You sound like you work for BT;-). Even if "most" people don't download "that much" (Though you yourself concede that you fiancée, living on her own, uses a chunky 20GB a month), there is a growing proportion of people who *do*, and they want to be able to do that wherever they might live and have a peak bitrate to support these high-quality services. They are the one's who are driving the market, not the 50+ market segment who just want to "do email" or whatever.
0.5-1.5% downtime sounds extremely bad to me - 1% downtime equates to 7 hours per month or 3.5 days a year. Conversely, I have had no downtime at all in the past 4 years (other than the occasional resync, which is on the order of a couple of seconds). If I was experiencing outages amounting to days per year then I would be changing ISP, whether or not that connection was used for business.
It's an estimate as I haven't got any logs for that kind of time frame. But just by guessing I'd say a couple of days over the last 3 or so years sounds plausible. Same goes for my last provider (who, despite being *more* expensive had terrible support). But then I've also gone years without having a fault ever. That's the nature of random failures, they're just unpredictable. So for critical service you need to make sure you've got some backup or guarantee from your provider. Otherwise it could happen to you too.
You comparison with super markets is a bit disingenuous for your cause. It's an industry focused on psychological marketing tricks and price inflation. What the hell's the deal with 2 for 1? Why can't I get the "real" price without buying 2 pounds of meat? There's certainly different qualities of products, but that doesn't mean that some of Tesco's "finest" stuff isn't just an overpriced rip-off.
The reason they make money isn't because they're objectively competitive but because consumers aren't always entirely rational about their buying habits. They can be "told" what a great deal is and be led to believe something's better. Perfectly rational consumers wouldn't buy bottled water, or buy sugar water that's many times the price of almost identical sugar water.
Your ISP may very well be more reliable, but to make it competitive in my eyes I would either need a lot more data or some kind of guarantee. You're just making blind assumptions about the service quality from a Romanian provider you don't know based mainly on the fact that you pay more.
Take for instance an experience I had with Amazon. They have "free" shipping on most orders, but for an extra fiver or so you get "premium" shipping: They "guarantee" the order will be there in less than 3 days. The thing is most orders I've ever made have been there in 2 days anyway, so there didn't ever seem much point. But since I wanted the order before Christmas I said "what the hell" and paid up.
Long story short it was lost in the post. I had to contact them multiple times to get a replacement sent, and again to get back the cost of "premium shipping" that I wouldn't have paid without it. It turns out that premium shipping is a load of bullshit. They send it with the same parcel service as everything else. There is no kind of priority or express mode that would justify the extra cost. And when, as in my case, it does go missing all you're entitled to is reimbursement for the premium shipping. It's all there in the fine print.
What happened was that I had been duped into thinking that because I'm paying extra for something there *must* be some extra quality I'm getting, even if they're not being clear about what it is. They realized that I have a reasonable, but statistically unlikely anxiety about not getting my order fast enough, and they could make money from that. It's like the bullshit extended warranties you get from the electronics retailers which don't cover jack shit and are shorter than the legally mandatory warranty period.
Anyway, my point is that without anything tangible like downtime statistics your presumed superiority of your ISP isn't necessarily rational. You might be pleased with your experience, but unless we turn the meaning of "competitive" upside down your ISP just doesn't cut it. By a long shot.
Errm, I'm not sure how having a speed of under 24Mbps makes an ADSL connection "outdated" since that's the top speed of *any* ADSL connection...
ADSL *is* outdated. VDSL is more up-to date (yes, I know that ADSL2+ has a longer range). Now, they do offer VDSL as their "fibre broadband" package, but that just means they're deceptively using the fibre buzzword for twisted pair wires. You're right that coaxial cables use copper (though not technically wires), maybe I should have been more specific. Of course it's just as deceptive for Virgin media to advertise themselves as fibre.
A modern infrastructure consists of a robust fibre backbone and a last-mile which doesn't bottleneck the service. In practice you usually get this from FTTH, FTTB as well as "coaxial cable to the home" like Virgin. I don't think it's unreasonable to call ADSL2+ outdated. It just sucks if that's all that's available.
