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The UK Decides 10 Mbps Broadband Should Be a Legal Right (engadget.com)
British homes and businesses will have a legal right to high-speed broadband by 2020, the government said Wednesday, dismissing calls from the network provider BT that it should be a voluntary rather than legal obligation on providers. From a report: Ministers originally considered adopting BT's voluntary offer, which would have seen it spend up to 600 million pound ($804 million) giving 1.4 million rural residents access to speeds of at least 10 Mbps. However, in a statement today, the government confirmed that it now will go down the regulatory route as it provides "sufficient certainty and the legal enforceability that is required to ensure high speed broadband access for the whole of the UK by 2020." Culture Secretary Karen Bradley said: "We know how important broadband is to homes and businesses and we want everyone to benefit from a fast and reliable connection. We are grateful to BT for their proposal but have decided that only a regulatory approach will make high speed broadband a reality for everyone in the UK, regardless of where they live or work."
10 Mbps, is not super fast by the standards of a lot of Slashdot users, but it is serviceable.
In fact as a cheap bastard I only just recently upgraded from a 10 Mbps to a 30 Mbps connection myself.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
Maybe it was broadband in 2010. Today you should be able to get at least 100 Mbps. Many of the areas we're bringing broadband to are receiving 1 Gbps symmetric.
10 Mbps is a complete joke, you'd be lucky to get two Netflix streams on that without stuttering.
I fail to see on a philosophical level how anything can be a right if it requires someone else to provide it for you.
I understand that the people who come up with stuff like this have good intentions in mind, but at some point they can just as easily start to argue that plantation owners ought to have a right to have a certain amount of cotton picked for them.
Also, since this is the UK, a right to broadband is pretty fucking useless considering you're only free to use it unless you want to look at porn or say things that other people might not consider nice.
I mean seriously, they're going to have deploy all new equipment and replace parts of the aging copper line hauls with fiber. The cost difference would be negligible to make it Gigabit capable. The main difference is the optics used at the central offices and local pops.
You wrote: "I fail to see on a philosophical level how anything can be a right if it requires someone else to provide it for you."
Well, someone must provide you with freedom of speech for it to be a right. I can assure you that Chinese in China doesn't know a shit about the "right of freedom of speech".
You'd be shocked at the number of people *PLEADING* for a 3-6Mb ADSL connection. In houses that *HAD* a 3-6Mb ADSL connection. And, when the ownership of the house turned over, AT&T (and other incumbents) said "Sorry, no more ADSL" (which equals... no internet).
https://arstechnica.com/inform...
I'd survive today with a 3/1 Mb DSL connection. Enough to stream SD. Enough to adequately RDP to a cloud service, which is how I'd do all my development were I so unfortunate. But, for a lot of people, and we're not talking super-rural... we're talking suburban subdivisions here... there isn't even that.
Good luck with that. BT couldn't even get 250K connections to work right 5 miles from the center of town while I lived there (Near NewMarket).
I'm enjoying my 150/150Mbit connection back here in the States, even though I am 16 miles out from the center of town at half the price BT charged me for their crap connection.
snip...
and whats with the red TARDIS it the title?
I heard the next Doctor was going to be a female - does she change the colour?
It is red phone box, red was the default colour for the telephone boxes provided by what it now BT (formerly British Telecom and prior to that the General Post Office), the Tardis is a Police Box.
How can something that costs other people money and time be a legal right? This talk is insane.
I wonder if it will be a true 10mbps or if it will be like my service where I'm subscribed for 25mbps but get at most 8mbps (at 3am on a weeknight)
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
History has proven that time and again, corporations will never do anything altruistically. Therefore is sometimes takes regulation to make things happen. I am glad that the UK went down this bath. 10mbps can do a lot - including streaming at 720p HD. It's also fine for VoIP.
Yup. Before she moved, my mother was getting 1.5Mb/s on a good day from her ADSL line in Devon. The ISP didn't advertise anything below 8Mb/s, but they did give her a discount when they verified that she couldn't get close to the advertised speed. It was too slow to stream even standard definition content via iPlayer (only just - you got about 30 seconds of video and a second or two of buffering).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I recently upgraded to 1Gbps (symmetric) and I would say that is "high speed". But 10Mbps seems decidedly on the average-to-slow side. Is this some politically-motivated lie to make people believe the 2rd rate speed they will be getting in 2020 is "great"?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I would presume that they could do fixed wireless as a solution, as well.
