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8Mbit Broadband to Become Available in the UK

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cheap-broadband dept.

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.

6 of 518 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Dear UK by Tackhead · · Score: 4, Interesting
    > 40 pounds? Now that's a heavy modem.

    "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.

  2. Re:you guys are getting screwed... by TecraMan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!)

  3. Re:Is that really a news? by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 4, Interesting
    10 megabits per second upload with no cap? Holy crap! I want your ISP! Imagine how amazing BitTorrent would be if every connection was like that! You could download hi-def TV shows and movies faster than you could watch them. You could do real-time P2P Internet video broadcasts, and have it actually work. Anybody could be their own TV station. Communication monopolies of all types would be on their deathbeds. Who needs cable TV when I can download what I want to watch, start watching in seconds (as the rest downloads faster than I can watch it), and watch it whenever I want?

    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?" `":" #");}
  4. France has got UK Beat: 20Mbits/sec @ 30 Euros by valmont · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
  5. Re:Not really a great deal... by NanoGator · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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."
  6. Re:500GB by complete+loony · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.