Slashdot Mirror
High Cost of Converting UK To High-Speed Broadband
Smivs notes a BBC report on a government study toting up the high cost of converting the UK to high speed broadband, which could exceed £28.8 B ($52.5 B). The options examined range from fiber to the neighborhood, providing 30-100 Mbps connections for a total cost of £5.1 B ($9.3 B), up to individual fiber to the home offering 1 Gbps to each household at a cost of £28.8 B. England's rural areas could pose tough choices. In the lowest-cost, fiber-to-the-neighborhood scenario, "The [group] estimates that getting fiber to the cabinets near the first 58% of households could cost about £1.9 B. The next 26% would cost about £1.4 B and the final 16% would cost £1.8 B."
I'm getting 160kbps on my ADSL connection, and it sucks. Roll me out some fibre, please...
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
Ouch. I wonder how britain electrified, did they pass the cost of the few onto the many?
--
Blackshot
Providing this level of internet infrastructure will be a viable investment for the future. Realistically this level of investment will keep them ahead of the pack for the next 10 years and during that time it will open the doors for businesses that typically operated on sneaker net to operate online. Faster transfer speeds mean more business gets done. More business means a better economy, which through taxes will easily recoup this initial loss.
Apart from retaining the bottlenecks present at the sites people visit (what point is 1GB to the home, when the site you're downloading from is limited to 300KBit/S) isn't this simply the last throes of "old" technology?
Countries are already starting to use WiMax and no doubt when the problems around scaling it are fixed, this will be a much more cost effective (and far less disruptive) approach than cutting more trenches just to lay fibre to the home).
The biggest part fo the problem is providing a service in rural areas - where the low population density makes the cost of each circuit disproportionately high. Even if the decision is made (on purely financial grounds) to "fibre" urban areas, there's still need to be a different solution for areas where this isn't economically viable.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I am presuming that the cost of rolling out fibre to the final 16% is based on the previous 84% having already been done, but why not start with the customers with the most need?
End users in towns and cities tend to have the higher rate ADSL services, some now achieving 24Mbps, which seems more than adequate for the time being. Get the rural customers that have the greatest need served first...
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
I have and ADSL connection that is supposedly at 1.5Mbps downstream, 320kbps upstream. It was working well until July, that means having basically zero lost packets on the first visible IP hop good minimum latency 54ms and reasonable max roundtrip (about 100ms) on the usual five minutes MRTG
After July Telecom Italia probablly channeled my ATM stream into a busy trunk since I now have about 2% lost packets, extreme jitter on roundtrip (not uncomon to have one second roundtrip on my first IP hop) and so basically my conncetion is BAD for voip and annoying for http
To measure all of this I use a modified MRTG
So, it is good to have a high speed phisical link, but do not forget to check the rest of the infrastructure, othervise the first high speed link is just to make you pay more but give NO additional benefit at all
Disclaimer: here where we are in the UK we have cable. And HSDPA. And we get much more bandwidth to Marin County or Cupertino, CA than we do to North London, UK, or to the non-cable equipped BT supplied town eight miles away. It isn't just rural areas; the whole BT infrastructure badly needs fixing, and there is no way that the company that until recently said the Internet would be a passing fad is going to do the job properly.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Really? Does business really suffer from slow broadband speeds? Occasionally, I have to wait an extra 30 seconds for a file download but it's hardly impacting my productivity. What kind of business needs a really fat pipe to prosper?
In the early-ish days of ADSL in Britain, it was quite common to check for availability, only to be told "Oh sorry, there's fibre running to your property - ADSL needs copper".
So unless they were really stupid and removed it, there's already an awful lot of fibre under people's streets.
I never understood the problem. Surely nobody cares whether they have ADSL or some other technology, as long as the bytes get to their TCP stack. Either market some fibre-based endpoint, or mass-produce fibre-ADSL media convertors and install them at the appropriate point.
porn.
It'd be nice if they'd actually *do* something like this though, but I can't see it happening. This is kind of like standing in an Apple shop going "Mmmmm pretty. Shame I can't afford it."
Spend the Olympics money on it; we'll only make a complete and total Millennium Dome style "designed by clowns" cockup of that anyway.
The thing with opening up massive broadband though is that something will also have to be done about bandwidth costs for the sites that are being downloaded from.
For now and the next few years, most people would be more than thrilled to get the 8 to 24Mb/sec that they have paid for. This only needs more backbone, not the ultra-expensive "last mile infrastructure".
Fiber can then be laid opportunistically when infrastructure is upgraded, then connected together wherever the demand arises. To spend enormous amounts of tax money debating hypothetical universal options is stupid.
Paid Q&A/Research
Still cheaper than the money they will end up wasting on ID cards.
I would imagine that the rural areas of Scotland and maybe Wales would pose tougher choices, as they are also in the UK.
