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UK Government To Back Broadband-For-All
Barence writes to mention that the UK government is throwing their weight behind a broadband-for-all initiative with an initial round of £250 million in funding. Using money left over from the digital television switch, the initiative aims to have a 2Mbit/sec broadband connection or better in every home by 2012. "Analysts welcomed the proposals, but say there are still many details to be hammered out: 'The Chancellor... needs to consider how to remove the barriers that prevent the people who cannot afford broadband to get connected. They need to ensure that competition in the market remains fair and consumers are given choice rather than one or two providers.'"
Five bucks...er, five pounds, that this will be filtered to high heck...
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
2000 called. They want their broadband back......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I guess it's a start, so they should be congratulated on that.
However 2Mbit seems remarkably slow. Even now, I'd find it too slow to bear. By 2012, in 3 years time, I'd imagine it will seem even more obsolete as services change to take advantage of higher bandwidth.
I have 10Mbit at home and that's about the lowest I can bear. I will upgrade to 50Mbit soon.
You know, instead of government spending taxpayer money on initiatives to make things like this free or artificially cheap, how about the government instead work on making sure that the economy is strong, and people have good jobs, then they can have the money to pay for their own broadband.
Seems like way too many people want to use government to attack problems from the wrong end. Don't try to make it so the poor can afford everything - try to make it so there a fewer poor people who can't afford things.
I wonder if there will still be a a market for people who wish for non-government ISP's to only have the government filter their packets rather than send their data down pipes, routers, and infrastructure owned and operated by the government. I wonder how many orders of magnitude easier it will be to do that kind of in-depth sniffing on government pipes than on private pipes?
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
I live in the boonies of the USA and my connection peaks just over 1 Mbps (I have a WiFi connection to a tower on the local volcano. Not a typo.) 2 Mbps would make me dizzy with joy, especially since at peak times I sometimes get under 500kbps. A lot of people out there are still using a modem, like me until a few months ago.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If I couldn't afford broadband I would definitely take free 2Mb/sec over dial-up, no contest.
Most likely the UK will pass a three strikes law in the near future, meaning the broadband will be for all except those who are accused three times by the recording industry of file sharing, with no warnings or evidence required.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Perfect example how socialist welfare state works. They rob you off your hard earned money and spend it on your behalf (minus corruption fee), since they obviously don't consider you mature enough to decide for yourself how to address your needs. Now if anyone can explain to me, how can this be so massively applauded and supported by the public?
Internet is more and more a utility. People can't live without it, so I think the governament stepping in and offering free/cheap internet access for those who can't afford it is only fair. Plus they can pass it as a education initiative.
While 2MBit/s might sounds slow to those of us that have turbo connections and get upwards of 10Mbit/s, this is actually a decent number for an initiative such as this.
2 MBit/s is actually a very attainable number for a cheap internet solution to get EVERYONE access to that speed. And while some may scoff at it being slow, 2 Mbit (around 250 KB/s down) is still about 5x faster than dialup. And it would be an always-on connection, something dial-up is not.
Also, for the UK to fund an initiative like this, it is VERY forward thinking, considering there are many parts of the UK that have roads no wider than a single small European car, and barely receive tv signal or cable-equivalent. I have been to parts of the UK where there is literally NOTHING for miles and miles. For them to be pushing for 2 MBit/s in these areas (if they are SERIOUS about providing this speed of internet to EVERYONE), it would be a viable alternative to the laggy, delay-prone satellite internet that many people in these areas are forced to purchase.
Ever tried to play an online FPS w/ Satellite? Yea. It sucks.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
Not only will you have broadband, but Phorm will even track what websites you visit in order to serve adverts that are relevant to you, and the goverment will be monitoring your connection to make sure you don't inadvertently access any violent pornography and that no terrorists try to indoctrinate you. Sign me up!
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
I wish I could get 2Mbps where I live. That would double what I can get here.
This is just so V can stream to every screen in London with minimal buffering.
this is actually a decent number for an initiative such as this.
No it's not, because by the time they are done spending money at the rate the Government typically spends it they could have bought a fiber to the doorstep system for every man, woman and child in the UK. Why would you spend a pile of money to build a system that's obsolete as soon as you turn it up?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
same thing going on in other parts of EU if you watch the news, they want to build it out then filter , control , then they have you , trolltariens @ work
So, from your statement, you are stating that fiber lines cost the same or less to implement on a per-home basis than phone lines/coax/copper?
