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"we are now reaching the limits of its capabilities"

In my area of East London we passed the limits of ADSL a long time ago. Thankfully i'm now on cable. My 4Mbps connection i have now have is in reality 10 times faster than my old ADSL which was supposed to be 8Mbps. In some areas it takes an age to even make a connection on ADSL.

The reality is digital Britain is going backwards not forwards as we all fight to get on. The government needs to remove ADSL altogether from its broadband strategy and beside fibre-optic cable, look to rolling out public WiMax services as the number one cable alternative.

Also in East London (Walthamstow) and broadband speed is abysmal in my road, largely due to overhead cables I suspect. I'm lucky to get 512Kbps most of the time, although I'm paying for 4Mb.

The sooner we upgrade the 'last mile' infrastructure to fibre, the better.

Also agree that public WiMax should be a priority.

Can you try and get some figures on how much installing fibre would cost, and how much it would work out to per broadband customer. Are we talking reasonable charges or are we talking silly money? Also, even after the fibre is installed, someone's going to have to pay to maintain it, so I don't quite see how the customer is going to avoid being charged forever.

"...and in any case it is not yet convinced that there is the demand for speeds of up to 100Mbps."

Unbelievable. Does BT believe there is demand for the 8Mbps they very nearly falsely claim to be selling? BT and other ISPs should be barred from using those weasel "up to" words. I used to get a fairly reliable 6-7 Mbps but since contention has increased over the last year or so, BT now can't even give me a service as good as the 1Mb/s they once did manage to provide. What would BT's idea of "up to" 100Mbps mean? A service that gives you brief periods of nearly 100Mbps at inconvenient times, but usually a tiny fraction of that and dropping to below 1/2 Mbps at peak times?

You don't need to live very "deep in the countryside" to get poor broadband speed. In this Cheshire commuter village less than 20 miles from Manchester most people struggle to get 500k (it's just tested at 485k) and I have been told by BT that they wouldn't consider I had a problem till it fell below 300k - even though I pay the same as people receiving 8mb.

At 500k you simply can't get the benefits of broadband like streaming video or services such ´óÏó´«Ã½ iplayer (takes all night to download a half hour programme.) We need to distinguish between those who have access through broadband technology and those who receive a true broadband service. No doubt the bandwidth demand of services will continue to increase leaving us farther and farther behind.

Here we are working on a parish plan and one of the questions in our questionnaire is asking residents is whether they are satisfied with their broadband - I should be very surprised if the level of satisfaction was anything like the 80% that ofcom found in rural areas of England.

I worked for BT just prior to privatisation in the 80's and at that time they wanted to lay a nationwide fibreoptic network, but the Government would let them.

Just imagine the revenue that network would be generating for the Government now leasing to media companies for VOD, ISP's, Phone companies etc.

laying fibre optic cable all over the place seems short-sighted to me, as once it's down it's down, and you can't change the phyiscal makeup of the cables.

it's a shame they haven't developed satellite broadband better, because whilst as it stands at the moment it isn't much good, i see no reason why it couldn't be improved...

All these figures can be very misleading, less people live in rural areas so 59% of what [number of households] are connected, and what quality of service do rural areas get? Do we need to redefine 'broadband' and what its starting point is?

I am lucky, I live on the top of a very isolated fell in Cumbria but have a dedicated 10Mb microwave link, funded by the development agency to prevent rural isolation.

Ofcom's data is worthless. At least they have the good grace to set out the sample sizes on their website and not only did they not look at most cities in the UK, but they only sampled around 100 people in each city they did look at. This means that the results putting Sunderland at the top are not statistically significant. Ofcom's aim seems to be to get a few cheap headlines. The ´óÏó´«Ã½ shouldn't indulge them.

The twisted pair copper cabling which brings broadband into most homes has performed miracles over the last decade, providing much higher speeds than most engineers imagined possible, but we are now reaching the limits of its capabilities.

How can you say that with a straight face when it amounts to: 'some people used to say we were reaching the limits of copper and they were wrong; now, some people say we are reaching the limits of copper.'?

Gigabit ethernet runs over copper too, you know.

BT cant see a reason why we would use 100MBPS, thats because they are so short sighted and scared to pay for fibre. If i had to pay a setup fee of say £100 for cable to my house i would gladly pay it for the 100 MBPS as long as thats the speed that i got.


What gets me is that BT is still trying to roll out its 21C Network which will offer upto 24 MBPS. By which time the rest of the world will be miles ahead of us.

I wish people in this country would have the guts to commit themselves to investment in the future instead of just trying to catch up on the present.

to #11 endorphene

"I wish people in this country would have the guts to commit themselves to investment"

Ahh yes but the problem is that like BT they invest in out of date technical solutions - I am thinking of the cable companies who invested in coax rather than fiber. So they now had a very thin backbone that cannot supply the services and will never supply many HD channels.

The trouble often is that whilst they have the 'guts' they will not listen to the technologists and ask what they should spend their cash on.

It is a bit like the NHS systems - by the time they are installed (2015 or later) they will be so out of date they will be antique.

My 'up to 8Mb' often runs at 60kps – BT claims this is broadband because of the way in which it's delivered.

Ofcom's perennial advice to 'change supplier' does not address the infrastructure issues: if you change from a Rolls Royce to a Ferrari it still won't go any faster if you drive along a cart track.

What would happen if we paid 1p or 2p per month for each 10k of speed? Would that encourage shareholders to press for 'technical experts' who actually knew what they were talking about?