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UK Government Proposes Minimum 10Mbps Broadband For Poor (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The UK's Local Government Association (LGA) is proposing a social tariff to ensure that minimum broadband access of at least 10 Mbps is available to all UK citizens at an affordable price. Last November, Parliament announced that it would begin work on a Universal Service Obligation (USO), which would grant all citizens the right to request broadband service with a minimum 10Mbps. At the time, Prime Minister David Cameron said, "Access to the Internet shouldn't be a luxury; it should be a right -- absolutely fundamental to life in 21st century Britain." Research by Ofcom in 2014 showed "marked relationships between socio-economic deprivation and [poor] broadband availability in cities". Similar results have been found in rural areas, which means that the demand for increasing broadband service to a minimum level may be high among people with lower incomes.
"...marked relationships between socio-economic deprivation and [poor] broadband availability in cities"
Face, meet palm.
Because that's really fast..?
What am I missing.....................???
The wife and I both make 6 digits each and the best I can get is 3mbs.
If we could get anybody but Comcast with that speed. Really, I think internet should be and will be a utility akin to electricity.
Um can we have a decently funded NHS Instead?
But how about making sure everyone has that at least?
With no contention?
Or, maybe, issue them, internet-capable devices, first and four, moist.
At the elite institutions, they wired all the campus locations for 100 Gbps and a minimum of 40 Gbps, so 10 Mbps is 40,000 times slower
This reminds me of the last time the British Government mandated a technology to the masses. The TV.
Where they allowed even the poorest of people to borrow money from banks just to be able to buy a TV. NO OTHER LOAN WAS ACCEPTED!.
They REALLY wanted the masses to be propagandized, enough to bank on it.
The same might be happening here, though id hazard a guess that most people already have internet access of some kind already.
Here in the UK we've taken into account internet for those unfortunate souls who may have had such access terminated in their home or residence unexpectedly. If you've recently experienced this issue, say, at the hands of an embassy or rather during, say, a political asylum against a rather simple investigation that is in no way a witch hunt with the potential to result in extradition to an island torture camp, the UK government has a solution.
simply leave the embassy, and walk directly toward the van marked "Internet." We're also offering free stainless steel bracelets to the first customers.
Good people go to bed earlier.
10 Mbps for the lot of them to split...bloody peasants.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
...which means the UK government will deploy their free broadband 10 years after UK ISP's read the headlines and abandon any cheap broadband packages.
Traditional web pages with text and moderately sized pictures, can be satisfied with 1 mbps, especially with the use of multiple tab browsing while pages load. Is downloading video really 'essential'? This is slashdot, where people want to do high bandwidth stuff.
Who pays for the computers so the poor citizens can access the internet?
Might be good if food and shelter were also guaranteed at an affordable price.
I tend to download video more often when the connection is too crap to stream.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I think you will find David Cameron is no longer Prime Minister in the UK.
Similar results have been found in rural areas, which means that the demand for increasing broadband service to a minimum level may be high among people with lower incomes.
I live in a rural area of the UK (my speed is 2.2 Mbps) and the issue is not being able to afford no better - that is all that is available down the end of a long copper line.
The are going to have to do a lot of road digging to put in cable before anyone around here gets any better, rich or poor.
And in rural UK the well-off outnumber the "poor". Most agricultural jobs have gone and the poor have gone to live in towns; their cottages have mostly been modernised and extended for better-off commuters. I live in what was once a forrester's cottage for example, extended to three times its original size.
It's miserable and unfair to be in poverty. And simply giving them broadband will not solve that. Therefore I offer a simpler solution:
Why not just mandate that the poor "not be poor" anymore?
We should just give them all say, $100,000 per year, and then nobody will be poor and everyone will be happy.
That should work just fine.
-Styopa
Even video can be done in some manner at 1 Mbps, except some live streaming that doesn't offer a low enough quality.
But well, not owning any TV is a lot more common nowadays, now that analog broadcast was switched off (In France, they've doubled down by ceasing digital SD broadcast, so the dingy little tuner boxes and second remote have returned)
Also, 1 Mbps doesn't really exist except for some rural lines (nothing really wrong with e.g. Seattle's DSL, it's just that 65 year-old-phone lines are rare outside the US) ; if you've got 1 Mbps it's likely because you're mooching from some wifi hotspot that will have availability problems. Congestion may mean pings less than 100ms are only achievable at 3 AM. For UK in particular, I guess rain and mist ruin it pretty often.
1 Mbps up/down with 100% availability and low ping and zero jitter would be pretty nice actually, although still not usable for everything.
Make rural infrastructure capable of 10Mbs