From TOA - £28 billion fibre infrastructure bill.
Currently there are 16 million households with Internet access in Britain.
If all of them adopted fibre, the cost per household would therefore be £1750, which would need to be recouped in ISP charges etc. over the course of this generation of technology's lifetime. Maybe £350 a year over 5 years = £30 a month.
That's more than I currently pay for unmetered ADSL, and doesn't factor in any profits, nor all the other stuff ISPs do.
OTOH commerce and government get a lot of value out of the Internet, so it makes sense to me that the effort should be funded by the public purse and taxes on business.
Then there are distributed systems that have pieces all over the place. I once worked on a system that had printers in all of their local offices and sent out batch jobs all over the World. Even with today's fast everything, things would bog down.
But yeah, for just internet surfing, I agree with you.
What kind of business needs a really fat pipe to prosper?
Businesses involved in delivery of digital content? A lot of the big TV names in the UK are offering on demand streaming video via the internet (BBCi, 4OD, ITV, Sky and Virgin). They're now starting to trial streaming of HD content, but with the lack of high speed connection it's not really a viable option for most people, and with HD devices starting to become more popular, pretty soon most people are going to want it.
What kind of business needs a really fat pipe to prosper?
First thing that came to mind was Pr0n.
and as we are often told, Tis better to GIVE than RECEIVE!!
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
Businesses involved in delivery of digital content?
Right, so what you're saying is that existing business may not benefit that much from fatter pipes, but new businesses can spring up (or existing business can diversify) that use them to deliver content that was previously impossible.
52 billion is not really all that much. Granted its enough to make one person filthy rich, but I'm guessing there's more than a few billionaires in London. Plus its not like the investment won't reap huge benefits.
If you really want to be scared do research on what it would take to upgrade the interwebs in a country like Russia, Canada, China, or the US. Note the extra zeros at the end.
Regardless, what will end up happening is it will flood the populated areas and sparsely inhabited areas will have to wait years unless someone important to the government lives there.
lol: You see no door there!
There is a simple explanation of all this. BT is one of the most inept companies in the UK. I used to work for a DSL provider in the UK and had to deal with BT Wholesale all the time, who, in turn had to deal with BT OpenReach. It's a complete and utter mess thanks to the UK Gov't privatising and stifling actual competition.
Add to that, I've seen cases where a new customer signs up for ADSL. If that customer isn't a BT Broadband customer, BT OpenReach will "mysteriously" switch their copper to the cross-wired/noisy pair and miraculously, the BT Broadband customer will have the quietest lines!
It's a complete mess.
ENGLAND != UK
UK is made up of 4 countries, Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Bloody England.
Fuckwits stop with this England is the UK already, ffs.
The real mother of all broadband - 1 gigabit fibre to your home
Download 10000 MP3's or 500 movies in 5 minutes*
All for only £500 a month (Fair usage limits apply**)
*From legal sources only, though everyone knows the only place you can get that amount of files is from illegal sources, even though we hate file sharers making us a bunch of 2 faced cunts.
**If you download more than 1Meg during some unspecified time limit that differs throughout the country we will limit your speed to 512k. Full speed will be reinstated after another unspecified time period. Unrestricted access is only available between the times of 01:00 - 01:10 each day.
Or we could just let the Mobile Telecoms companies roll out 3G LTE http://snipurl.com/3ohwz
(should be here about as quickly as laying fibre to everyone's house...)
With T-Mo and 3UK consolidating their 3G RANs coverage is going to be expanded substantially.
Let's face it: the 3G licence holders (3UK, T-Mo, Orange, Voda and 02) paid a hell of a lot more
in the spectrum auction to HM Govt. than this £28.8bn!
Disclaimer: I work for a Managed Service company directly working on the 3/T-Mo consolidation.
Bus error in your favour. Collect 200kB
If all those households adopted fibre, then none of them would pay for ADSL. So you would have to subtract all current ADSL revenues from the pool of money available to fund this infrastructure. That's a big subtraction.
Chances are excellent that most households which already have ADSL would not switch to fibre unless the difference in price is zero (or very nearly zero). Slashdot audience aside, most households are perfectly content with ADSL "last mile" speeds, at least with the present range of Internet-delivered services.
Put these two facts together and one quickly concludes that, if the cost of the infrastructure is accurate, in order to execute the project the vast majority of funding would come from sources other than household rate payers. I really don't see the point given that there are likely much more attractive alternative business cases, including some combination of urban fibre, wireless, and improved copper-based technologies. Which coincidentally is exactly the approach Japan is taking. New high-rise apartment buildings in urban areas tend to get fibre, most of the rest of the country gets progressively faster ADSL, and various wireless data services keep getting more prevalent. Much of Tokyo has cheap 802.11b/g service available, for example, and the mobile telephone carriers keep boosting their data speeds.
