Reply to post: Re: Use cases please?

UK industry mouthpiece wants 'near-universal' broadband speeds of 30Mbps by 2020

JetSetJim

Re: Use cases please?

> That's my point, the vast majority of the country don't live in shared student digs, or have 4 teenagers at home. For them, a reliable 30Mbps will be more than adequate. Landlords of HMO student digs can pay extra for FTTP and flog it as an extra benefit.

640K was more than enough RAM for anyone (Bill Gates [1]) and there is a global market for, at most, 5 computers (Thomas Watson, IBM [2]), and there is certainly no reason for anyone to want a computer in the home (Ken Olsen, [3])

Currently, perhaps it is only the "premium" users who feel the need for more than wet-string between themselves and their local green box, but isn't that how the world works? People will find uses for it, and service offerings that use more bandwidth will become more affordable - even if it's just to watch ultra-HD cat videos. Kids are being brought up using devices that have more compute power in than was available to the whole planet 50-60 years ago (or some such number).

FTTP should be made to be the norm for *anything* new, and funds should somehow be made available (taxes / subsidy via subscription / ...?) so that non-fibre folks can upgrade.

I've seen a document showing that Openreach's new copper cables are in fact copper around a fibre core, so they've got that box ticked, and I'd guess that the copper could even provide a little bit of power to guarantee the ability to make a call in the event of a domestic power outage. All they need is to swap out DSL cabs with FTTP cabs (yes, they have lots of cabs, so it won't happen overnight, but then nor is their "superfast" FTTC upgrade rollout).

If BT don't do it, other folks like B4RN and Gigaclear will, and BT will lose customers, as will Openreach as they migrate onto competing fibre networks. Bye-bye BT, it was good to talk.

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[1] - meh, probably fake, but excellent urban legend

[2] - probably over-interpreted, allegedly only speaking about a single model of a single computer on sale at the time, but the spin applied since then makes it a juicy quote

[3] - over-interpreted remark, although current IoT moves are bringing it more into context, IMHO, if the discussion on http://www.snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen.asp is anything to go by

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