Secondly, some of us don't consider speed to be the primary factor when buying a service. I don't actually use my internet connection for anything that would benefit from 60Mb/s, whilst I do want decent support, reliability, etc.
I realize that and for that reason there is a robust offering from business-grade ISPs to cater to your needs. I on the other hand love the fact that multi-GB downloads are done in a few minutes, updates are blazing fast, we can watch multiple video streams at once and listen to internet radio all day without ever having to worry about reaching a usage cap. (Even internet radio will only get about 9 hours for 1 gig of data) BTW, in my experience even paid services like iTunes won't push more than 30Mb/s frome their servers to a single client, so you're right that there is sometimes limited benefit. But it does mean you can support multiple users and the higher tiers usually have really nice upload speeds too.
I think you overestimate what the "average consumer" does with their internet connection.
Possibly. But before we get into consumer demographics and user behavior statistics I think it's best we just agree that there's a huge variance in the types of users. So far today I've used about 300MB, without really doing pretty much anything that's bandwidth intensive. Typical days might get around 2GB. And if I've done something heavy like download games like Diablo 3 (12GB), a beefy IDE (Usually multiple GB), updated a couple of Linux boxes, downloaded a movie, and my family have watched a couple of hours of streamed video, that's when I get 20+GB in a day without even noticing. As it is I used 53.97GB in the last 30 days.
In fact, personally I actively avoid services that are promoting high usage (by offering cheap "unlimited" accounts) because I know the economics of running an ISP doesn't allow you to do "cheap", "unlimited" and "reliable" at the same time as paying for staff who have a clue. I *want* my ISP to limit the heavy users so that I'm not subsidising them.
Technically no ISP can offer "unlimited" service anyway. What they can do is analyze usage patterns and customer's needs and desires in order to compete on price and certain desirable service qualities (bandwidth) in order to capture market share. At the moment it appears the big ISPs and that Romanian FTTB company are doing a better job at capturing my type of market than Entanet. Reliability is of course somewhat less tangible. I don't know of any statistics that would let me evaluate different companies performance. My experience has usually been between 0.5-1.5% downtime. I can see how this might be a dealbreaker for some businesses, but I can live with it. The link you posted certainly doesn't advertise guaranteed fault-correction, which is typically part of a business grade contract.
The prices I see for the ISPs you are claiming are "specialist" just don't seem that high to me. Yes they aren't absolutely the rock-bottom prices, but they're not
Yes, they have a service that starts at £15/month, but you fail to mention that it's with 1 GB/month allowance. *One Gig!*. That *is* outrageous in today's age. That's about an hour of iPlayer! Not even one Netflix movie! So let's reiterate: For just short of £30/month (don't forget the "line rental") I get an outdated ADSL connection with a speed of anything southward of 24Mb/s and a usage policy which would seem draconian 10 years ago. Meanwhile at Virgin Media, £30/month will get you 60Mb/s maximum speed (and because they don't use copper wires you do actually get this speed on pretty much every connection) and a traffic usage policy that's more like 2GB/hour.
I don't want to seem to be bashing Entanet. I'm sure they have very happy customers who specifically chose them. I'm also sure there is a class of customer who has low usage demands but requires IPv4 subnets. And to be fair they do seem to offer an "unlimited" service where you pay £30/month plus line rental (though not for their FTTC offers which again have fairly restrictive usage allowances). But the take-home message here is that for average consumers who are interested in watching youtube, movies, video chat, and maybe a little bit of naughty file sharing, *these are not great deals*.
Now of course I can turn the tautology argument against you: All "non-shit" providers give you a premium service for "free". But your requirement for not being shit is that they give you this premium service for "free".
Now, if every package they offer is much more expensive than otherwise comparable products from the big providers, the "free" service can't reasonably be considered free. Any reasonable person would conclude that you went for a specialist ISP and are paying a premium for a service you require (IP addresses).