I think he was just giving a single example off the top of his head, at no point did he ever say that it was the ONLY business type that could take advantage of faster connections.
I work in a UK satellite office, for a US based organisation. We have a VPN to the US servers, tunnelled over the internet. A faster internet connection could halve the time it takes me to do an Subversion update. It could halve the time it takes me to get a large trace file needed to solve a customer's problem. And it would make me less frustrated. All of these mean more productivity.
However, TFA is talking about household internet.
I can think of two ways businesses can benefit.
Firstly, employers of home workers, for the same reasons as office workers benefit.
Secondly, businesses that stand to gain from this are ones that are feeding rich content to home Internet users. Whether it's ad-supported Flash games, e-commerce sites with lots of supporting movies/sounds/images, or retailers of online content (e.g. iTunes), the faster your customer's pipe, the more enjoyable their experience becomes, and the more they're likely to spend (or gain you in ad revenue).
This kind of topic REALLY rubs me the wrong way.
BT work great as a company, but have had no intention (until lately) to upgrade their networks or lay down a decent infrastructure for future improvements.
Work great as a company, much like the Petroleum companies in the UK, they can make a staggering profit, while screwing the consumers.
TeleWest/NTL/Virgin Media have had a solid network from the start, while BT prolly ridiculed them at spending such a vast amount on laying fibre.
Now when the profits are being squeezed & the copper core disadvantages are being highlighted, and every kbps is being used, BT/UK Govt complain of the Upgrade costs that have to be passed onto the consumer.
Needless to say I'm an ADSL, BT "boned" user, (although my ISP IS NOT BT), I only wish they had cable in my area.. :(
"Businesses involved in delivery of digital content?"
Pfft! Outsource it to Piratebay. You can trust Piratebay. This ad brought to you by Piratebay.
The BBC iPlayer already offers TV shows in HD and my "measily" 4mb ADSL connection handles it absolutely fine, even when others in the house are also browsing the web etc.
I'd love to brag about having a 100mb connection as much as anyone else who reads slashdot, but I can't really say my life suffers much from not having one.
Except that if ISPs like Virgin Media get their way, only the big boys will be able to deliver content at acceptable speed anyway.
Before the state owned telecoms company was sold off they had plans to run fibre to the door of every home in the UK.
Then the cable TV companies ran fibre to the street cabinet.
Then BT ran fibre to the exchanges.
A fucking great duplication of effort and wasted opportunity.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I live in the Scottish Highlands, 3.5 Miles from the local exchange measured point to point. We don't have fibre of course, but we do seem to have extremely good copper - possibly because the branch of the line I'm on ends another 8 miles further down the glen. I routinely get 4.5Mb on my line (Demon as ISP), have seen 6.5Mb, and Demon tell me they are seeing a little over 7.2Mb raw connection speed at the Exchange. Furthermore because the exchange only has 130 people on it contention is virtually unknown.
Whilst I've love faster, bizzarly given the current state of the network I'd most likely see a drop in speeds if I moved into an urban area.
How about better real time teleconferencing as opposed to sending humans on expensive jet airplanes all over to meetings, or for workers who can work at home instead of physically commuting daily to the office?
Out in the sticks a friend only gets 1mbps. BBC iPlayer can't quite cope with that - and unfortuately unlike YouTube won't stream the entire file when paused, just the first few minutes, then stops downloading. Watch 3 minutes, wait to buffer for 5, then repeat.
Which kinda makes using BBC iPlayer there impossible. For me on 2mbps though, its fine.
It's just an island. Take about greedy motherfuckers! I can run a war for a month on that amount of money.
Third, all that money will go into the pockets of the companies that will deploy those pipes (buy their shares!), minus what occasionally will make its way back to who signed the bills ;-)
How about online backup services for small businesses that generate more data daily than could be pushed over a T1 during the backup cycle?
And why not streaming HD content at a minimum of 20 Mbit/s? Why not 1 Gbit/s? We always know the connection will never be fast enough... but for god's sake... all we ever seem to do here is talk about it. If we just sit here and bitch about how slow it is, and the super wealthy assholes that own stake in the current infrastructure bitch about how fiber rollout will prevent them from buying their third airliner, nothing will ever get done.
It's about time the phone company spent some money for once, instead of just absorbing tax credits and making more money doing the same thing.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Spam, Porn, Illegal downloads, Mafia....
Oh the legitimate ones, Remote tech support, daytrading, Online Security analyst.
If you have a online business, you're mental not having it at a central hosting location. It's not worth being able to walk over and touch the server for the price difference of the broadband and support that needs to go with it.
Honestly you can very easily support an online Store over 128K line. I have a friend that supports his 6 figure online income via a cellular connection.
If you ae dealing with high bandwidth content, then what is wrong with your executives being located in a place where you dont already have very high bandwidth availability? You need to physically beat to death your advisors that told you to build 64 miles away from the nearest optical node the telcos have.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The spying business ?
How else are they going to install the spy cams inside the TV's and stream all that data back to Big Brother (and no, I'm NOT talking about the one with the confessional etc.) ?
What better way to ensure that single parents are not cohabiting, or that everyone is segregating their rubbish ... and just along the way, perhaps one time in 10 million, we might actually catch someone making coke bottle bombs out of hydrogen peroxide ... so it must be worth the price.
And just think about all the employment we can create, paying people 12 pence about minimum wage so they can watch other people. No more pesky unemployment figures to worry about.
China might have talked about doing it years ago, but only the nanny state of UK could actually pull it off, in the name of "security".
Posted by a cynical ex-brit who left blighty 12 years ago, and never looked back.
The new boss of BT was on Radio 4 recently talking about his "main focus" for the coming years is on customer service. This is like a fireman saying that he's going to do little more than put out the flames, rather than telling people not to juggle petrol cans and lit matches.
I really do fear that Britain is about to fall behind here. Several Asian nations are already at the stage described in TFA and, typically, we're "consulting" about it.
I can assure you that if there was cable in your area with FTTK, BT would be the very last people in the world to tell you. A Telewest salesman once told me that Telewest liked to employ people who had actually been sacked by BT rather than being made redundant, because redundant employees still believed one day they might get their jobs back, and so didn't want to sell against BT. The attitude Telewest liked was the guy who, in WW2 fighter style, put a little telephone sticker on his car every time he managed to move a business away from BT.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Apparently the fibre option is already on the agenda for my area. It was announced in a newspaper last year, and the was a page on "the benefits to local businesses and residents" in a council propaganda magazine that came (uninvited) through the door yesterday.
It's less than $860 per capita or 1,9% of the UK GDP. It's not quite pocket change, but not far from pocket change either.
Breaking news: It would cost over six billion dollars to give every person on earth a dollar!
802.11 N supports up to about 300mbps, and has a range of .5 km, wouldn't it be more cost effective to dump a few of these around the place.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
It's funny how this is supposed to costs billions in the UK however in France they were able to roll out Fibre with 1000mbs products showing up almost everywhere for a sub 1bn investment (can't locate the source of this at the moment).
Funny how every other country with a successful Internet deploment strategy (France, Sweden, Finland, Japan, Korea, etc.) are all able to get this deployed without anybody getting out of business. The old dinosaur BT however needs oodles of cash. Yeah right.
Guess the old "Rip-off Britain" adage is still true (and I should know for living there!)
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
The most obvious example would be high street video game and movie retailers. They'd probably still keep a few high street shops just for a bit of presence, but there wouldn't really be a need to have them anymore.
Storage Area Networks would also start making a lot more sense. Online backup services for both business and home use would be able to flourish.
Then there are things like making more use of thin clients, people hooking into their home machines and playing games on them etc. A lot of that will come down to latency, but bandwidth can be important too for transferring a lot of sound and colour information. There are probably plenty things that would suddenly become possible that we just never even previously considered because it would have been far too slow.
I agree that there are many businesses that don't really need more bandwidth, but it certainly wouldn't hurt. Our own business has users in other offices and out on the road that connect via VPN. Having a faster line would make transferring encrypted traffic a less painful experience (though again some connection speed issues just come down to latency).
which is totally what she said
It's not just individual line rates that are the issue - there is contention to take into account too. You can bet that if everyone that is contending for your bandwidth all streamed HD video simultaneously everything would grind to a halt.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
http://www.broadbanduk.org/ and the report (PDF):http://www.broadbanduk.org/component/option,com_docman/task,doc_download/gid,1036/Itemid,63/ (4 MB). Wy dont submitters bother to give the source of a news report?
A business like mine that has 30 sites all interlinked and sharing data, with nightly transfers to headoffice for management reporting, intra-site backups using rsync and a VoIP network.
Don't specifically need 'FAT' but a full sync of all our data (only needed occasionally) takes 10 hours over 8Mbit DSL.
We've looked at fibre: 5K (GBP) install and then 7K year to operate - per site. having to consider it for our new HQ where the projected copper DSL speed is 1.5Mbit/sec
AT&ROFLMAO
In my experience in IT here in the UK, if most/all of your work can be done from home then it will likely be outsourced to India, in which case the speed of household Internet connections in the UK is of little importance.
Online distribution of rich content kinds of entertainment (such as movies and TV series) could really take off with this. However the main things holding back an explosion of high quality Net-based digital media are:
This is hindering the spread of simple, cheap net-connected PVRs and similar devices that connect directly to the TV.
Until people can buy a generic £30 online digital media box at Tesco (like they buy a PVR or DVD player) which works with any ISP and lets them play most movies and TV series on their TV directly from the Net, there will be no real consumer market for 100Mbs plus Internet access.
