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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.
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.
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.
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Still cheaper than the money they will end up wasting on ID cards.
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.
Of course the management at BT will drag their feet on the chance of a handout from the government, just like our "public" transport operators. Blame the WTO! When we had public utilities we were all shareholders, now they've all been privatised yet the public still "subsidises" (funds) them through taxation. How do I get a job like that, one where I'm rewarded for failure?
I recall trying to get ADSL in '97, our exchange was eventually enabled in 2001; an eternity in tech years. By failing to roll-out DSL when it was current generation tech, BT cut their ROI and now the technology is rapidly approaching obselescence. Instead of FTTH, BT are hard at work on rolling out network level malware known as Phorm. The free market wouldn't tolerate such follies so the only conclusion you can draw from all this is that the incumbent is still very much a government sanctioned monopoly.
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 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).
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?
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.
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
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.
As Portugal is already ahead of the UK in any broadband ranking and is already deploying a nation-wide fiber optic network that will offer 100Mbit/s connectivity in any domestic connection then maybe, just maybe, you could not only get your facts straight but also avoid sounding like an idiot with all those racist remarks.
By the way, I'm Portuguese and I already pay 19 euros a month for an unlimited, 8Mbit/s connection.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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."
UK supply is actually 230V +/- 10% in line with the rest of the EU.
(OK, actually it's 230V +10% -6% but we're getting a bit technical now...)
simon