You, my friend, do not live in 2009. You are somewhere far off into the future. Perhaps somewhere around 2050 or later. And on Mars.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
You may want to talk to your retarded little brother USA, and see how that worked out for them.
Gov'ner: Here's 250$ million, Broadband for all, yea! :(
Telcos: Yea!
Pleabs: Yea!
Gov'ner: Where is our Broadband?
Telcos: What broadband?
Gov'ner: Where is our money?
Telcos: What money?
Gov'ner: *shrugs*
Pleabs:
so now they can spy inside!
This is my sig.
Is it the government or the taxpayers who are paying for it?
There could be a lot of fiber stretching involved, which would leave the way open for upgrading the endpoints as need demands it. Though there's certainly a potential here for spending a lot of money on a system that's a legacy from the get-go.
'It was behind the picture,' said the voice.
Looks like they're finally working on the infrastructure for all those telescreen hookups.
It does if you are stringing new wire. The cost of the wire is nothing compared to the labor cost of installing it. If you aren't stringing new wire then why haven't the phone companies already provided service?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
They probably wanted to see how they could get cameras in the house and not just on the street. Yes, now you have govt controled and monitored internet... OHHH, you have a web cam... can we see? :)
Other may disagree, but I will say this even as an America IT geek: This kind of government intervention is a bad thing whether it's in America or another free society like Britain. The free market should determine how infrastructure like this is built, the governement watches to make sure that everyone plays by the rules but otherwise minds it's own business. That's my two cents.
So of course it is dead easy to turn around in 2012 and claim that yet another published target has been met.
I've had 20 mbit down / 1 mbit up for 50 quid a month for nearly 2 years now.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
...is this really needed at a time when we should be making real an effort to cut spending.
I love the idea, but we need to prioritize a little, could this 250m be better spent elsewhere? Or not at all?
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
It looks like it is going to be implemented by putting lots more HSDPA cellphone towers around the countryside. They give you 3.6Mbps if you are close enough to them.
But with Fiber, you HAVE to string new cable everywhere...because it is FIBER. 80% of the UK will already HAVE some sort of cabling up, whether that is coax or phone lines. The initiative would only be stringing new lines up where there aren't currently any, in which case for this initiative it makes sense to match the current cabling in the rest of the UK, to being the out-of-touch areas up to speed with the rest of the country. They only want to give people the option of having faster than dial-up speeds to those who, most likely, don't even have dial-up, or don't have any change of a phone company/broadband provider forking over the $ to run lines themselves out to small areas with little to no people around.
To bring fiber to the whole country, it would cost infinitely more than bringing 2 Mbit/s sevice to EVERYONE (meaning, the people that have no internet or can only choose to have dialup).
cable and phone companies only run cables to areas that will make them $. I used to live in a very "boonie" area here in NY in my childhood. No cable company wanted to run broadband up our road (a single ROAD only about a mile long) because the population density on that road was not large enough for them to warrent running cables. After about 5 years, more people moved into the neighborhood, and sure enough, there were Optimum Online trucks on our road the following summer.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
I guess it depends on whether they are targeting 2mbit as in actually 2mbit or "2 mbit UNLIMITED at 1:1000 contention with 4gb /month cap". If it actually ends up averaging 2mbit and not 500kbps then it's not so bad.
how do they plan on gettin' a computer in every home by 2012 too?
Broadband-for-all... in order to Spy-on-all.
What, you thought the British government was gifting its people with free broadband because it liked and trusted them?!
That's at least 2Mb/s everywhere in the UK. There are still some rural areas, particularly in Scotland, where the only 'high-speed' Internet access you can get is ISDN, at 128Kb/s (for two channels), charged per minute and very expensive. My mother can currently only get 1Mb/s from her ADSL connection in rural England due to her distance from the exchange, and I can get about that from my phone (UMTS) when I visit her if I put it in the right spot in the corner of the room (although with slightly higher latency).
