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1Gbps Fiber Optic Network For Rural Britain
cylonlover writes "Economies of scale mean that densely populated cities have generally been the ones to benefit from the roll out of superfast broadband networks, while those in rural areas have missed out. Following Google's recent announcement that it will build and test 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks in selected cities with between 50,000 and 500,000 residents in the US, starting with Kansas City, Kansas, Fujitsu has unveiled plans to create a similar superfast FTTH broadband network for five million homes and businesses in rural Britain to bridge the digital divide between city and country."
Here in Finland you have to pay €15,000 just to have a wired connection in some areas.
Like the rollout to rural areas of the NBN in Australia, smart and powerful people are rolling out fast FTTH broadband so IT people can live the dream, move to the farm and give up on the city rat race. You don't need to live in the inner city to write code.
At least until the apocalypse.
...is that they want £500m from the government to build it, which is almost all of the money set aside to provide rural broadband. That may well be worth it (I know people in rural areas who would probably think so), but I'm not sure if it's a good idea for Fuijitsu to have no competition.
Ftth! Ftth! Ftth! Ftth! FTTH!
Damn hairball.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Don't they mean UPTO 1Gbps!
Unlimited usage*
*we will read every bit of data and stop anything we don't like.
when can we get this in cities too, such as the one where I live? My £25 virgin connection seems to be far from that.
1Gbps per household or 1Gbps shared between all the households?
Soon, as rural Britain discovers the entertainment value provided by LOLcats, Farmville, and Rebecca Black, they suddenly won't be bored anymore. Not being bored, they will no longer desire to work the lands. Crops will wilt, no longer be transported to cities and production will fall 90%, and Britain will be cast into the greatest famine since 1315.
Desperate for food, and with their rural counterparts still clapping their hands and laughing feverishly, city-dwelling Britain citizens will start flowing out of the cities in search of food. They will swarm around farms in hope of finding some left-over crops. Soon the survivors will build homes on these farms, and cultivate crops of their own. With cities left desolated and deserted, the new urban areas will be the previously rural areas. And soon enough, Fujitsu will unveil new plans to provide high-speed broadband to the now-isolated rural-urban areas. It's all part of their plan.
Can we get rid of this stupid meme about the British having bad teeth? It may have been true in the 1950s but an entire generation has been brought up on Fluoride toothpaste since then. As a result the old drilling, filling and extracting business has dried up to such an extent that dentists are desperately trying to stay in business by bleaching teeth to an un-natural #ffffff white, giving Botox injections etc. The meme may come from a Simpsons episode but the British can like the Simpsons without believing that Americans are all made of yellow plastic.
I live in Cheltenham, UK (a city of approximately 100,000) and my 5 year old flat block has over 150 units in it; but due to anti-competitive ISP consolidation (and very bad business decisions), companies haven't invested in modern internet infrastructure. I've seen my local exchange. It is a barely manageable mess of copper cables and dangling punch down blocks which isn't due an to upgrade to support ADSL2 for more than a year.
The fastest internet connection I can purchase is a mere 2.2mbps downstream/100 kbps upstream; I had faster internet access 20 years ago when I lived in Ottawa, Canada. Screw the villagers, put the money were the population is.
You tell them yanks, Jeeves!
Niles Bottomworthapoundsurely, DDS
Brits may have good oral health but looking into the average adult's mouth is like staring into a box full of piano keys. We just don't seem to have the culture of paying a lot of money to give our kids braces here; or at least, if we do then there's a generational lag that's preventing me from seeing the results, and it'll get better over time.
What luck these ruralites have, fiber and no dentists.
At least they shouldn't have too many digestive problems.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I've been told this by my last two dentists, both of whom have been very good. My present one says he prefers to feel good about his profession rather than promote unnecessary work, and recently spent an hour carefully rebuilding a tooth rather than fit a crown because he "wanted to keep as much of the original as possible, and besides crowns can take a long time to settle down". That's probably why, at well over 60, I still have all the teeth that I had at 18.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Utter pie in the sky, sadly. £2bn isn't anywhere near enough to bring fibre across the countryside of England, let alone Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as well.
I'm lucky. I have a 7Mbps ADSL line despite living in the middle of nowhere, simply because I had ISDN installed in the late 90s. BT had to run ne cabling along the poles outside just for me (at their expensive); as a result everyone else around here has a 2 or 3 meg line at best. Elsewhere in southern England, for example in a village a few miles from Reading, you're lucky to get a 1Mbps connection.
ADSL2 may go some way to bringing faster broadband, but that's years behind schedule and I doubt it'll get here until 2020 at the earliest (by which time my 7Mbps line will look quite pathetic).
FTT(rural)H sounds great, but who'll pay for it? BT, being cheesed off, will charge exorbitant prices for the use of their poles and ducts, and it just isn't economically worthwhile to lay 10 miles of fibre cable to serve a couple of hundred people.
I suspect at best this proposal will lead to fibre reaching the outskirts of towns and cities, areas that already have ADSL2, while the majority of the rural population will see absolutely nothing from this - in the same way that large parts of rural England are without 3G phone service, or even a 2Mbps ADSL line.
Hopefully I'll be proved wrong, but as far as I can see there simply isn't the cash available to achieve the aims.
ISPs need to differentiate their products so they can get more money from those willing to pay. (like a separate line boarding a plane for business). Unlike water and gold, bandwidth is basically an unlimited resource up to a few GBs-1.
A 10GB fiber is cheap, and a fast router is cheap, but your access is throttled down so they can pretend it is a limited resource, and charge you.
Actually, an optical backbone cable has 768 fiber carrying maybe 128 colors of light at 10GBs-1 each color, so 1 cable would give every house in the entire San Jose Bay Area 1 GBs-1. A single carrier router could terminate this cable, and local 10GBs-1 routers are cheap.
Voila, 1GBs-1 for everyone!
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I believe this is just an excuse to provide all the necessary bandwidth for surveilance cameras.
After all rural camera coverage is so much worse.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Which went like this:
I'd buy a dilapidated old gamekeeper's hut high up on the moor. Every morning, fortified by a heart-stopping fry-up I'd pull on my Wellies, don my tweed coat and cap, and grab my blackthorn walking stick for brisk walk down the moors to the village pub, we're I'd hear the news. Hour after hour, pint after pint I'd join in the general complaining about the state of the government, the weather, and the livestock. I'd then make my tipsy way back to my hut, falling exhausted into bed for nine hours or so of dreamless sleep, then wake up and do it again. This would go on until one day I drunkenly wandered into the fatal mire on the way home. Then, as I was sucked down to be preserved as a curiosity for future generations of archaeologists, I'd pull out my emergency hip flask of gin. I'd pour a stiff shot into the chrome flask cap, then toast a life of dogged utility crowned by one brief, glorious interlude of useless, low-tech pleasure.
Now I know I'll never get down to the pub, because I'll be checking Slashdot "before I go out". Soon I'd be ordering liquor off the Internet, because "it was more convenient". I might as well spend my declining years back here in the States in a high rise apartment block.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sounds more like the germans to me. Don't the english always get on them for their unshaven women? I saw a german once. Hairy arm pits like an italian. She sang "99 ballons". Nena schwarzenwood sounds about right.
"We just don't seem to have the culture of paying a lot of money to give our kids braces here;"
This makes no sense, dental care in the UK is free whilst you're in full time education, so usually up until the age of 18, and at worst 16, so there's no issue of paying money to give kids braces.
It's only after that you pay, but it's NHS subsidised and there are fixed costs for treatments. The most expensive treatment course bracket is IIRC around £135 and covers things like root canal and other more complex procedures. Most treatments are much cheaper than that- around £30 I believe.
This is also why I don't really understand America's obsession with British teeth- far more people here have access to good dental care than in the US proportionally. Presumably it's something from the pre-NHS days i.e. much of the 1940s or before.