I often find it useful in this stage of the discussion to remind everyone where we started out in the first place: 1) Person A complains about low quality DSL connection in UK. 2) Person B praises cheap and fast consumer-grade FTTB in Romania 3) You point out that "up to" 80Mbps DSL is widely available for less than £10,... 4)...but fail to mention that you need to add £14.50 as line rental and that 80Mbps is somewhat optimistic. So I pointed this out.
Now we're here arguing about static IP subnets on premium-priced, "non-shit" broadband packages. I can't help but feel that you've been moving the goalposts a bit. I can't read Romanian but FWIW if they're anything like similar European ISPs they probably don't guarantee static IPs either, or offer it for a premium (usually around €5/month) What they do have is a connection that is both much cheaper and much faster than what you see in the UK, running on a high-quality modern infrastructure. I, along with most consumers, would value this more than static IPv4 addresses which I don't need (at least not for the moment).
None of the companies you listed is a consumer-grade ISP. Your Entanet doesn't even advertise that they have residential services. The few "home" services I found from your recommended companies were also all much more expensive.
And your static IP isn't really free if you're paying for a business-class service at a business-class price. FWIW I've never gotten the option of a "free" static IP with any of the ISPs I've been with. But then again I don't shop for business-grade broadband for my home anyway.
It's not about changing existing parts and machines, just the way they're measured. Or, more accurately, how the data is published. For most intents and purposes your shop is already metric. The inch is defined in mm, and pound force has an exact decimal representation in Newtons. Even in metric countries the inch-sized stuff is ubiquitous, just that it happens to be a 12.7mm pipe or whatever. Of course there is a problem with screw threads, but that's more of a problem of not adopting the ISO standard than the measurement system that's used.
You just took an entire paragraph to explain what in the metric kitchen is very simple: liters and grams. It is simpler and less ambiguous. If that doesn't make it superior I don't know what does. Now, of course you can just say that it doesn't really matter an awful lot. But saying that it's just as good because people get used to it isn't a good comparison.
There's no clear distinction between everyday life and non-everyday life. In the days of GPS and prepared food most people probably don't even use any kind of measures most days anyway. But I'm guessing that anybody who uses actually fluid ounces would be bothered by the inconsistency. For instance I find it quite annoying that I have to take into account where a cooking recipe was published and make appropriate corrections for the stuff in my kitchen.
Most people in the UK will give you half inches as well, so it's "six-foot-three-and-a-half", as opposed to "one-ninety-two". Arguing for mixed fractions because one example is shorter is silly.
It's ridiculous to claim one system is inherently more intuitive than the other. People's intuition is forged by experiences, and even then they can be massively off.
Eyeballing stuff only takes you so far. When you do real calculations (even simple ones) that the advantage of the metric system is immediately apparent: You don't have convert for different scales and dimensions. Instead of four common units for length, their square's for area, another unrelated unit for area, at least as many for volume, and a curious distinction between dry volume and liquid volume, you just have the meter from which all other "units" are easily derived.
I was paying 25 GBP a month for a 30 Mb connection, which seemed quite reasonable compared to the DSL providers who had low usage caps, no speed guarantees, and wanted an extra 15 GBP on top of their advertised price.
It's called competition and no matter what people say markets are much more healthy and vibrant with it. There are so many different design decision when making a games console that a single standard couldn't possibly serve the market.
VAT is probably the most logical tax, it taxes spending and not income
Only if you want to stifle the economy. If on the other hand you want to encourage economic activity you make spending easier. Income which isn't spent doesn't benefit the economy. You've got it pretty much backwards.
It's pretty fair regardless of income levels, much more so than income taxes.
VAT is effectively a highly regressive tax because even though it applies to everyone the poor to middle-class people spend a much higher proportion of their income on consumer goods, subject to VAT.
Typical supercomputing tasks usually scale quite well. (Otherwise there's little point of running it on a supercomputer in the first place). Which is of course why GPUs are so interesting.