In other parts of the UK, you can get much faster connections. I currently have a 10Mb/s connection, and 24Mb/s or 50Mb/s connections are available in other parts of the country (and here soon...). Currently, however, the incumbent telecoms companies have no incentive to deploy broadband infrastructure outside the more lucrative urban areas. This is starting to change with the HSPA rollout, since you can cover a lot of rural homes quite cheaply with a small number of towers, but it's still not very fast.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Looks like they are learning from the US' mistakes.
They need to ensure that competition in the market remains fair and consumers are given choice rather than one or two providers.
(emphasis mine)
2 Mbit (around 250 KB/s down) is still about 5x faster than dialup
V90 was 56Kbit down, 33Kbit up (rarely achievable) - not KByte. 2Mbit down, 250kbit up is far better than 5x faster (particularly as the majority of traffic for the average user is down).
I live in the boonies of the US and get 300 kbps, take that! Lets play who has the slowest internet.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
Yeah, and there are still people stuck on dial-up. 2Mbps to every home wouldn't be nothing.
Still, it seems like 2Mbps in 2012 should be a bit behind the times. In the near future, being stuck on DSL should be like being stuck on dial-up now. Most of us should have 10Mbps symmetrical connections (or better). I know, someone is going to say that's ridiculous, but I don't think it is.
Only 1Mbps? I would pay anyone $250 right now to up my speed on my 56kbps modem to 33kbps. Right now it's 26kbps (as it's been since 1994).
And to belay the obvious: No, satellite doesn't work on my site, and wireless is "5 years away" which is the same number I've heard for the last 10+ years.
And if you think I chose to live in the boonies (rural US) without internet, you're wrong. I chose to live in the boonies WITH ALL UTILITIES, but around the mid-90's the set making up ALL UTILITIES changed. So I guess I should have burned my now-useless house down as soon as ISDN was invented.
You might want to check your math though. Most dialup I've seen rarely breaks 56Kbps. If they are planning on 2Mbps, then that's an increase of roughly 40 times, not 5. The jump from dialup to 2Mbps, is roughly equivalent to going from a relatively slow 2Mbps broadband connection to a 100Mbps LAN connection.
Let me do the maths for you...
Dialup is rated at 56kbps.
This broadband is 2Mbit, or about 2000kbps
2000 / 56 = 35.7
That means this initiative is 35.7 times better than dial-up. Now I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that anyone on dialup RIGHT NOW would be glad of such speeds.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
2mb/s is horrible. At the rate they are planning 4G will be available and considerably faster than this broadband for all, which is sure to be monitored feverishly by the government.
You give him/her too much credit. Lackeys think for themselves and have a shot at becoming the evil genius eventually. This person is either a mook or a goon.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Lets play who has the slowest internet.
Shhh, there might be some Aussies in here.
I downgraded from standard Comcast (7 Mbps) to their slowest offering of 756 kbps (0.756 Mbps) just to save money. It isn't so bad! Vonage works fine, youtube works fine, flash games (my kids play all the time) work fine. An ISO or anything larger does take some planning or patience however. I will want to upgrade when/if streaming video displaces my PVR though.
Who could have? Why haven't they? Speculating about what it seems like it ought to cost is different than doing it.
The monthly bandwidth cap matters much more than the bandwidth per second. I'd rather have a 200 kbit/s connection with a 100 gb monthly cap, than a 2 mbit/s connection with a 10 gb monthly cap.
That being said, does anyone know what the monthly cap is going to be? I don't live in UK but I still hope there isn't going to be one.
Member of the 7 Digit UID Club
I have a UK broadband connection, with an 8128Kb sync. My last provider implemented throttling, so my speed at weekends dropped to 512K on average, and down to sub-200 regularly. One day I hit 62K. That's when I left.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
I would have had the first post, but damn this 1200 baud modem.
Having been on Virgin's fibre broadband at 20Mbits (yup, 20) for 6 months, while it is indeed very fast and so far, reliable, it is NOT fast enough. As soon as another occupant of the house beginds to watch an HD stream or download something, it slows down - sometimes even grinding to a halt altogether during busy evenings. Furthermore, with the advent of widespread cloud computing, considerable strain is going to be put on the Internet as a whole. Already, using Google Docs on anything but the fastest connection is impossible, with it timing out if the connection slows down too much. (Not Google's fault.) For the sake of the economy, like the autobahns, highways and motorways of the past, the governments of today (Singapore has already done this) needs to build a super/mega/ultra/wikkedly fast national network of at least 40Mbits (yes, 40) with a 5Mbit or more downlink to make uploading content and teleconferencing practical. The ideal way to achieve this without digging up half the planet to lay fibre to the home will be to use 4G LTE wireless technology. We MUST invest now!
