Slashdot Mirror
UK Delays National Broadband For Three Years
DMandPenfold writes "The British government has said that it will not be able to complete the rollout of broadband across the UK until 2015, blaming a lack of funds. 'Under the previous Labour government's original plans, everyone in the UK would have had access to 2 megabits per second broadband by 2012.' On Thursday, UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt organized a meeting for major broadband providers 'to identify the current barriers to providing basic level broadband in rural areas as well as suggesting ways to make more use of publicly-owned networks, such as those connecting schools and hospitals.' BT, the country's biggest telco, estimates that the necessary government funding for the project will be as much as £2 billion."
Why the delay? It should be scrapped altogether.
I have nothing against people in rural areas wanting the same services
as everyone else but why should I have to fund it? If they want to get
money for this they should increase the council tax to rural areas to
pay for it. They chose to live there so they should pay for the privilege.
The BT 21CN is just wrong and doomed to failure. Its over budget, delayed
and will never work right. By the time its completed they'll be needing
to upgrade to keep up with things like BBC IPlayer, YouTube, P2P and other high
bandwidth services.
Quite a few years ago I tried to get my local council to create it's own
broadband network. The local community would fund the internet network and
then add the cost to the Council Tax. If other areas did the same they
could link's their networks to each other and create a massive resilient
network that isn't dependant on BT's overpriced services. Local connections
would be at nearly LAN speeds. It would promote community services and
facilities. It would also remove a lot of the traffic going through exchange points
like LINX.
"BT, the country's biggest telco, estimates that the necessary government funding for the project will be as much as £2 billion."
This is a farce. What the new Government did was ask the TELCOs what the problems were with deploying rural broadband. That's like asking De Beers how to reduce diamond prices.
BT can pay for it themselves. Roll out the universal service obligation for broadband. BT's already got special treatment thanks to its representative in government, Ofcom. It's time it also enjoyed obligations.
I don't want the bloody government paying for this. I don't want the government doing anything else with the Internet in this country, in fact. From the IWF to Cameron telling Facebook to take down troll comments praising some guy with obvious mental health problems who went on a killing spree, this government is more New Labour and less Liberal than the last.
Even in my remote town in the middle of nowhere,
So, you live in one of the territories, then?
Even in my remote town in the middle of nowhere,
So, you live in one of the territories, then?
You need to ask with the proper "eh?" at the end.
Even in my remote town in the middle of nowhere, we now have access to 12 megabits per second for commercial clients.
You haven't said anything about the price - or what drives your local economy.
"Remote" doesn't always mean poor or politically impotent.
Makes me sick. BT should pay for it, they already have a monopoly, so you can't avoid paying them money. Why can they not pay for this themselves? They have stiffled innovation for years. They promised 21CN for the whole country and I don't believe they ever had any intention of delivering it.
2 Megabit by 2015 !!! I thought my 8Mb broadband was slow.
There was talk about funding coming from the TV license fee, why hasn't this happened, I would consider broadband to be more important than the digital tv switch over. Especially as most of the remote areas have trouble picking up terrestrial TV anyway.
Why? C is extremely terse, and therefore ideally suited to dial-up.
Now if you were a COBOL programmer, you'd have a point.
SCNR
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
A 27 year old _grand_mother!
Are you serious or was that a typo?
...this means that there are people in the EU who are being denied their Basic Human Right to free 100MB Internet service! Could it be that there has been some exaggeration going on? Have we been misled?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Reports say they're pulling out of Afghanistan in 2014, so the timing sounds about right.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Well, at my rural property in Tasmania (where I'll be living in a few months' time), I'll have to take whatever connection I can get, and I'm quite sure it won't be as good as 1Mb/s. I'll be several km away from the nearest Telstra pole (or even a power pole, for that matter), and I'm not sure whether or not Telstra's wireless connection will actually be possible there. Obviously, all the satellite options suffer from the upstream latency issue for VOIP. Here in Perth (Western Australia, that is), I have plenty of choices for ADSL2+ connections, but it's easy to forget about regional areas until the day when you have to deal with them.
>>>Obviously, all the satellite options suffer from the upstream latency issue for VOIP
(1) How about just using an old-fashioned phone?
(2) You don't have to move there. You made that choice yourself. You lose fast internet, but in return gain the beauty of a rural home. These are the tradeoffs we all choose as a natural part of life - lose some and gain some. If you think internet is more important than just move back to the city or suburb.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
A national broadband plan has to incorporate all of a nation's people. Those rural parts (such as Tasmania, Northern Territory, Nunavet, Alaska, and so on) really drag down the average.
My exchange allows for LLU ISPs, however they only use ADSL2+ for broadband. My line to the exchange is poor, I can only get 2.5Mb/s ADSL, ADSL2+ is no go on my poor quality line. I'm forced to stick with BT because of their crappy twisted pair cables.
Until it gets down to the issue of who pays for it. I'm reminded of an ancient Roman orator, who was asked which wine he liked to drink best. His answer?
"The wine, for which, someone else has paid for."
Kinda sorta sums up the broadband debate everywhere. Everybody wants it; nobody wants to pay for it. And it would certainly be best if someone else paid for it.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It was a joke, looks like.
Though there are 27 year old grandmothers out there. Get knocked up at 13, then if your daughter does the same....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I've never really understood why people in rural areas feel it should be a legal requirement for their internet to be as fast as it is in cities. If you want to escape the riff-raff and live all on your own in the country, you should be prepared to deal with whatever that might bring you.
