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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."
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
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.
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.
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
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?
Because some people might want to buy them who already own set top boxes?
Why would you want a PAL tuner in a TV that is plugged into a set top box, given that the STB should be connected by SCART, not UHF...
How do you know the TVs being sold don't have SCART? Pretty every TV I've seen sold in the UK in the last ten years does
Who cares, it's not up to the government to stop people buying obsolete things.
Actually, it is part of the government's job to stop companies misleading people into buying stuff that will very soon be useless. At the very least they should mandate that big "This TV will not be able to receive broadcast TV in a few months" stickers be put on them. Not everyone is well informed about the current state of the digital switchover - I imagine that quite a few people still buy PAL TVs with absolutely no idea that they will cease to be useful (without a set top box) within months.
Hmm, maybe the government should put stickers on Linux machines to say "this machine can't run Windows software" too.
It's like people buying cheap HD DVD players after HD DVD was killed. I'm not sure why, but a lot of people did. What you're suggesting is that some government bureacrat work out a set of rules to decide what was obsolete, if people understood the implications of the obsoleteness. They'd have to fine people for not displaying the right sticker, which means someone would need to check. You're far better off just allowing the market to handle this.
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;
If the obsolescence is a result of a government action, then it is more then appropriate for them to require a sticker that says Because of our action, this will be useless in 1 year or whatever.
In the case of HD-DVD, yes, let the market play the game. Let them set the rules. But when the market's rules are superseded by government intervention, it is only proper that the government require warnings to be in place.
It'd be worth you while rechecking that. My exchange was one of the last to be upgraded to ADSL as it was under the magic 250 subscriber number at which BT said it would never be commercially viable and so never going to upgrade them. However ALL the exchanges in Scotland were upgraded around four years ago courtesy of an ~ £50 million rural access grant from the EC. We were limited to 1Mb originally but that was upgraded a couple of years back. So the problem should not (now) be your exchange.
The other issue that you may have run into is that BT were massively keen on DACS'ing rural lines in the 80s and 90s, which means they could get two phone connections on one line and not have to lay more cable. This doesn't work with ADSL and you have to get the line reverted to a single connection - which means moving the other sharing line elsewhere. Generally they'll swap DACSs between whoever they can (i.e. non-broadband subscribers) before laying new cable, and if they're out of space they may just say ADSL isn't available. There are ways around this - see various advice sites but generally it involves pleading/shouting very loudly/talking to your MP/etc. (and befrending you local BT engineer is a good move too - BT Corp. may be evil, but these guys are your friends).
Despite my extraordinary good connection it could have been better as recently BT had to lay a new cable down the glen to provide new lines - having run out of space on the original cable, no room to DACS any more and being obliged to provide lines to new property when requested. As the telephone engineer overseeing this said to me, he couldn't understand why they laid copper when they could have laid fibre for little additional expense, and they were going to have to lay fibre sooner or later anyway.