It may be a legal right to have it available, but without competition, will the average person be able to afford it ? And if BT is legally required to provide it everywhere, but a large percentage of rural customers can't afford to buy it, then the costs will just be passed on to the city customers.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
4k streaming is beginning to be a thing, and the displays and associated hardware are trending down in price, as per usual for newish tech.
10 mb/s isn't going to cut it indefinitely.
The important thing here isn't the 10 mb/s; it's the idea that connectivity is so important that equality depends on access.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The UK has a reputation for keeping tabs and spying on its citizens.
In reality - you know, where we all actually live - the only rights of any kind that exist are those rights for which someone(s) will impose force to ensure the availability thereof.
It's all very fine to talk about what should be; for instance, IMO, no government should impose on informed, adult personal / consensual choices - but they fact is, they do, and they can't be stopped from doing so by any practical means. Because this, although it should be a thing, is not a thing, because there is no force behind it. Which demotes it down to the status of fantasy.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Personally, I think that if the Internet isn't going away, and more and more vital services are going to be accessible via the Internet, that eventually it's going to have to be considered another basic utility, like water, sewer, electric, and sometimes natural gas are. Of course if I can see this possible future so can ISPs, which I'm sure gives them nightmares regularly (i.e., their profitability would become non-existent).
How this would be a dangerous precedent, I think, is if the implementation of a policy like this is done poorly. Too much or not enough of a leash on the ISP(s) involved might mean people get price-gouged (even worse than they are already), especially if they decided you were required to have Internet, whether you wanted it or not (much like the ACA), and there wasn't any sort of subsidy for low-income people.
No. It's used by people that can fend for themselves upset at the idea that elitists think that everyone should be treated like children.
Entitled is the right word. You aren't owed anything by anyone.
That's quite apart from whether or not taking care of people is the civilized thing to do. The real problem is that you can't have everyone be takers. You can't just rob the "wealthy".
There are't enough "wealthy". More people need to be willing to step up and provide. Otherwise, you run out of other people's money.
If you think society owes you something, you are probably a leech.
Even pirates despise a leech.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The last mile cost is negligible. Practically all new last mile installations are Gbit capable already.
Let me highlight the problem there... There is a huge difference between the hypothetical 500 house subdivision that is cheap and easy to wire (well fiber) for high speed and rural where it can be miles between houses, think 20-40K per mile (per customer) not even sure the charged bill could pay the interest on this kind of cost. Note that this cost doesn't include right of way, leasing space on poles/utility operations - probably not digging under roads if need be... These costs can be a lot higher (plus don't forget that the company needs to make a profit providing the service)
All of this said - I would expect BT response to be - well, we don't provide ANY services to this area... unless heavily subsidized by the government, because we can't afford to spend the extra 100sK pounds
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Maybe before it is determined to be a "right" that the information highway has a certain speed limit, it makes more sense that it is a legal "right" and not a privilege that we be able to drive the physical highway...seems a bit out of logical order to me.
I think you are conflating two different things that has led to a poor comparison between two entirely different system environments. Baseband versus broadband are signaling techniques, not measurements of speed. The speed of a digital communications medium can be measured in bits per second, so you could have a 10 Mbps baseband signaling system (such as 10BASE5, the broadly implemented DIX then IEEE Ethernet LAN specification from the late 1980s), or you can have a 100 Mbps baseband signaling system (such as 100BASE-TX, the IEEE Ethernet LAN specification from the mid 1990s).
The term "broadband" technically means the use of multiple passband channels that can be aggregated together to achieve a greater overall communications rate than any single passband channel. It came to be used as a non-technical marketing term for "fast Internet" at some point, but hopefully the typical /. participant will understand that it is not a technical term when used in that way.
The 1980s 10 Mbps Ethernet standard operated over a maximum distance of 1.5 kilometers (3 segments of 500 meters each, connected via repeaters to form a single 1.5 kilometer collision domain network) in a shared bus topology. Longer distances could be achieved only by using bridges to separate collision domains (the distance limitation for a collision domain is based on the minimum frame size and the time needed to detect a collision between stations at opposite ends of the network). When used in this way, networks could cover a larger geographical area (several kilometers to hundreds of kilometers) but with severe limitations on throughput through the backbone (which was limited to just 10 Mbps).