Digging up streets is extremely expensive and labour-intensive, which is why when all the little local cable companies had built their networks, they had very little money to invest in the actual serice, and they ended up being taken over by what eventually merged into Virgin Media. Virgin Media seem to have no intention in laying cable to areas that never got finished in the initial build 12 years or so ago, and villages and small towns will probably never get cable. Remote rural users won't either.
Even if BT Openreach did run fibre to the street cabinet, there are many lines in rural locations that are many km from the nearest street cabinet, and wouldn't be able to get much better service if the DSLAM were relocated closer to their premises, and BT Openreach are hardly likely to install fibre to a new cabinet and install a DSLAM that is only going to serve 10 houses in a remote hamlet.
it's hardly impacting my productivity.
It's hardly affecting your productivity. This is Slashdot, not a marketing department or a boardroom. Let's use English instead of Marketese. Further reading.
In my experience in IT here in the UK, if most/all of your work can be done from home then it will likely be outsourced to India, in which case the speed of household Internet connections in the UK is of little importance.
I appreciate that we're just trading in anecdotal evidence here, but while I myself am office based, a significant number of my UK colleagues are home workers, and yet more split their week between home working and coming to the office.
The IBM location in my town reduced its desk count, introduced mandatory hot-desking, and encouraged people to work from home some of the time.
what the bbc iplayer offers is not HD... it's a highly artifacted h264 stream at a ~512 resolution, try watching it on a large HDTV and you'll see.
I think this is great, because until recently I had an account with Virgin. This was supposed to be 20Mb, which is roughly equivalent to 2.5MB, of which - if we were lucky - we got maybe 1MB of connection, on a really good day. So, by my calculations, 100Mb in actual terms means roughly 5MB connectivity to the internet. Doesn't sound so shocking now, does it?
Be smart, help people!
The company I work for surveys powerlines for utility companies. We cannot transfer 1000 x 15MB still images in anything like reasonable time and cost. And don't even think about hte video surveys we do.
So yes. Business is being held back.
Download up to 50 full DVD-sized linux ISO's in an hour*
* This service is meant for residental use only, daily bandwidth limit of 650MB applies.
Not just those businesses. The company I work for has a distributed workforce, but only has a thin pipe to the main server because that's all that's available at realistic cost (it's only been about a year that broadband has been available there at all). Waiting 30 seconds to download a file? Pah! At busy times I can wait a couple of minutes just to open a folder. That means that instead of working live on the server, I work on local copies of all files and up- and download them in batches, which leads to backup and configuration management headaches. Most of our customers are abroad, so in our little way we are boosting the UK economy. I suspect this is an issue for a lot of small- to medium-sized enterprises.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Are you talking about the intertubes, or is there some other fat pipe...
Nevermind.
I appreciate the problem, but for 100 quid a month you could colocate a server somewhere with a real pipe. That way at least, everyone could use it at the maximum speed of their broadband rather than being limited by the somewhat pathetic upstream speed on your ADSL connection.
Of course that might not work so well at your office if the server really has to be located in your HQ. In that case, some form of bonding multiple ADSL lines would help a lot. I know Andrews and Arnolds offer this. Other good ISPs probably do too.
My friend uses Linux on an old Dell Inspiron. BBC confusingly call both their Adobe Flash and peer-to-peer systems iPlayer. I was referring to their website, which is called BBC iPlayer, not their P2P streaming service, called BBC iPlayer. (which you clearly recommend, and is quite good).
Sorry I didn't explain that well in the original post, but since I mentioned streaming from their website and not P2P, I would've thought it was bleeding obvious.
He can't download the full resolution using the software - call my friend difficult if you like, but Windows XP won't run nicely on his laptop, Gentoo works great, and Youtube and others stream fine with it. I've set up a couple of video streams from my own server that work great for him, using JWPlayer, which stream live for him (depending on the FLV quality I choose, naturally!)
The problem comes where the BBC iPlayer Adobe Flash Player (BiAFP?) will only stream the next few minutes of the streamed file when paused, rather than Youtube which will keep streaming until the end of the file.
Apart from the obvious conservation of bandwidth, is there any technicial reason that the BBC's iPlayer (BiAFP, not their P2P software) won't stream an entire file when paused? It'd actually make it usable on slow systems.
For the record, I think the 'low quality' is actually rather good, its good enough quality to watch for most TV shows, just a shame their player isn't quite so well designed for slower connections.
Most of the videos from the BBC iPlayer (BiAFP) are already on Youtube, split into parts. I have to admit, he usually uses these. Even worse quality, yet there doesn't appear to be any other option.
Thanks for trying though. Yours would be a great solution if it were possible! Any other ideas?