Supercomputers are meant to be scalable, so it doesn't really matter what the computing power of an arbitrary "CPU" is (which consists of an equally arbitrary number of cores all running at a somewhat arbitrary clock rate). What does however influence design decisions are 1) cost 2) power consumption If an ARM machine has an advantage on these compared to an equally powerful x86 cluster then that makes it better.
Which is a reason not to go for the DSL. You have to compare the full price for the whole package. The cable providers always offer double or triple play and give you a telephone adapter to use you POTS phone.
Well, that seems to require that the compiler could anticipate future languages and compiler architectures. Not completely unfeasible, but it would probably need some massive AI capable of reverse-engineering from a limited set of code.
Oh, and as a "bonus" for this tremendous foresight DSL speeds are consistently 30% slower so that some people can still use their late 90s phones and fax machines. For a 25 mbps line that's a trade-off of 8mbps for a 64kbps phone and fax line which no-one uses.
That can go the wrong way too though. In Germany the former state phone company decided to invest billions to get ISDN in every corner of the country, only to find that the speed was obsolete almost as soon as it came into service.
Fibre providers have an ONU (optical network unit) supplied by the mains power on the property. Unless there's some kind of requirement for power-free phones I don't know about there really is no reason to run expensive copper wires.
Except that these people are usually professionals or craftsmen who usually work with commercially available ammo and who would probably be able to make a gun themselves anyway. A gun after all is really just a tool to use the real weapon: the ammunition. A flimsy trigger and barrel can certainly be made with a 3D printer. 3D printing gunpowder and a shell? Not as easy.
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You sound like you work for BT ;-). Even if "most" people don't download "that much" (Though you yourself concede that you fiancée, living on her own, uses a chunky 20GB a month), there is a growing proportion of people who *do*, and they want to be able to do that wherever they might live and have a peak bitrate to support these high-quality services. They are the one's who are driving the market, not the 50+ market segment who just want to "do email" or whatever.
0.5-1.5% downtime sounds extremely bad to me - 1% downtime equates to 7 hours per month or 3.5 days a year. Conversely, I have had no downtime at all in the past 4 years (other than the occasional resync, which is on the order of a couple of seconds). If I was experiencing outages amounting to days per year then I would be changing ISP, whether or not that connection was used for business.
It's an estimate as I haven't got any logs for that kind of time frame. But just by guessing I'd say a couple of days over the last 3 or so years sounds plausible. Same goes for my last provider (who, despite being *more* expensive had terrible support). But then I've also gone years without having a fault ever. That's the nature of random failures, they're just unpredictable. So for critical service you need to make sure you've got some backup or guarantee from your provider. Otherwise it could happen to you too.
You comparison with super markets is a bit disingenuous for your cause. It's an industry focused on psychological marketing tricks and price inflation. What the hell's the deal with 2 for 1? Why can't I get the "real" price without buying 2 pounds of meat? There's certainly different qualities of products, but that doesn't mean that some of Tesco's "finest" stuff isn't just an overpriced rip-off.
The reason they make money isn't because they're objectively competitive but because consumers aren't always entirely rational about their buying habits. They can be "told" what a great deal is and be led to believe something's better. Perfectly rational consumers wouldn't buy bottled water, or buy sugar water that's many times the price of almost identical sugar water.
Your ISP may very well be more reliable, but to make it competitive in my eyes I would either need a lot more data or some kind of guarantee. You're just making blind assumptions about the service quality from a Romanian provider you don't know based mainly on the fact that you pay more.
Take for instance an experience I had with Amazon. They have "free" shipping on most orders, but for an extra fiver or so you get "premium" shipping: They "guarantee" the order will be there in less than 3 days. The thing is most orders I've ever made have been there in 2 days anyway, so there didn't ever seem much point. But since I wanted the order before Christmas I said "what the hell" and paid up.