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
if you compare 2mbps to 28.8kbps (probably a more realistic number, since lots of the people forced to use dial up are unable to get DSL because the copper is bad) the ratio comes out nearer to 70x faster (overall).
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
I find the term "broad band" offensive. I much prefer the phrase "all female orchestra", but I agree that everybody should have access to one. What do you mean off topic?
The problem is, this will end up being universal. Just think about all of the crappy services that governments provide like mail delivery. Here in the USA, Fed-Ex, UPS and DHL all provide a much better experience then using the USPS, but not by much. How much more will ISPs fail to innovate because they only now have a niche market? Whenever the widest used alternative is crappy, you only have to beat it by a bit to appear "competitive" and when the crappy service is government run, you can bet it will be crappy for its lifetime.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
But how else will the poor be able to connect to the Internet with their MacBook Pro, you insensitive clod?
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced that the Australian government will build a new $43 billion national broadband network, connecting 90% of homes to 100-megabit fibre internet. "We believe that fast broadband is absolutely essential for our nation's future", he said.
"Telstra has raised issues with the amount of bandwidth usage this will produce, given we're still hooked to America by tin cans and string, but our Great Firewall of Australia Internet filtering project should keep usage down to reasonable levels at near-dialup speeds. We promise you won't go over your download cap."
The Great Firewall will reliably block all illegal material, child pornography, terrorism and unAustralian thoughts.
"Not only are the contents of the list illegal," said Senator Stephen Conroy, " but revealing the list is also illegal, and so is linking to someone linking to someone claiming to reveal the list. So we're blocking Google Search. Having to use Anzwers should keep usage right down."
Calling it, the "single largest infrastructure decision in Australia's history," Mr Rudd said the project would employ up to 37,000 people a year monitoring citizens' net access, reading their email and correcting spelling errors in their football forum posts.
A consultative process will determine the regulatory framework for the network. "We're considering getting Senator Fielding to do it personally," said Senator Conroy, "since he's the dickhead who demanded the censorship in return for his votes. Hopefully it'll melt his brain. Bloody balance of power. At least Xenophon's bloody sane."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I'm sure they won't block the URLs of activist groups who criticize the government.
http://www.campaignforliberty.com *enter*
500 server error
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Try a 300, baby!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I once used a 28.8K dialup modem to connect to an ISP. Over VoIP.
I live in a small town in Iowa, and until recently, I had 100 mbit fiber, for $65/mo.
Granted, it's capped at 20 gigs/mo, with 50 cents/gig overage. But still, I find it amazing that there are places in this country where your choice is satellite, dialup, or cell.
Speaking of which: Does anyone know where I can get better Internet?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Physical fibre is cheap - cheaper than copper. The expensive part is the labour of installing it, digging trenches and such.
So why would you waste money on installing 2Mb/s connections to people who currently have nothing, when you could install 100Mb/s connections or faster for the same cost?
First they are connecting telescopes with fiber, now they are about to give away broadband!?! See, this tiny little island can do all that while rich companies can't get cable to my neighborhood. Next thing you know that island country will be all "we are an empire" and stuff, while us US folk slip into 3rd world status.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I live in the boonies of the USA and my connection peaks just over 1 Mbps (I have a WiFi connection to a tower on the local volcano. Not a typo.) .
The problem isn't that you can't get broadband in the boonies. Anyone can. The problem is that most of the time, that option is via satellite. Once you get past the initial hardware expense, monthly service for satellite tv and Internet packages are comparable to cable packages. The problem is the damn latency. Satellite is fine for downloading files and surfing. But try playing FPS's on one.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It's frustrating trying to find a good deal here in the US. Much like cellular services, the major ISPs offer no financial incentive, only slight feature differences at the same price range. Competitive pricing is non-existent where I live.