Brits may have good oral health but looking into the average adult's mouth is like staring into a box full of piano keys. We just don't seem to have the culture of paying a lot of money to give our kids braces here; or at least, if we do then there's a generational lag that's preventing me from seeing the results, and it'll get better over time.
erm.. children under 16 or even up to 18 do not pay for dental care. the NHS pays for it.
Kupfernigk is also spot on in what he says too
*up to 18 if still in full time education...
Of course it sounds very impressive compared to what we are getting now but it still isn't enough to realistically scale into the future. Given the average contention ratio of 50:1 this works out to 20Mbps per person, or half of the bandwidth required to stream a blu-ray movie... if they actually give us the 10Gbps future potential then it will cover current bandwidth usage and some level of the future use... but again short sighted.
starting with Kansas City, Kansas,
Dorothy: "And Toto too?"
Fujitsu: "Yes, and Toto, too."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
£16 for the first session
£47 for fillings, root canal, tooth removal.
£204 for the major work.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
If the Local link is a 1 Gbyte/sec I need a faster network at home. Otherwise i do not have a good reason to keep my storage local. If streaming from the ISP to my tv is the same speed as streaming it from a local disk, then there is no need to download anything anymore.
So i Needs faster speeds in my home network! 10 Gbit is alreayd there but it is too expesive. Please intel, give us faster LAN at an affordable price.
Or it's just our crap system. My dentist ordered braces for my teeth when I was a child. It took so long for the follow-up appointment on the NHS that they couldn't fit the braces they wanted, then with the rest of the faffing around, British indecisiveness and lack of proactivity in the medical professional here, I never had any fitted. Thankfully my teeth aren't too bad, but there are still some slightly larger than desirable gaps and angles that encourage plaque formation.
I just got back from a decade living in Canada. Bad teeth in this country are noticeable after N. American living, as is the number of people with halitosis. My brother even suggested to me that going to the dentist every two years was probably over-kill. Thanks, but I've learnt that getting them cleaned professionally every six months makes my mouth much happier.
So yes, things have improved, but they're still not great.
Here in the English speaking part of the world, we're all excited about Fujitsu's other exciting announcement about bringing fibre to rural homes.
Cheers, gone up a bit from when I last had any work done then, but still not too bad, specifically I didn't realise root canal was only in the middle band.
Looked up the full details here:
http://www.nhs.uk/chq/pages/1781.aspx?categoryid=74&subcategoryid=742
Didn't realise the treatment course period lasted 2 months either.
I just saw an excellent program on The History Channel which aptly compared the crumbling infrastructure of the United States with that of Ancient Rome and ultimately concluded that Rome's downfall was due to lack of maintenance, care, and upgrade. It would appear that the United States might meet the same fate as Ancient Rome if we do not upgrade our infrastructure. Cox, Time Warner, Comcast, Qwest, and Verizon all brag about broadband speeds to 40+mbps over aging copper. The only exception is Verizon which uses Fiber To The Home. Cox found a cheaper alternative to bring FTTN which lies somewhere between cable and traditional DSL. Still,it is old fashioned technology kept running beyond its really useful service life. The US was once a technology powerhouse and now England is rolling 1GB FTTH. The major telecommunications companies and their respective investors need to get off their collectively greedy asses, accept less profit, and build out a powerhouse infrastructure that will pay back in dividends and attract businesses and commerce. What small business would actively say, "Wow, 40mbps over copper is fantastic!" when they could perhaps start a small time hosting company or managed services company with an affordable 1GB link to the home. It opens up so much possibility.
And this is why Geocities web devs were the best. They almost always provided a lo-fi and hi-fi version of their content. They look out for their customers.
Additionally, in the USA there is an awful lot of bad teeth, dentistry in the United States is an order of magnitude more expensive than (private) dentistry in Britain, and it shows especially in rural areas where salaries aren't great and many don't have insurance and people just can't get any form of dental care. (There was even an article a few years back in AOPA Pilot, a flying magazine for AOPA-USA, about dentists who fly around the Appalacians in an ancient DC-3 basically pulling rotten teeth out of the locals).
I've lived in both countries, and I've seen plenty of very bad teeth in the United States in relatively young people.
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