To suggest that the deployment of a nationwide Internet service that provides a minimum of 10 Mbps to every station is in any way only equivalent to 10BASE5, or even the 1990s 100BASE-TX Local Area Network standards, demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the history of data communications technology and the difference between LANs (Local Area Networks) and WANs (Wide Area Networks).
OTOH, If there's no one to provide the 'right', like no available doctor to treat you (in the case of a 'right to healthcare'), no amount of government intervention can guarantee that right.
Exactly. In the classic case you have a state which in theory guarantees a lot of positive rights - free food, free house, free everything but doesn't grant many negative ones - freedom of speech, freedom from torture, right to due process, habeus corpus etc.
In practice you starve to death on a collective farm and if you complain about it you get arrested, tortured and sent to a concentration camp where you also starve to death.
See - Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Eastern Europe in the Cold War.
The lack of negative rights makes the positive rights meaningless.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Choosing to regulate any corporate thing is a departure from the Neoliberal ideology that has ruled the UK (as elsewhere) for the last 40 years.
I wonder if this is really a tacit acceptance of the utter failure of that approach, or if they just saw the reaction to Ajit Pai in the US and thought they could do without that kind of grief right now.
What a joke...internet is "a right".
Stop getting your history knowledge from bad fiction.
There was no free food, free house or free anything back then in the socialist countries. In fact, there was no social safety net at all for able-bodied people. They had a constitutional right to a job and an actual duty to work. This means that if a person couldn't find a job, it could ask the government to provide one, but having a job - any job - was basically compulsory.
Then again, a couple of years after the war nobody had to starve anymore. The food quality wasn't always good and some types of food were only available in small amounts - hence the queues - but basic foodstuff was abundant and really really cheap. People actually starved in the early nineties when the socialism was over and a very much dog-eat-dog capitalism arrived instead. The GDR was the only exception since we were absorbed. Still the quality of life of many East Germans plummeted compared to what they had previously. Many former soviet republics still have a lower life expectancy than they used to have in the soviet times and people there starve to death right now. So much for your "in practice".
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
So, the US FCC removes protections from the internet in the US and within a week England votes to make broadband a right?
I realize the cord was only cut 240 years ago, but isn't it time that we stopped acting like the teenage rebel?
We literally have 40 Gbps ports here on campus.
That's like ... 4000 times faster.
Heck, we even have three 100 Gbps ports, within two blocks of where I am.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There was no free food, free house or free anything back then in the socialist countries.
http://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/...
The Soviet Union advocated a conception of human rights different from the notion of rights prevalent in the West. Western legal theory emphasized the so-called âoenegativeâ rights: that is, rights of individuals against the government. The Soviet system, on the other hand, emphasized that society as a whole, rather than individuals, were the beneficiaries of âoepositiveâ rights: that is, rights from the government. In this spirit, Soviet ideology placed a premium on economic and social rights, such as access to health care, adequate and affordable basic food supplies, housing, and education, and guaranteed employment. As it acted on these guarantees during the postwar decades, the Soviet system evolved into a giant welfare state. The Kremlin proclaimed the achievement of such rights, and the benefits that Soviet citizens received from them, as evidence of the superiority of the Soviet Communist system to that of the capitalist West, where the importance of civil and political rights was emphasized, while the notion of economic and social âoerightsâ was viewed much less favorably.2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Personal property was allowed, with certain limitations. Real property mostly belonged to the State.Health, housing, education, and nutrition were guaranteed through the provision of full employment and economic welfare structures implemented in the workplace.[16]
However, these guarantees were not always met in practice. For instance, over five million people lacked adequate nutrition and starved to death during the Soviet famine of 1932â"1933, one of several Soviet famines. The 1932â"33 famine was caused primarily by Soviet-mandated collectivization.
I.e. in theory many positive rights. In practice mostly famine, shortages and bread lines.
People had a duty to work wherever the state told them to, and in practice the state had no obligation to feed them. Hence the deaths from collectivisation.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
You have a problem with reading comprehension, eh?
First, how is what I have written different from what is written on that Stanford website?
Second, how is what happened in 1932 relevant to "Then again, a couple of years after the war nobody had to starve anymore"? How do you explain that the life expectancy plummeted after the breakup? Oh, by the way, how do you explain the fact that Russia suffered regular famines before communism was even invented?