Long story short it was lost in the post. I had to contact them multiple times to get a replacement sent, and again to get back the cost of "premium shipping" that I wouldn't have paid without it. It turns out that premium shipping is a load of bullshit. They send it with the same parcel service as everything else. There is no kind of priority or express mode that would justify the extra cost. And when, as in my case, it does go missing all you're entitled to is reimbursement for the premium shipping. It's all there in the fine print.
What happened was that I had been duped into thinking that because I'm paying extra for something there *must* be some extra quality I'm getting, even if they're not being clear about what it is. They realized that I have a reasonable, but statistically unlikely anxiety about not getting my order fast enough, and they could make money from that. It's like the bullshit extended warranties you get from the electronics retailers which don't cover jack shit and are shorter than the legally mandatory warranty period.
Anyway, my point is that without anything tangible like downtime statistics your presumed superiority of your ISP isn't necessarily rational. You might be pleased with your experience, but unless we turn the meaning of "competitive" upside down your ISP just doesn't cut it. By a long shot.
Errm, I'm not sure how having a speed of under 24Mbps makes an ADSL connection "outdated" since that's the top speed of *any* ADSL connection...
ADSL *is* outdated. VDSL is more up-to date (yes, I know that ADSL2+ has a longer range). Now, they do offer VDSL as their "fibre broadband" package, but that just means they're deceptively using the fibre buzzword for twisted pair wires. You're right that coaxial cables use copper (though not technically wires), maybe I should have been more specific. Of course it's just as deceptive for Virgin media to advertise themselves as fibre.
A modern infrastructure consists of a robust fibre backbone and a last-mile which doesn't bottleneck the service. In practice you usually get this from FTTH, FTTB as well as "coaxial cable to the home" like Virgin. I don't think it's unreasonable to call ADSL2+ outdated. It just sucks if that's all that's available.
Secondly, some of us don't consider speed to be the primary factor when buying a service. I don't actually use my internet connection for anything that would benefit from 60Mb/s, whilst I do want decent support, reliability, etc.
I realize that and for that reason there is a robust offering from business-grade ISPs to cater to your needs. I on the other hand love the fact that multi-GB downloads are done in a few minutes, updates are blazing fast, we can watch multiple video streams at once and listen to internet radio all day without ever having to worry about reaching a usage cap. (Even internet radio will only get about 9 hours for 1 gig of data)
BTW, in my experience even paid services like iTunes won't push more than 30Mb/s frome their servers to a single client, so you're right that there is sometimes limited benefit. But it does mean you can support multiple users and the higher tiers usually have really nice upload speeds too.
I think you overestimate what the "average consumer" does with their internet connection.
Possibly. But before we get into consumer demographics and user behavior statistics I think it's best we just agree that there's a huge variance in the types of users.
So far today I've used about 300MB, without really doing pretty much anything that's bandwidth intensive. Typical days might get around 2GB. And if I've done something heavy like download games like Diablo 3 (12GB), a beefy IDE (Usually multiple GB), updated a couple of Linux boxes, downloaded a movie, and my family have watched a couple of hours of streamed video, that's when I get 20+GB in a day without even noticing. As it is I used 53.97GB in the last 30 days.
In fact, personally I actively avoid services that are promoting high usage (by offering cheap "unlimited" accounts) because I know the economics of running an ISP doesn't allow you to do "cheap", "unlimited" and "reliable" at the same time as paying for staff who have a clue. I *want* my ISP to limit the heavy users so that I'm not subsidising them.
Technically no ISP can offer "unlimited" service anyway. What they can do is analyze usage patterns and customer's needs and desires in order to compete on price and certain desirable service qualities (bandwidth) in order to capture market share. At the moment it appears the big ISPs and that Romanian FTTB company are doing a better job at capturing my type of market than Entanet.
Reliability is of course somewhat less tangible. I don't know of any statistics that would let me evaluate different companies performance. My experience has usually been between 0.5-1.5% downtime. I can see how this might be a dealbreaker for some businesses, but I can live with it. The link you posted certainly doesn't advertise guaranteed fault-correction, which is typically part of a business grade contract.
