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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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.. :(
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.
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?
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.
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."
Sorry but that's totally wrong. Although you CAN stream low quality versions over the web, BBC iPlayer is PRIMARILY a peer to peer content delivery service. You can download programmes using the iPlayer download manager and you can even watch them totally offline if you want to. You don't need a fast broadband connection at all. If you want you can queue a load of stuff to download overnight or while you're at work.
So, far from "impossible" as you say - the only thing you don't get are the low quality online versions, which is NOT what iPlayer is all about.
I'm feel sorry now that people are seeing the low quality online videos on the iPlayer website and thinking that they're using iPlayer! I hope everyone realises the extra quality you can get when you download the full resolution version using the iPlayer software.