I've actually lived in the GDR and visited the USSR back in the 1980ies, so I know what I am talking about. You don't.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Pff 1gbps? What are you poor?
I recently upgraded to 10Gbps (symmetric) and I would say that it is "high speed". But 1Gbps seems decidedly on the average-to-slow side. Are you telling some politically-motivated lie to make people believe that the 2rd rate speed you are getting now is "great"?
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Are you aware of how many hifi systems process data at far more than the data density of a CD? And are you aware that like 20-20 vision applied to a 1920x1080 image, the odds of anyone actually being able to hear anything that far down (or deal with anything that loud) are pretty much zero? And even if they could, the amplifiers that drive the output transducers don't have that kind of dynamic range anyway, nor do the transducers themselves.
Yet... this stuff sells, and it sells very well.
And that's without even getting into the details of people buying tube gear because "reasons."
All indicators say that the broader market will bite on higher resolution pretty much as soon as they can work it into their budgets. If these folks don't have a budget issue, they'll bite right away.
It isn't always about the quality you can use; it's about the quality you can feel smug about. Not that any of that stops confirmation bias and pure imagination from stepping in and bringing out the "oh, sure I can tell the difference, you betcha" from the happy owners of such tech.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think that your comparison with other utilities is relevant. I would of course also include telephone service, which is directly comparable to Internet service: it’s telecommunications, just with a narrower scope (originally, voice only; though it was later extended through facsimile and data modems). The wide availability of those services is regulated. There’s no reason that this shouldn’t apply to Internet service (or, at least, telecommunication lines capable of supporting such service with reasonable performance, assuming that there are third-party ISPs providing service to customers connected to those lines).
For the same reason, I can’t imagine why we’d raise the spectre of compulsory service. I don’t know of any jurisdiction forcing people to open an account with the local telephone, electric, gas, water or even garbage-collection company. Local codes might require builders to install metered connections to those service networks, to ensure that they are effectively available to anyone moving in, should they wish to use them. But they don’t force them to be actual subscribers.
Since you are limited (among other things) by the speed at which the remote machine sends you its data or receives your data, in practice, very high bandwidth is mostly useful for simultaneously connecting to many hosts. That is likely to happen if you serve data (but, of course, that concerns your upload speed), if you’re running an office with several employees (or a business serving Wi-Fi to its customers), or if you have a family with several people simultaneously (and fairly heavily) using Internet around the same time every day. Otherwise, it’s likely a waste of money.
The UK's legal right to 10 Mbps broadband is a joke! Everyone over there should demand 1Gb both up and down the pipe! And make it free to all! What good is socialism if it doesn't meet the basic needs of the people?
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
I'm paying almost $40/month to Frontier for a 1.5 Mbps DSL connection. Country Cablevision has a fiber optic line running across my front yard but says I can't have any of it. I assume the line runs over the next ridge to the new gated community development... can't have us poor riff-raff cutting in on their bandwidth...
http://www.govtech.com/dc/arti...
"The grant funded a $25.3 million fiber-to-the home broadband project in Yancey and neighboring Mitchell County. Now completed, the network can deliver service at speeds from 25 mbps to 1 gigabit upload and download to every household in the county." That's just a God-damned lie.
https://ilsr.org/wp-content/up...
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
It's odd that the US is the most church going of the first world nations and the least Christian in practice. I would say ironic, but Americans don't understand that. As my atheist wife has said to a devout Christian friend "I hope you get found by someone like me rather than someone like you when you are in most need"
Wow you're a tosser.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
There are places where, for instance, if you do not have electric service at your house (and it could be a multi-million dollar home with self-generated solar, for instance, just no grid connection), the County will Condemn your property and threaten to tear it down as such. I also think that if you pay for water service, you have to pay for sewer service (which makes sense, they're tied together in the larger scheme of things anyway).
To sound paranoid for a moment, imagine this: The world Internet moves to IPv6; every single person on the planet can now have their own, personally-identifiable IP address, that can literally follow you around from cradle to grave. There now is no such thing as 'anonymity' on the Internet, everything you say and do can be traced back to you, immediately and easily. Government spook types would LOVE this. That's one reason for compulsory internet service. Another, less paranoid-sounding, would be to help subsidize Internet access for the poor, much like the ACA (which by the way is for all intents and purposes now defunct) does/did.