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UK Researches Future 10Gbps Broadband Technology
MJackson writes "The UK Technology Strategy Board, an executive non-departmental public body established by the UK Government in 2007 and sponsored by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, has invested £1M into over a dozen research projects for the development of ULTRA Fast up to 10Gbps broadband technologies. The ultimate aim, the development of pan-European Ultra Fast Broadband, could give EU companies a massive competitive advantage on a global scale."
That depends, are you in London? Some other big city? No? Then no.
Then again, my parents are in a small village in the middle of Norfolk and they get full 8 Mbps ADSL (I've tested it). The village is so small that the local junior school collects students from several villages and still has to combine several years of students into the same classes, instead of the traditional several classes of students per year. The village is home to the phone exchange which serves the surrounding villages, which is most likely the reason they get full speed ADSL.
I'm in the Newcastle area, and could get Virgin's 50 Mbps cable connection if I wanted (I'm on their 10 Mbps service). However the upstream side of the connection leaves a little to be desired.
1080p60 is 3Gbps nominal.
Move to the sticks, by a school. You get much better speed than in a city with less contention. This is my experience anyway.
Pro Coffee Drinker
Knowing how the UK government (and certain ISPs) think, I am concerned that the might use higher speeds to leverage people into more intrusion on their private communications. Virgin currently offer the fastest broadband and they are notorious.
Also, there is a difference between what a UK ISP sells you as a high speed connection and what you actually get. The ISPs spat the dummy out not so long ago about how IPlayer was 'ruining' the Internet because *gasp* people were actually starting to use the bandwidth they had paid for. Just because you've got a bazillion gigabits between your house and the ISP, doesn't mean the ISP is planning to support that at its end. They might well be counting on you buying an uberfast connection just to show off then not using it.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Isn't 10Gb internet access going to further increase the technical requirements for implementing the kinds of surveillance and recording systems the UK government wants? If you think that the associated complexity and costs of their current & proposed systems are extreme already, just imagine if everyone's access were to get 5000x faster!
Maybe they'll have to give it up. I suppose we can only hope!
-- "Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all."
At this rate broadband transfers wll be faster than HDD access times. Interesting to think all data could live in the whole network and not in datacentres at all.
Why on earth rely on others when the whole network can do, at long long last, what it originally was set out to do (OK unknowingly), connect machines together, not to hubs but together in a fully distributed manner.
At least they are trying. And the geography, geology and demographics of each region of the world is going to determine what kind of technology can be used. If everyone is packed together into a small city, then cable/wifi might be the best solution. In a rural area with low density farmhouses, satellite might be the best solution.
I always thought having miniature tunnel boring machines would be an alternative to digging up roads to lay fibre optic cable. The use of giant cutting wheels is not really permitted in the UK or perhaps even Europe.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Yet another "strategy board" to waste huge chunks of our money to sit around and pretend to work, under the guise of helping. Do we really believe amazing advances are going to come of this, or are we all just going to have forgotten about this a few years from now when some or other new "strategic initiative" is launched, while we fall further behind the East? Leave the money in the hands of the companies who stand to benefit from this, and set up true free market competition - if it's really good for the companies, they will not only do it themselves, but spend the money far more efficiently, because unlike these bureaucrats, they aren't assured of a future salary regardless of whether or not they produce anything at all. That's basically how we got ahead in the first place.