The point is the UK has stacks of long copper circuits running everywhere they need to go. This copper can be much better utilised with modern electronics than the primative dedicated POTS circuits. Also keeps the Hysterical Preservation Boards less unhappy than trenching.
The key is to convert neighborhood distribution passive boxes into actives. Cut the links running back to the Central Office and use them for ATM or even xDSL digital circuits. Provide POTS and ADSL from the actives.
Come on people, it's a question of scale. A figure like 28.8 billion pounds is nothing when you're talking about what, 50 million people? That's only about 575 quid per person. Say about 1000 bucks a head.
Whatever you do, don't leave it up to the bloody media companies to do. Look at it like a public utility. And after it's installed, you can charge the media companies to use it and manage it in a public-private partnership. It's win win baby.
Salut,
Jacques
I am sure these numbers are fake or doctored. There is no way it would cost more then 100 million to set up england on high speed...you need 4 backbones with fiber optic and the rest you can at a very low cost blend into wifi for those hard to reach spots and offer an incentive to the people for buying the special high power routers/antennas. This is just yet another stab at making people pay through the nose for service they could get cheaper if they weren't so afraid of living without it.
But does anyone look into these options themselves, no, unless you have an independent contractor who comes in and establishes prices, no one really knows the real costs so they think, well i guess if they say its going to cost this much, then they must be telling the truth.
Do the boondocks **HAVE** to be wholly wired to the hilt? I mean, those people have deliberately chosen an energically-wasteful and ecologically dubious lifestyle. And with increasing pressure put on the environment precisely by the transportation needed for those people, why should they not be penalized for their willful choice, instead of having those made wiser choice having to foot their connection bill?
you want me to fund all those companies who want to saddle me with DRM?
Really, what everyday businesses need this?
I am not sure how it is in the UK but in America the largest number of people employed are employed by small businesses. This whole idea of "must have bigger pipes" looks like support for content providers who rarely if ever are small businesses. Worse these usually are the same companies using DRM and copyright laws as a hammer across the world.
I look at it this way, if the costs are to be taken up by the public then some guarantee of unimpeded access to content should be required.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
And just think about all the employment we can create, paying people 12 pence about minimum wage so they can watch other people. No more pesky unemployment figures to worry about.
This is England, you wouldn't need to pay 'em. Just call it Distributed Big Brother and have a tabloid style "Shop the evil doers, win a bounty" number for people to call. The unemployed will happily watch it at home and the underemployed will happily watch it at work.
Hell you could charge 'em for the privilege and use some of that money for the bounties and the rest to pay off the loan that you used to build the system. Oh and hookers and blow in some country where rich swine are protected from the press.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
How about businesses that decide to allow people to work from home? Face it, businesses that need big pipes will lease them as needed. But the summary emphasises connecting homes, and that's the key to a distributed workforce. If I have a LAN-speed connection to my home, and a company-issued computer and IP telephone, much of what I need to do in the office can be done at home.
Upside:
- Fewer commuters, less traffic congestion, lower cost to workers, less CO2 put out. Dare I hope that lower fuel consumption translates into lower prices?
- People who have a harder time being able to work otherwise(mothers with young children, people with disabilities for whom getting home-to-office-and-back is difficult, etc) could remain in the workforce. Their income stays higer/more stable, their company is not forced to rehire/retrain for the position.
- Workers could live in more rural/suburban locations where there is a lower cost of living. Businesses would benefit by having access to a larger talent pool than the do if they draw from a more finite geographical area.
- Businesses would need less office infrastructure to support the same operations, lowering the cost of doing business, and hopefully giving higher profits to owners and lower prices to consumers. Businesses that might not otherwise be viable might spring up.
Not all busniesses can benefit directly from this model, obviously. But then if you consider the overall benefit to the economy by having lower cost of goods & services from the companies who can, everyone wins.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
We have 60 million people in a tiny island, and the population density in our emptiest areas is not much different from US exurbs. What's more, a lot of the people in our remote areas are doing something called "farming", which is rather important just at the moment; they are exporters rather than consumers of energy sources. We actually need to encourage more people to go and live there, because at the moment they all want to live in London. We have just had revealed a £3 billion gap in funding for the £7 billion of repairs the London Underground mass transport system needs. Which makes more sense; spending a few billion on encouraging people to live outside the South-East by improving infrastructure, or spending it on trying to keep too many commuters trying to reach central London every morning?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Somehow I'm getting a steady 23Mbps out here in southern ohio, even though I'm paying for 15Mbps (cable), happened after a storm. It WAS 11Mbps.
I would like to know exactly when it became a right for people that live in the middle of nowhere to have fast broadband. Purely letting the market decide is not the correct solution because we would end up with a situation in which probably only 30% of the country would ever get fibre. Going out of our way to make sure every isolated house gets fibre is not the correct solution either.