The real problem is the absurdly low monthly transfer cap. With Hughesnet it's like 9GB/mo, or at least it was last I looked. My ISP gives me 30GB/mo at 512kbps-1Mbps for $50 and I can buy another account if I need to do more downloading, on the same hardware. Allegedly, anyway. I consider myself particularly blessed. I just hope my ISP stays in business :(
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If they can get everyone online, they can then monitor everyone! (Those pesky hold outs not on the internet are so hard to track!)
I would have been before you, but I've been having reliability issues with hawk-on-pigeon packet loss. Both ways, in the snow. So there.
My BT circuit (I don't get a choice there isn't a cable co.) has the last 800m from their cabinet on aluminium cables. I can't see that being replace with fibre any time soon.
The day this Moronic Gov't promises something that makes a difference to me and doesn't cost a fortune in wasted taxation I'll eat my hat.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
So does FexEx, UPS, or DHL deliver a document from any mailbox to anywhere in the country for 43 cents in a couple of days?
You have to take then for what they are. They aren't (primarily) a parcel service. They aren't an overnight courier. They are a mail service. And for that they do a pretty good job.
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
You can still pay for private healthcare, Bupa is a prime example of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bupa
And if you've got enough money to afford private health care, the tax that pays for the public health care probably isn't a big dent in your paycheck.
So does FexEx, UPS, or DHL deliver a document from any mailbox to anywhere in the country for 43 cents in a couple of days?
We'll never know, because USPS has a Federally granted monopoly on 'non-urgent mail'. Take that away from them and I'd wager that UPS and/or Fedex could drive them into the ground in short order. If nothing else the USPS is overpaying most of their employees, though I'd wager that private enterprise could find savings in other areas as well.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Great level of debate. Fuck you too.
. Wherever there's universal coverage, there's also usually long waits for specialized surgery
Of course there is. The alternative is no queue, and if you don't have the cash to pay for prvate treatment, you just go home and die. As for the 30% or so of the US which has no health insurance. The US has the world's best medical care, for their rich, and 4th-world level for their poor. And has the infant death rates to prove it.
>> Using money left over
What is that? I've never seen that before...
"Why would you spend a pile of money to build a system that's obsolete as soon as you turn it up?"
Sounds a lot like the private sector (at least when it comes to the internet), the private sector is milking old technology for all it is worth.
Or the NHS, or Royal Mail.
This isn't funny ... this is sad :(
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
There are still some rural areas, particularly in Scotland, where the only 'high-speed' Internet access you can get is ISDN, at 128Kb/s (for two channels), charged per minute and very expensive.
Well afaict you can use a single channel ISDN dialup with pretty much any dialup ISP (including unmetered packages). I think there are unmetered packages for dual channel too though I dunno how much they cost.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
My guess is that BT will be forced to provide sufficiant infrastructure to get a 2 megabit link to every home. BTs backbone network sometimes has some contention but it's generally not too bad. The worst contention typically comes on the connections between ISPs and BTs backbone network (which are very expensive)
Generally this means with ISPs that use the BT system you either get unlimited deals but with horrible contention or metered deals which perform well. There are also some very expensive packages (e.g. the IDNET "buisness premium" package ) which offer both good performance and no metering.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The internet is a huge waste of time, destroys local communities and commerce, damages society and fools individuals into thinking they don't need to have contact with real people to be healthy.
I so wish I could stop wasting my time on it.
Yes, you won't be be billed per minute by the ISP, but you will still have to pay per minute for the phone call, just as you do with dial-up.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If the government was changing for their Internet in some fashion, but allowed people to opt-out, would there be any room for private nonfilterered Internet?
Granted, there would be selection bias: a lot of normal people would stick with the government internet, whereas a lot of the actual bad guys would head for private ISPs.
Government monopolies = have some of the same risks as private monopolies. Government playing sorta like everyone else, or the government service going to people too-poor-for-the-private-market in the market can work.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
but you will still have to pay per minute for the phone call, just as you do with dial-up.
Depends what package you get. There are dialup packages with freephone numbers. They didn't charge per the minuite but they did often have an AUP which prevented being dialled in 24/7 (I think the BT package I was on said 10 hours per day in the AUP though I dunno if they enforced it) and they also made you redial every so often.
ukfsn ( http://www.ukfsn.org/home/internet/friaco.html ) have several packages using this system though they don't seem to have a true unmetered package. They also have dual channel ISDN packages (at about twice the price of single channel packages).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register