infrastructure for the UK. As somebody previously mentioned, nobody has 10gE ethernet at home - yet. The fact is that installing a network like this will be future proof.. not like the 40mbit/s rubbish BT is attempting to pass off as 'next generation'.

100mbit connections (with 100mbit upload speeds too) are available in several countries already, to the consumer, some even offering gbit connectivity too. It's not impossible - something like JANET but for every home in the UK. Get on with it!

[Anonymous Hero]

@Michael W - Not needed..

What was it they said back in the 50's or 60's about just needing four mainframes for the whole worlds computing requirements?....or in the 80's, something about only needing 640Kb of RAM....?

I never thought I'd need a 1GB network in the house...

Paris, because size matters.

[gautam]

Dream on!

This is only money to explore "feasibility". Just a dream and that money will be over in 6 months with a dusty report.

How about internet over the Electrcity lines? Much more cost effective and virtualy free to upgrade. Why doesnt anyone talk about it? This idea has been around a long time now.

Can someone enlighten us about this?

Paris cos even she sould like a "speedy" one!

[Anonymous Coward]

'bout time too

Plus funding should consider:

+ blended technology options from one ISP/Telco at regional level

+ blended technology options from one ISP/Telco at EU level

+ partnership solutions on the above.

Premise (yawn) a public asset is a public asset and no one has authority to dick about with it be it quango, (un)civil service or any of the several tiers of government inflicted upon us (yawn)

[Anonymous Coward]

True, aNthraXx true

but then again, the academics always have influence the public not a jot.

[Turbojerry]

A simple formula for what should happen

Core network should run @ xGE where x is the current standard every time the standard goes up one notch the plans for backbone upgrade should be completed within 6 months and roll out started within 12 months and completed within 24 months for all major metropolitan areas and 36 months for the rest of the country, businesses should have access to the backbone directly at xGE and consumers at xGE/10, all connections should be full bore without download limits and this formula should be overseen by a government body and enabled by primary legislation, successful delivery of the network should mean a tidy bonus to those in charge, failure should mean they are fired and banned from holding any other government job.

[Anonymous Coward]

@gautam

Internet over Powerlines is a stupendously bad idea, which is why it's not been done. The radio interference that creates is extremely bad - sufficient to mean that radio (sub ~200MHz) gets wiped out.

- This is because the 'in air' live and neutral cables are all separated by a significant distance which are pretty good single pole antenna, and the 'in ground' cabling is primarily in the form of 'street ring mains', making your entire road into one giant loop antenna.

The existing "Homeplug" systems would fail emissions testing quite badly if they were required to meet similar specs to a standard ADSL router. At the moment there isn't an emissions standard for them, and the EU are effectively still deciding when to ban them by introducing such a standard.

Glass to the home and business is going to be necessary sooner or later, although there's still the question of which kind of glass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Battle of Digital Britain - legacy business v the Internet

Most of the money issues could be overcome if the 3G heist money (£24bn + interest) was put back into the sector.

There was a recent Ofcom/AnalysisMason research showing backhaul bandwidth prices dropping from £80 per Mbps to £5 per Mpbs (that's bits). Backhaul at 30 Kbps per user (currnet estimate) is because the per kilo-bit seconds costs for peak are not that different from the historical costs of voice calls. Our overall connectivity (quality bandwidth) is being restrained to accommodate the legacy fixed and mobile voice reveneus.

The slowing factor is how our major corporations re-invent themselves for the Internet age. The Internet is the NGN, we just need good unfiltered connectivity to it. PSTN needs to be replaced with a combined fixed/mobile mulitmedia service which uses Broadband. Our Broadband end points are also mobile access points. The internet is the future interconnect.

Not sure why the TSB needs this cash? Do we have to wait for them to prove things before the change in regulation! If so this would be bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

A change I can believe in!

I pay council tax, I pay income tax. I have no idea what that combined £500 a month goes towards. Because I sure as hell don't see £500 worth of services offered to me. Unless the useless binmen have the worlds most overlooked yet lucrative job ever.

Basically, 29bn is a deal for 1gb to my house.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep we need more bandwidth.

We all need at least 5 megabit upload. So we can use Cisco Telepresence from home. 15 megabit if we have a big home. Bring down the prices and get rid of the car.