The prices I see for the ISPs you are claiming are "specialist" just don't seem that high to me. Yes they aren't absolutely the rock-bottom prices, but they're not
Yes, they have a service that starts at £15/month, but you fail to mention that it's with 1 GB/month allowance. *One Gig!*. That *is* outrageous in today's age. That's about an hour of iPlayer! Not even one Netflix movie!
So let's reiterate: For just short of £30/month (don't forget the "line rental") I get an outdated ADSL connection with a speed of anything southward of 24Mb/s and a usage policy which would seem draconian 10 years ago.
Meanwhile at Virgin Media, £30/month will get you 60Mb/s maximum speed (and because they don't use copper wires you do actually get this speed on pretty much every connection) and a traffic usage policy that's more like 2GB/hour.
I don't want to seem to be bashing Entanet. I'm sure they have very happy customers who specifically chose them. I'm also sure there is a class of customer who has low usage demands but requires IPv4 subnets. And to be fair they do seem to offer an "unlimited" service where you pay £30/month plus line rental (though not for their FTTC offers which again have fairly restrictive usage allowances). But the take-home message here is that for average consumers who are interested in watching youtube, movies, video chat, and maybe a little bit of naughty file sharing, *these are not great deals*.
Now of course I can turn the tautology argument against you: All "non-shit" providers give you a premium service for "free". But your requirement for not being shit is that they give you this premium service for "free".
Now, if every package they offer is much more expensive than otherwise comparable products from the big providers, the "free" service can't reasonably be considered free.
Any reasonable person would conclude that you went for a specialist ISP and are paying a premium for a service you require (IP addresses).
I often find it useful in this stage of the discussion to remind everyone where we started out in the first place: ...but fail to mention that you need to add £14.50 as line rental and that 80Mbps is somewhat optimistic. So I pointed this out.
1) Person A complains about low quality DSL connection in UK.
2) Person B praises cheap and fast consumer-grade FTTB in Romania
3) You point out that "up to" 80Mbps DSL is widely available for less than £10,...
4)
Now we're here arguing about static IP subnets on premium-priced, "non-shit" broadband packages. I can't help but feel that you've been moving the goalposts a bit. I can't read Romanian but FWIW if they're anything like similar European ISPs they probably don't guarantee static IPs either, or offer it for a premium (usually around €5/month)
What they do have is a connection that is both much cheaper and much faster than what you see in the UK, running on a high-quality modern infrastructure. I, along with most consumers, would value this more than static IPv4 addresses which I don't need (at least not for the moment).
None of the companies you listed is a consumer-grade ISP. Your Entanet doesn't even advertise that they have residential services. The few "home" services I found from your recommended companies were also all much more expensive.
And your static IP isn't really free if you're paying for a business-class service at a business-class price. FWIW I've never gotten the option of a "free" static IP with any of the ISPs I've been with. But then again I don't shop for business-grade broadband for my home anyway.
How much do you pay for your service?
1,2 and3) fat chance of getting that with a consumer grade ISP. Which national ISPs do IPv6 anyway?
4) Anecdote I know, but I was pretty pleased when I got a billing issue fixed in a couple of minutes on the online chat. And other statistics seem to disagree with you http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2012/12/sky-broadband-tops-ofcom-study-of-uk-isp-customer-satisfaction.html
It's not about changing existing parts and machines, just the way they're measured. Or, more accurately, how the data is published. For most intents and purposes your shop is already metric. The inch is defined in mm, and pound force has an exact decimal representation in Newtons. Even in metric countries the inch-sized stuff is ubiquitous, just that it happens to be a 12.7mm pipe or whatever.
Of course there is a problem with screw threads, but that's more of a problem of not adopting the ISO standard than the measurement system that's used.
You just took an entire paragraph to explain what in the metric kitchen is very simple: liters and grams. It is simpler and less ambiguous. If that doesn't make it superior I don't know what does.
