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Also, unmetered access with NTL is 128kbps @ 15 GBP/month and I'm with Tele2 @ 13* GBP/month for 150kbps. So it's not all bad in the UK.

Much faster speeds available of course, but I'd only use that for big downloads and that's what the university bought cd-writers for :)

*(special offer, meant to be 20, but I've been on this for over a year now)

ADSL was originally intended for digital TV (and pay per play movies/timeshifted TV) over telephone lines, and look what it is used for now.
These people do something similar over wireless in the UK ... I nearly signed up for them, though my leasehold agreement forbids external antennas ... With ITV Digital going titsup.com it looks like cable for me.

Oh yes, can someone give me a job? :P

Here Here. Well said my friend...

For the last 3 years BT has been telling me that my local exchange would be set up for DSL 'by september this year' So you can imagine my surprise when I contacted them a couple months ago to find that the part of the city I live in (Bradford, BTW) is classed as a 'rural area' (yes I can see fields from here but they're a good few miles away - and I'm only 10 minutes away from the city centre) I'm in the suburbs for gods sake! Yet if I lived on the opposite side of the city to where I am now, broadband is available almost right the way out to the bloody farms!

Anywho my option extend slightly further but they're still a f*cking joke

- "Wireless Broadband" (broadband my arse!) by Tele2 which is only slightly faster than a dial up modem and needs line of sight to one of their base stations. Then they have the balls to charge £40 per month - plus the connection doesn't give you an IP address, they run the whole thing using NAT

- Cable Modem, courtesy of TeleWest or NTL - but here's the big joke; Yes I can have a cable modem, but only if I pay for them to come and dig up the road outside my house and put a connection in to our nearest cable exchange box (it's about 60 feet from where I'm sitting). Last time I contacted the bastards they quoted £1700 for installation. And why do it cost so much? Why? because the street I live on (it's more of a cart track really) isn't owned by the local council, if it was owned by the council they'd install a cable modem for about £40 - f*cking ridiculous!

"Broadband Britian"? What a fucking joke. I'll second that!

Tele2 already provide a wireless broadband service to a fair chunk of England (but not London at the moment).

They charge £39.99 ($60) for 512k downstream/256k upstream, which compares pretty well with the fixed UK broadband (I have a 512/128k cable modem from NTL which is £19.99 ($30) a month).

An outfit called Tele2 already offers wireless, always on, 512K connections in parts of the UK. I know someone who's got one and runs a web server from it and is happy. Well, as happy as you get round Camberly. Not sure of the exact technical details but "there's a thing on the roof which connects by coax to a box of tricks which has an RJ45 plug on it". Range is pretty limited ,but speed apparently OK.

To put the situation in crass 'BT Speak', I say "fuck em". I get 512k Cable Modem for £25 a month, BT isn't even worth looking at, even Broadband Wireless deserves more consideration than BT in its current state.

and may be the only way wireless broadband will ever be achieved!

In the UK, there is a company called Tele2, offering WirelessDSL. The home user thing was 150Kbps symetrical, with up to about 1Mbps symetrical (If you have that kind of money). All you need is a dish on your house (about the size of a small pizza box) pointed at the local basestation.

Check out their website for more info.

There is a european company called Tele2 which is currently rolling out wireless DSL in the UK and in europe as well. The UK version uses a licensed setion of the 3.6 GHz to 4.2 GHz spectrum. Network architecture is regional central access nodes with backbone connection and microwave links to more local "Tele2 Access Nodes".

Quote from the site :
"Superior Security
The Tele2 network has been designed to provide maximum security. Originally designed for secure military operations, the system uses the latest spread spectrum CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) and frequency hopping radio technology."

On the users end the antenna plug into a LAN router type of thing, with an ethernet connection for the LAN/PC.

Up to 150Kbps both ways, supports linux (basically supports anything that does TCP/IP), coverage is currently only 4 cities, major expansion in Q1 2000, residential version £9.99 per month (on trial), buisness ones £39.99. Loads of adverts at the moment on local radio and stuff.

tele2 are trialling broadband Wireless networking in my area of the UK. The big attraction is that it costs £10 per month for unlimited always on access. If the deal is that good when they roll it out to the whole country then I think we're looking at an unqualified success story.

The UK already has such a scheme in the form of tele2. They sell "Wireless [A]DSL". 500Mb of transfer for £34.99 ($52) a month (They don't say the speed... ~1MB?). They also do leased-line standard symmetrical services (at a price).

It's not that cheap, and 500Mb isn't even enough to download a decent Linux distro. Also, the coverage isn't much yet, but they are increasing it.

Anyway, the UK government has allocated a vast swathe of the 35Ghz microwave band for wireless Internet, of which, AFAIK, tele2 is the only licencee. It was a bit of a flop.

I wouldn't settle for anything less than the hard-wired stuff (I have an NTL cable modem myself. Very rare in the UK). Cable modem has much potential (>10Mbps downstream. That I want to see).

Russ

> If everyone paid per byte for their internet access there would be almost no lag, because people would be more careful about their usage.

Firstly, this would also make terribly complicated phone bills, would the ISP have to give you an itemised bill of where your bandwidth went? (60MB download from www.x.com, etc)

Also, when you talk about "metered" calls, what are you metering? Time? Bandwidth? A mixture of both? A long call takes up a modem slot, even if little traffic is downloaded.

So, you can:
a) meter on time, (like BT local calls)
b) unmetered with a higher flat rate. (leased line)
c) meter on bandwidth (eg Tele2 ,

(With Tele2 you get a wireless link (arial goes into a ethernet card) You pay a flat charge a month, with an certain allowed bandwidth a month, charged for any overage)

Personally I prefer the last option, a full time line, with a reasonable bandwidth allowance.
The starting tarrif is £60 a month, for a 128K line, and 150MB a month, which is tempting, but a little too expensive. The more people that get into this sort of pricing model, the more competive it will be, and the more the range of tarrifs will suit the consumer.


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