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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."
They're passing a law for legal rights to the modern internet here, not rights to pure luxury to allow you to torrent files 24/7 like a small independent nation.
Besides... https://help.netflix.com/en/no...
Internet Connection Speed Recommendations
Below are the internet download speed recommendations per stream for playing TV shows and movies through Netflix.
0.5 Megabits per second - Required broadband connection speed
1.5 Megabits per second - Recommended broadband connection speed
3.0 Megabits per second - Recommended for SD quality
5.0 Megabits per second - Recommended for HD quality
25 Megabits per second - Recommended for Ultra HD quality
So according to Netflix themselves, a 10Mbps connection should be enough for two HD streams or three SD streams.
#DeleteFacebook
Well, someone must provide you with freedom of speech for it to be a right.
This, as they say, is so wrong it's not even wrong.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
Consider terminating electricity or natural gas utility in the middle of winter because of non-payment. Then consider what level of service utility is necessary to maintain a functional citizen that won't disrupt society.
No man is an island. If you think otherwise please stop taking advantage of all infrastructure for even 1 month and get back to us with your considered opinions afterwards (assuming you are even alive).
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
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.
I'll bet you're against the right to have an attorney provided for you also.
No, that is incorrect. This is the government deciding that, in the 21st Century, access to broadband Internet is a fundamental part of national infrastructure as the electric grid and telephone, and that there are minimum standards that must be met by providers as per the law.
You aren't getting a 10 Mbps connection for free, just like you aren't getting electricity for free. What they are saying is if you elect to purchase access to those universally available services, there will be a minimum standard available to you.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
But you don't have a right to free utilities, and eventually you are required to pay them or the service will be shut off. I don't think it's unreasonable to place some restrictions on utilities as they are typically granted legal monopoly status by the government so it's only fair that in turn they can't act as they will in all matters. Also, if I were off the grid would those utility companies be required to come and provide me with service if my own power generation or heating were to fail in the middle of winter? I suspect not, so I don't believe what you're describing is a right at all.
Also, please name all of this infrastructure that I'm supposedly getting for free because its some kind of right that I supposedly have. As far as I can tell it's funded through various local sales taxes or use taxes in some form. If I were to suggest that I should get it for free because I have some right to it, I'd be laughed at. I'm not some kind of anarchist that believes all government is evil or we'd be best off with none, but looking at the world today I see the government doing as much if not more to violate my rights than it does to ensure them.
I think you're confusing what "rights" actually are. A service that you voluntarily pay for (or that you're required to pay for) is scarcely a right and shouldn't be treated or thought of as such. Nor should laws placed on utilities for common sense reasons.
Don't feel bad... I have 16 at home and it works just fine considering what I use it for (browsing, VPN, the occasional tv stream, etc.)
Funny thing - When I lived in-town, I had a 50mbps connection, and comparing my experiences now with what I had then, I don't see any real difference (okay, it was a 50mbps Comcast connection, but...)
All said, I suspect that unless you routinely suck down multi-GB files all day long, or use it to watch like three 4k Netflix/Hulu/whatever streams all at the same time? Even 30mbps is kind of overkill. I won't turn it down, but at the same time I don't really use it, and the vast majority of people out there won't either (at least not for now, and this may change as cable-cutting becomes more prevalent and screen rez goes up.)
Since I recently switched to a faster plan, I've noticed the internet goes offline far more often than when I was at 15mbps. It's usually only for a minute or two- but it's several times a day. Internet never went offline when it was slower.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Who is going to pay for the infrastructure?
I know what you want people to answer... "The government, it's a free hand-out, socialist state", etc.
And whereas, initially that is true, in the end, the person using that connection will pay for it. It will just take longer for the IPS to get their money back from installing the cable for a rural route not already served, than it would in a densely populated urban cluster. If it takes a company 10 years to recoup an investment they will be less willing to invest than if it takes 5. Sometimes they don't want to invest, or take risks in a longer term investments. The government is forcing their hand here.
Some of the really rural, out of the way, places, they may never make their money back. They will most places eventually though. Most of the UK is fairly densely populated. Even rural areas in the UK aren't usually too far from an urban hub. It's not like the US Midwest where you can sometimes drive an hour without hitting a major population centre.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
For download speeds, anything over 10Mbps is fine for 99% of normal users
Indeed. At 10 Mbps my wife and daughter can each watch a different movie, and I can still get work done. That is enough for me.
Quibble: The UK is saying that 10 Mbps is an entitlement, not a right. An entitlement is what someone else is required to give to you ... although you still have to pay your bill to get your bits.
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.
Absolutely, it's lost investment opportunity elsewhere, or they would have done it themselves. If it were the MOST profitable option to make money, they would have done it themselves. They're only being forced to do this because it is not something they would do voluntarily.
That said, they will make their money back from this. It's a forced investment, but one that will ultimately yield them a profit. I don't feel sorry for the ISP.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
You don't have to be a socialist to view roads as infastructure.
Republicans were the original party of "roads".
The whole effort doesn't have to be described in terms where you get a free handout.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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).
I fail to see on a philosophical level how anything can be a right if it requires someone else to provide it for you.
This is what human rights are all about, in practice; there is no such thing as a natural right, unless you count "do as thou wilt". We give up that right so that everyone can have the freedom not to have to suffer the consequences of everyone around them doing whatever they want to do.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
If it works like this, aren't guns in US (or at least parts of it) an entitlement and not a right, too?
Of course not. Nobody is required to give you a gun.
They tried that with healthcare. Didn't work. #deathpanels. Believe me folks a hundredandeleventyone.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."