Personally I think we should aim for about 80% of houses with fibre to the home (yes, I would be in the 80%). If that means we need to subsiize it a bit so be it. I think we have to wake up a little and realize that these people chose to live far from populated centres. That luxury comes at a cost, that cost being higher utility charges.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Oh you poor underprivileged user!
Come to America! Here we have one of the world's greatest telcos|pack of liars: Verizon, your "broadband and entertainment company," offering high speed internet for everyone!
NOT!
That 160kb would be a real delight here but all the renowned Verizon will sell me is POTS.
I usually watch iPlayer on a 52" HDTV, normal mode can't handle it but the HD mode is great. It's not as HD as say the BBC or Sky HD channels, but the image is still pretty crisp.
If I were to actually use 7.6 megabits/second constantly I would get an unpleasant email from my ISP. The maximum bandwidth your connection can handle has little bearing on how much data the UKs creaking network of copper cables and fibre optics can actually shift.
Only a tiny fraction of people use the Internet to its full potential. We are not a small % of antisocial bastards; whenever I have shown someone what is out there they have taken it. People only self-regulate their usage through ignorance. BBC iplayer highlighted this problem by bringing content delivery to a wider audience, and the ISPs bitched about it so badly. They had sold people connections on the basis they would hardly use them, and became pissy when people started using the product they had paid for.
Getting every end user to have a maximum bandwidth in the gigabit range would presumably mean that sustained usage in the megabit range would no longer be a problem. If the studies they did simply increased the maximum bandwidth of peoples connections without increasing network capacity to match, though, then the people who wrote it were morons and the article is meaningless.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Well, for one thing businesses with a lot of employees working on computers.
For another, how about ... businesses with imagination?
Aside from the obvious examples of content businesses, there are businesses that could use content to sell more products and services. Here in the states, soda bottles had unique IDs that could be used online to redeem song downloads.
How about businesses which need to provide technical support. Service manuals could be augmented by videos, so that you could watch a video on how to unjam the copy machine (and maybe get exposed to a bit of subtle marketing). Maybe you'd even get a human being to talk to -- expensive to be sure, but in some cases worth it. Maybe the local auto mechanic who's stumped could video conference to the regional service boffin.
I could probably come up with ten pages of examples of ways businesses could use high bandwidth link, especially provided that everyone has them. Now chances are, very few of those would come to fruition, but that's OK because, shocking though it might seem, I'm not as smart as everybody else in the world, put together.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Only $52.5B? There are over 22 million homes in the UK. So that's like $2,400 per home. People pay $50+/month in the US for broadband (much more for FIOS!). If they had no other expenses, they would pay this off in 4 years. Realistically, this should still be profitable after 10 years.
I remember when people were saying "Dialup is fine, why would you need an ISDN connection for?" Then came more multimdedia intense webpages. I remember people saying "ISDN is fine. Why would you need cable or DSL?" Then came video.
Does the UK really want to be in the same boat as the U.S., lagging behind when the next big thing comes?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The BBC iPlayer already offers TV shows in HD.
Sorry if i come a cross as a troll but the iplayer is no where near HD, 640 pixels wide is not HD and don't get me started about the bit rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_television#Standard_Display_Resolutions
Even you average MVK 720p TV rip is border line HD.
Due to the bit rate been squashed down.
A 4Mbit ADSL will die under a true HD stream.
And this the whole reason they are pushing these upgrades, the UK broadband infrastructure is still copper based.
It is fine for web but the cracks start to show when it comes to rich content like HDTV over IP, VoIP,Video chat, Massive data transfer.
If you want to see the difference between them. Then download a episode from BBC iPlayer, then a 720p TV rip plus a music video at 720p
The average size of the video will be like this
iPlayer 350MB
TV Rip 1.2GB
Music Video 200MB if H264 and about 400MB for MPGE2
The music video will trash the rest in quality.
I would give you links but copyright prevents me. If I could call it a test of video quality I would host them myself but fair usage does not exist in the UK.
Have you been reading "Blind Faith" If not, you should.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Candid88 from 1990 called. He doesn't have any "internet" and can't really say his life suffers much.
He gets his news from newspapers. He watches video on TV or drives over to the video store to rent a tape. At work he sends intercompany courier mail and faxes. He can hear a weather report every 30 minutes on the local talk radio station. The travel agent books his flights and rooms. There's a library less then 10 miles away if he needs to look something up in an encyclopedia or old magazine.
So why would he want to do any of that on a computer?
Really? Where did you find that was better?
While that may be true of the average code-monkey banging out "Enterprise Java" or PHP all day, those of us doing real work actually have skills which are in demand and can not simply be replaced with some random guy in India.
Can someone please compare this to how many days it takes us to spend that much money in Iraq?
I'm guessing they have an SDSL/SHDSL line (synchronous DSL, so same speed each way) - that's the only way you'll get a decent upstream rate (and if they haven't got that, then they should look at it).