Now, of course you can just say that it doesn't really matter an awful lot. But saying that it's just as good because people get used to it isn't a good comparison.
There's no clear distinction between everyday life and non-everyday life. In the days of GPS and prepared food most people probably don't even use any kind of measures most days anyway.
But I'm guessing that anybody who uses actually fluid ounces would be bothered by the inconsistency. For instance I find it quite annoying that I have to take into account where a cooking recipe was published and make appropriate corrections for the stuff in my kitchen.
Most people in the UK will give you half inches as well, so it's "six-foot-three-and-a-half", as opposed to "one-ninety-two".
Arguing for mixed fractions because one example is shorter is silly.
It's ridiculous to claim one system is inherently more intuitive than the other. People's intuition is forged by experiences, and even then they can be massively off.
Eyeballing stuff only takes you so far. When you do real calculations (even simple ones) that the advantage of the metric system is immediately apparent: You don't have convert for different scales and dimensions. Instead of four common units for length, their square's for area, another unrelated unit for area, at least as many for volume, and a curious distinction between dry volume and liquid volume, you just have the meter from which all other "units" are easily derived.
I was paying 25 GBP a month for a 30 Mb connection, which seemed quite reasonable compared to the DSL providers who had low usage caps, no speed guarantees, and wanted an extra 15 GBP on top of their advertised price.
It's called competition and no matter what people say markets are much more healthy and vibrant with it. There are so many different design decision when making a games console that a single standard couldn't possibly serve the market.
VAT is probably the most logical tax, it taxes spending and not income
Only if you want to stifle the economy. If on the other hand you want to encourage economic activity you make spending easier. Income which isn't spent doesn't benefit the economy.
You've got it pretty much backwards.
It's pretty fair regardless of income levels, much more so than income taxes.
VAT is effectively a highly regressive tax because even though it applies to everyone the poor to middle-class people spend a much higher proportion of their income on consumer goods, subject to VAT.
South Korea and Samsung would probably disagree with you.
Just like to point out that the Nintendo 3DS and Playstation Vita, two "hardcore" systems, use ARM CPUs.
Typical supercomputing tasks usually scale quite well. (Otherwise there's little point of running it on a supercomputer in the first place). Which is of course why GPUs are so interesting.
Supercomputers are meant to be scalable, so it doesn't really matter what the computing power of an arbitrary "CPU" is (which consists of an equally arbitrary number of cores all running at a somewhat arbitrary clock rate).
What does however influence design decisions are
1) cost
2) power consumption
If an ARM machine has an advantage on these compared to an equally powerful x86 cluster then that makes it better.
Source? It also seems pretty silly because most people these days use cordless phones that need additional power anyway.
Which is a reason not to go for the DSL. You have to compare the full price for the whole package. The cable providers always offer double or triple play and give you a telephone adapter to use you POTS phone.
Well, that seems to require that the compiler could anticipate future languages and compiler architectures. Not completely unfeasible, but it would probably need some massive AI capable of reverse-engineering from a limited set of code.
Oh, and as a "bonus" for this tremendous foresight DSL speeds are consistently 30% slower so that some people can still use their late 90s phones and fax machines. For a 25 mbps line that's a trade-off of 8mbps for a 64kbps phone and fax line which no-one uses.
That can go the wrong way too though. In Germany the former state phone company decided to invest billions to get ISDN in every corner of the country, only to find that the speed was obsolete almost as soon as it came into service.
VDSL is sketchy though. And you left out their "line rental" charge which for some reason they leave out of their advertised price (14.50 GBP).
Fibre providers have an ONU (optical network unit) supplied by the mains power on the property. Unless there's some kind of requirement for power-free phones I don't know about there really is no reason to run expensive copper wires.
Except that these people are usually professionals or craftsmen who usually work with commercially available ammo and who would probably be able to make a gun themselves anyway.
A gun after all is really just a tool to use the real weapon: the ammunition. A flimsy trigger and barrel can certainly be made with a 3D printer. 3D printing gunpowder and a shell? Not as easy.