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."
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.