Colocation is indeed another feasible option, but then you have the headache of managing the security and integrity of a system that is outside your corporate firewall, and not under your physical control (See these incidents of data centre server theft).
No it will keep them on an equal footing with many other countries in the world that did this years ago. *Not* doing it will put them even further back.
Compare 3.3E9 GBP (for 84% coverage) with how much the telecommunications industry makes in the UK every year. Really, it's nothing. Or compare it to the cost of 3G licenses back in 2000 -- they cost more than 5 times as much.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I guess maybe my experience in Investment Banking around here has colored my view on the subject of outsourcing of IT in the UK ...
It's true! According to Google Maps, "England" is an empty farm field somewhere midway between Stoke on Trent and Telford.
I had no idea it was such a small place. It's pretty impressive really, that so much culture and history all happened in that one tiny field.
In comparison, the UK is much larger, almost the size of an average US State. Think how many Englands could fit in that space! I wonder why they never expanded out of that field? I admit, the hedge surrounding it does look formidable from the aerial photograph, but there's a road right next to it.
This fanciful figure on fibre rollout is to get the government to use taxpayers money to fund something the BT shareholders are too tightfisted to pay up themselves. They are just there for profits, not to pay for capital investment, let the sucker customers do that.
BT have had it REAL good since privitisation in the 1980's. They got the entire network for nothing, can charge other prividers access money to "their" lines, have benefited vastly because of digital switching so no need to have big buildings as exchanges (most now housed in street cabinets), and have sold off most the old phone exchanges to property developers.
They also charged "line rental" on top of call charges (and if you use the internet more line charges via your ISP* subscription). For what they charged over the years, you could have pulled/blown your own fibre down the cable ducts to the local exchange.
* Most people even if they have it at their exchange, are not on unbundled local-loop lines.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Well how about the business of poltics. Universal high bandwidth broadband mean there is no reason why live transmission can be delivered from every major political house 24/7, even local government meetings could be streamed to the web. You want honest politicians then keep an eye on them.
Added to that, paid political advertisements on commercial services could be banned all together, killing off corporate funding of corrupt politicians via lobbyists, as all politicians can stream what ever messages they want via universal broad band.
Then you can add all the delivery of community services , giving 'community organisers' a bigger voice and greater reach (yeah I know there is no corporate profit in those community services which is why the rich and greedy like to deride them, but for the rest of us they save and assist millions of human beings every year).
Then there is the downloading and burning of legal content. Of course just a small reminder, that families represent a different use, typical family of four all sharing the same connection, four times as much bandwidth required.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Would you vote for a politician who said he'd commit 6bn to make the country a world leader in highspeed data?
Personally, I think this is an excellent use of taxpayer money - we are a tech and services economy, so let's play to our strengths, shall we?
Better use than money on refurbishing iraq as the worlds largest carpark at any rate.
Assuming they have power for the computers and terminals.
I realise the UK is a fairly small country compared to the US, Canada and Australia but even in the UK is it possible to put fibre to every or even most homes?
It just seems mind-boggingly expensive.
I don't mean to be draconian or a spoilsport but I guess I'm getting older, the world doesn't work how we want it all the time, economics come in to play here.
My two questions about this situation is, what is happening with ADSL, considering it works over standard copper lines, it's still in my mind a fascinating and brilliant technology, considering we only had dial up only 10 short years ago here in Australia.
Are there plans to further increase the speed of ADSL technology?
Huge fat fibre to the exchange is quite feasable then ADSL off that doesn't seem that prohibitively expensive yet potentially still quite fast.
(for ref: I'm in Australia and on ADSL 2+ speeds, I sync at 15mbit and get about 1.5mb a second, sadly a 20 / 40gb a month limit (peak, offpeak) so it's useless to thrash it but it is quite snappy)
Second question is, what does South Korea, Japan, Sweden do? most of us know they have some huge links in those places, 100mbit is quite common to the home.
My question is how and what technology, can we learn from them?
Surely they don't have fibre to each home, is it similar to DSL? is it cable, or sadly is it fibre to each home?
Final point, 28billion actually doesn't sound _that_ expensive in this day and age, considering what single road projects can cost councils and countries, it really seems kind of cheap to be honest.
I have a friend that supports his 6 figure online income via a cellular connection.
I know a drug dealer too. ;-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Considering what we've spent on the NHS IT system that no doctor or nurse I've spoken to seems to want, this seems like a bargain to me - why NOT give the people something they actually want for a change ?
I'm not so much interested in speed as I am in affordability and reliability.
I am tired of oversell, I don't want "up to 20 Mbps" for 15 quid a month, I'd just be satisfied with a "guaranteed 1 Mbps" for a tenner.
I don't want my internet connection to slow to a crawl just because my neighbours are streaming video.
Affordable and reliable, is that too much to ask?