We'll be hearing this from the Tory-Lib Dem government for the next 4-5 years, I suspect. There will be many many things that we should be doing, but because Labour mismanaged the public purse, the digital divide in the UK will have to stay.
It's really quite boring that politicians spend so much of their first time blaming the previous incumbents for current problems, instead of being a bit more proactive and concentrating on solutions instead of laying blame...
cat:
um so has Liz2 suddenly got a few more subjects or did Bush give us Alaska in return for backing gulfwar 2
You want all the neat stuff you need to actually live in a heavy urban area delivered to you from the rural areas, plus have it cheap. Swell, this is now possible because as a nation we invested in a set of "commons", we now have decent roads everywhere, rail service, and seized property where electric transmission lines, natural gas lines and water lines exist..all to bring stuff to you in the cities, our royal "blues" bloods now by voting demographics, cheaply. So, if the rural people just want a little better internet, all of a sudden this "commons" idea gets bad? OK, maybe it is! How about you voluntarily give up all your cheap trucked in stuff and piped in stuff and go out and start contracting for your food and water and electricity, and pay transit fees and tolls, boundary line by boundary line, to each owner, to all the rural landowners to get that stuff? What do you think your urban existence would really cost then?
I'm all for it really, dump the commons, privatize everything including the roads, no more eminent domain seizure and use for the transmission towers and water pipelines, toll roads everywhere, all of that, let it simmer for a few months, just to see what is really valuable today or not. Let's rock! Bring it on, we'll see who cracks first.
Here, just to show you we rural people have some compassion for our now starving urban area "neighbors" under the "chuck you farley, we got ours now you pay up what we demand if you want anything better like normal 21st century stuff" private everything model of society and economics... you might need this http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/e-sermons/butcher.html You need to print out a hard copy now while you can..my guess is your electricity would go to, oh..a few hundred bucks a kilowatt hour at a minimum once all our transit fees are paid to us. Maybe more..or maybe we just wouldn't care and say "no, tough luck, we don't need anything you have, including your scam fiat currency crap. We could do that, too. We got the food, water and energy, you got...consumers. That's it..you just consume what we provide, and provide cheap.
Have fun! Let's do it, the grand experiment, get this sorted out what is really worth what, once and for all. Then no more debates, we'll all know what is necessary and what isn't, who gets paid too much and who gets paid too little, and what is more important, and whether or not a "commons" is a good idea. Let's let a real free market and no more public commons *anything* sort this all out. I'm totally ready and would really like to see it. Making my bucket of popcorn right now!
You can get 12 megabits per second in pretty much all of the UK, if you're willing to pay BT (British Telecom) enough. It's not standard though.
Anyway, not to cast any doubt, but when you say the lowest you can get is 5Mb/s, is that the actual minimum speed you'll get, or the minimum they'll sell you? Most ISPs in the UK will happily sell you "up to 8Mb/s" but the lines might only support 4Mb/s, for example.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
21CN is the core network you muppet - its not for the D side
6,500m of cable is £48,750?
I'm hoping that includes the laying fee, otherwise they really ought to stop laying Monster Cable for phone lines.
LLU works fine with poor lines, my parents have LLU (Sky) and only get 1.5 MBps. I don't think any LLU providers will refuse to serve a line that can handle 2.5 Mbps, and ADSL2+ is fine for such things - you just don't get any benefit over ADSL.
even in my remote town in the middle of nowhere
But how big is this town and how does service degrade as you move away from that town. Even a fairly small town should have enough buisness to support an incoming fiber and a phone exchange+DSLAM.
Knowing UK broadband the actual service here will most likely be rate adaptive ADSL2, that is up to 24Mb but more likely 10 or so on a fairly good line and much less as you get further away from the exchange.
It all comes down to number of DSLAMs. the faster they want the minimum service level to be the shorter they have to make the worst case line from the DSLAM to the customer. That in turn means they need more fiber and more DSLAM cabinets and that means more 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
Somewhere in storage, I've got a little pamphlet from Canada's Tourism Commission which claims Alaska as one of the ten provinces and two territories.
Why would you think that. 27 yr old grand mothers are quite common in Rochdale.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
(1) How about just using an old-fashioned phone?
Because it will cost thousands to get cabling through several km of forest.
You don't have to move there. You made that choice yourself.
Of course I did. But as a technically able sort of guy, I am simply investigating the best options for me to be able to both have my cake and eat it. After all, that's what Slashdot is supposed to be about.
Considering my mother taught a few Great grandchildren of children she taught in the school she worked at since she had me (her second child) I can confirm that 35 year old great grandparents are indeed possible. It was when it got to the stage where there was a great grandchild of one of her original students in every year that she decided it was time to retire...
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
A 34 year old grandparent is possible without any laws being broken, since the age of consent in the UK is 16, and allowing for gestation.
In a world where there are 15 people who are each worth between 20 and 60 billion dollars?
Why would you think that. 27 yr old grand mothers are quite common in Rochdale.
All these 27 year old grandmothers ... where are they flocking from?
I said great grandparent, that was not a typo.
But these were kids whose ideal jobs were "To become a hairdresser so I can talk to my mates and cut hair all day" and who wanted to get pregnant by an unknown man so that they could get a decent house - the younger you were the quicker you could get to the top of the list and the more children you had, the bigger house you got. This wasn't one or two this was about half of the class each year!
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -