大象传媒

"your need - or desire - for speed is no less than that of someone living in a humming metropolis" - arguably the need or desire is actually greater in rural areas when there is no public transport, little enterntainment, no government or council services available locally so you have to either get it online or drive to it using our highly taxed road fuels (or veggie oil instead).

The people in Arnisdale are hardly hard done by - they don't have to live in an idyllic village next to a loch miles from anywhere. It's a bit much to expect their lifestyle to be subsidised by people with the social responsibility to live in a more sustainable manner.

You dont have to live in the middle of nowhere to have a bad connection. I hope when you move into the large towns and cities you will investigate the problem of congestion.

As more and more people get broadband connections ive seen the speed available to me fall by upto 50% in the last 3years, from over 5megs on an max 8meg connection down to 2 and reliability has suffered as well. BT need to start investing in replacing our aging teleccomunications infrastructure in the same way as the water companies were forced to. The government too must recognise the problem and the costs involved and pony up some of the costs as well.

lets face it the government will invest in bridges and roads, this investment will have the same degree of benefit to the economy.

Arnisdale needs to be careful. There are plenty of people in the country who are home workers and if they achieve comparable broadband speeds, it will become a more attractive place for a mass of people to get away from city living. It would only take one more invention, the mass midge destroyer, and I will be moving there myself!!

I live only 14 miles from a city but as with most people in the village cannot get Broadband except by getting a satellite dish. BT say it is too expensive to connect us as we are 4 miles from the exchange . For those of us who cannot get it the emphasis on speed is extremely irritating! Just to get it would be nice!

Rory, Saw lunchtime news. Great that this issue is in the spotlight again. Unfortunately in Scotland there are many of us who are rural but very close to civilisation who still can't receive broadband. I live on the outskirts of Kilmarnock (Cuninghamhead) and it is not available. Our situation is just like earthgardenwater. So frustrating. I want to work from home and cannot. BT are happy with their headline %'s and the Scottish Government made interesting noises with a commitment to consider the issue with broadband for scotland but nothing happening it seems. I am on Kilmarnock exchange and therefore there is a long line issue but there are exchanges much closer that could be utilised. Utterly frustrating.

You asked on the 10 Mb downloaded movie for times. I live in Cambridge and it took 19.02 minutes. I use Demon, through a BT line. I tried the 大象传媒 News 'test your connect speed' and got times varying from 0.6 to 1. (H'm!)

By the way, I had a devil of a job trying to find HOW to communicate with you! No method on the 大象传媒 snippet about your download test. Nothing on the video which took nearly 20 minutes to download. Tried 大象传媒 search. It took me to your first blog, where communication was closed. Tried 'next blog', but got bored by about Jan 4 2008. Tried Technology and couldn't find you. Eventually tried blogs, and then I had to register. Was I registered? Search through the massive list of people I've registered with (on my computer, which rather spoils the point) and bingo, I got through! I know that spam's a problem, but really! PLEASE, perhaps, a little hint on, for example, your first blog (which is where links on your name seem to end up).

Ho, I'd better give my name - Jo Edkins, Cambridge. Trainee programmer for IBM in 1971! We didn't even SEE the computer. Or terminal. All punched cards...

Correction in my comment above I was referring to earthgardenwatcher and not earthgardenwater!! Oops - apologies.

A survey of broadband speeds is a great idea and one that the reach of the 大象传媒 makes into a quick and viable idea and also very topical.

There is one issue which I think is also relevant which is that many people for cost reasons opt for a lower speed package which may skew things in certain areas. This raises another key issue which is not maximum speed but actual speed versus what your ISP promised. Also upload speed is often a fraction of download (1/8).

Regards Mark (Edinburgh)

PS Is it just me or do others find the ISP's use of MB (also megabyte) for download speed rather than Mbps (Megabits per second) misleading. (Implying a factor of 8 increase)

I have to disagree with your description of the speed, 10Mbps is not 'scorching', it is slow and 20 or 50Mbps is as well. 40Gbps on the other hand is scorching, at the moment at least and that is BT should be installing around the country. Not this 21st century network rubbish which is actually a 20th century network at best. The government need to put their foot down and force BT to either build proper infrastructure or hand the network over to another company that will. Even in the small areas they are going to put in fibre it will still be dead slow, only 100Mbps.

Further to my previous comment, take a look at the map for the NW, centre of Bolton, Wigan, Liverpool, Manchester, Bury, every city I look at the centre is always red where green is in the outlying regions.

Clearly Mark Adair's got it right - BT are wholly remiss in not already having Infiniband to everyone's house.

I also live in a conventional Broadband wilderness. We are not in a desolate part of the country, just 3 miles from the nearest exchange in Suffolk, but that is 3 miles too far for BT.
Last year BT assured me that I could get 0.5 Meg of broadband, but after 2 months of trying, including BT sending the incorrect software of 4 occasions, I gave up. BT now agree that broadband is not available nor likely to be.
There is some light, at a price. 2 radio based systems are available but at a cost of about 拢30 per month plus an installation charge of about 拢200.

Paul Kidger

Rory,

As you know, I am the person who is partly responsible for what you called the "home brew" network in Arnisdale. I wish you had emphasized that this is a testbed for a *research* project by people in my department dedicated to affordable high-speed broadband in rural areas. Wireless technology is going to become very cheap and offers huge advantages over copper for rural areas. Your "scorching fast" 10mbs that you got from our network was probably limited by our backhaul. The network we have in place is already capable of substantially higher rates.

You might also want to substantiate this figure of broadband availability -- 99.something percent, or more places than have running water --- comes from? What is the basis for it? In any case I assume it is for the lowest quality of service. Since you are interested in speed, what you should be asking is how many people are in reach of -- say -- an 8mbs service.

Best wishes

Peter Buneman
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh

In USA the FCC is soon set to vote on a proposal to auction off a section of the radio spectrum that would require the winner to offer free wireless broadband access across the nation.
You can read about that here: