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8Mbit Broadband to Become Available in the UK
UK Online is offering 8Mbit broadband service to the UK. The upstream is 400K, and there's a monthly download cap of 500GB, but at 40 pounds per month, plus 50 installation and a free wireless router in the package, that has to be among the best deals on offer from anyone.
With the exchange rate currently running at ~$1.8/£1..
Plus.. I *rarely* max out my 1mbps line as it is.. who's going to have a good use for this.. (I don't use BitTorrent, mind.. the donkey does for me).
This sounds like a great deal for students...we split 1.5mb/s four ways, and there are definitely times when I can feel the strain...then again, we also split the bill 4 ways, so it's not so bad ;)
"and there's a monthly download cap of 500GB"
OK, bub, let's see you carry that much pr0n.
If a CD-R weighs 20 grams and holds 700MB, then a spindle of 50 CD-Rs (35 GB) weighs about a kilo, or 2.2 pounds. 14 spindles * 35 GB = 30 pounds.
So you're breaking even (pound for pound as you pound the pud) after about three weeks.
Conversion to Libraries of Congress full of dead-tree editions of Mayfair (it is the UK after all) is left as an exercise for the rest of you wankers. Er, for the student.
I'd love 8mbit downstream, but why is it still a sad 400kbit up? I can understand that upstream costs nominally more and they don't want you to run a massive servers, but that large of a discrepency (20:1) just makes no sense.
What I think would make the most sense is giving people a few mbit upstream (closer to 2:1 or 3:1) and then limiting them to something reasonable, like 2gb/day (best done a floating 10gb/5 days or something). That way the upstream is there when needed, but doesn't let people run massive servers 24/7.
I pay less than half of that for 8/1 and no cap!
I live in Sweden.
UK Online is the residential division of Easynet.
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For a rabid Linux hacker, it is easy to bust that CAP by downloading DISTROs after DISTROs not to mention package updates after updates.
Try Gentoo Distro for starter.
Here in Sweden this is commonplace. You can get 8mbits/1mbits from the Telco, pricetag about US$56/month. No download cap, no upload cap. You can get 24mbits/3mbits as well, but I'm too lazy to check the price on that.
Then there's several other companies offering DSL with various merits as well as prices.
Me, I'm happy with my fiber-LAN hookup. 10/10, no caps whatsoever, and five IP-adresses to use for whatever purpose I want. Price about US$40/month. If I want to I can get 100/100 for about US$80/month.
And yes, I know that we who live in Sweden are totally spoiled with broadband.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
It gets worse... I have 8Mbps DSL in France for 14.95 per month (basic idea is that everyone pays the same, whether they get 1Mbps or the max 8Mbps).
Thats less than £10 per month and with no download cap! Come on UK... Getting beaten by the US is bad enough, but by France? That's terrible!
(BTW: I'm a Brit in France, so I have mixed feelings on this one!)
Might want to checkout the maximum theoretical inbound and outbound bandwidth of the ISP too before you rush into things...
It might be that they only have a 1 gigabit pipe connecting them to the rest of the internet, which would ensure that the only time you'll reach 8 megabits, is when you are only transferring to other people on the same ISP.
Then the routing might be so bad that you have 600ms lag which will make it terrible for gamers.
Anyone actually on this ISP and checked the lag, and the average speed?
500GB a month is hardly anything to sneeze at. If it is single layered DVDs, that is about 111 DVDs. Per month! If you saved all of that, you'd be spending at least a couple hundred dollars a month in hard drives.
If you fully clog a T1 for a month, that is 461 GB, and I shouldn't need to tell you how much they cost.
We have only begun to tap the potential of the Internet. When the average connection can both download and serve hi-def video faster-than-real-time, we will really have arrived at the Internet of the future.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
thanks for playing. You read it well: 20Mbits/sec DOWN and 1Mbit/sec UP. No cap. and that's for 30 Euros per month.
The service comes with free telephony to any french landline (calls to mobile phones cost something), and very cheap international rate, like 3 eurocents to europe.
Once you've got all that, you can pay an extra monthly fee to get hundreds of TV channels. With 20Mbits/sec ... that should do it.
All of this is given to you thru Free.fr triple-play box, the FreeBox. My Mom's been with them for a couple of years and has the original, more clunky incarnation of today's sleek freebox. Here's a picture of it.
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"When you consider all of these factors, this "best deal around" doesn't really seem to be quite so great anymore."
Erm. Unless it's a common practice to move to the USA to get cheaper internet, why would one from the UK even consider this factor?
"Derp de derp."
If you can just download it again why would you bother to store it at all?
More and more I expect our HD's to become caches for content on the internet.
Imagine for a moment a filesystem driver that uses a local disk to cache files, expiring the old unused content and replacing it with a torrent file (or whatever the latest p2p is) that can be used to transparently download the file again the next time it is requested.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
You make it sound as if it was something wonderful. As somebody who's had Videotron in the past, I'l fill up the necessary information.
- In my neighborhood, cable would get slow at Rush Hour. This was back then with a 4mbps connection
- They constantly change the deals. Sometimes, they make things better and sometimes really bad. For example, We (family) left because back then, the download limit per month was 6GB and for that speed, completely ridiculious. we payed $270 cause we downloaded around 20GB. Not long after we left, they made a sudden change by raising the cap's limit although we were never informed if such possible change to occur in the not-so-distant future.
- Their slower plans have silly caps that are in place to make more ppl go with the fastest/unlimited plan. The caps are easily beat within days. At least 500GB makes more sense than 20.
That being said, we use AEI because it's $30/monthly for 3Mbps/800Kbps. Of course, the technical support blows beyond your imagination but it's fast most of the time. Of course, Bell's Sympatico (competing xDSL-providing company) isn't that great either "Can you verify if you have a microwave close to your modem?" shrug...
Try the 100 Mbps up/down for USD 85/month I can get here in Stockholm, Sweden (the dollar is really weak right now, a couple of years ago it would have been more like $60/month). No cap. Not that I need it, my 10 Mbps is just fine (wnd with no perceptible slowdown during peak hours) -- Bittorrent is amazing as it is, especially with all the other peers who use the same ISP (www.bredband.com).
Britain gets screwed on a lot of things. :)
Have you seen our petrol prices?
I am also not impressed. Why is this news?
I live in one of "the worst serviced areas" in the Netherlands: my employer (a university) claims to have 96% national coverage for employee DSL, but not in my area. Most providers have near or total national coverage.
Still I could get for instance the following comparable offer with no cap: 8064/640, no cap, EURO 49,95 (Tiscali).
Minimum no cap: 256/256, no cap, EURO 15.00 (Speedlinq).
What I have is 3200/768, no cap, EURO 59,95 (but tax deductible), with a provider (XS4ALL, see for instance this and this) that has a reputation for fighting the government and others in court to protect the privacy of its customers, a good ping, and the best helpdesk for UNIX users.