大象传媒

This seems like an odd one to me. People always seem to be claiming that file-sharing is the majority of the bandwidth on the net, and while some is legitimate files, I'm sure most is files a lot of people don't want moving around. And yet, if we're determined to minimise what the net's used for, why keep expanding its capabilities? I can see the advantage for things like net telly, especially with 大象传媒 HD now needing 3.5 MB/s, but do we really need 50 or 100MB/s? It seems like that sort of thing would really only be necessary for industrial/academic data. And while bigger pipes mean quicker page loads, etc., is there not a limit on that due to your computer as well?

I'd be intrigued to know if I'm missing something here.

"we're certainly nowhere near competing with the world's broadband speed merchants."

Very true and yet people are being expected to fork out 50p per month towards an upgrade so a PRIVATE firm doesn't have to upset their shareholders!

50ppm is NOTHING, the money raised won't go where it's meant to be going and no doubt, Labour will add some kind of extra tax to get their greedy hands on some of this money (meaning even less for the fund overall).

Oh, let's also not forget that taxes always seem to go up so 50p now, won't be long before it's 拢1, then like petrol, will creep up gradually - the people will complain, it will be reduced for a month and then while attention's focussed elsewhere, go back up!

The UK network access is poor because BT put the share-holders in front of the customer (again) and not into providing the network of the future.

And yet, Gordy B seems to think we're at the forefront by wanting to provide a poxy 2mb connection to all and sundry? Don't make me laugh.

If we want the network of the future, make BT a public company, use general taxes and aim for a 50 or 100mb connection for all - this way, if it doesn't succeed 100% then at least it will be better than if the 2mb target doesn't work!

I don't think it's very fair on the city folk who have 20-50mb connections to subsidise those folk who choose to live in the country or whatever and don't have this luxury (which, by the way, is a LUXURY and not a RIGHT or indeed anywhere "as vital as water or electricity").

It should be down to the privately run BT to get their short arms into their long pockets and provide for them.

Oh and as we're lowest in the EU league, why can't the government as for some of the 200 trillion it's given to the EU to fund these kind of projects?! If you believe that broadband is as essential as water/leccy then where is Aid for the UK when we need it?

I think something needs to be done, but I am not at all certain that that "something" is simply to increase Internet connectivity. Rather, we need to take a step back and question whether everything should be moving online in the first place? Would it not be better to ensure that even people without an Internet connection can receive access to goods and services?

There is a lot of proprietary technology around, and proprietary technology is toxic. Manufacturers use it to limit what you can and cannot do with it.

For instance, artificial obsolescence is engineered into Microsoft Office by changing the file formats every few years. Newer computers come with a newer version of Office which saves files in a format that older versions cannot understand, thereby forcing users of older versions to upgrade. Yet, the only thing that is wrong with the older software -- which has worked perfectly well up to now -- is that it cannot read the newer files; Microsoft have deliberately done this, in order to ensure people are forced to upgrade

This dependency on proprietary technology ultimately means that money that people probably really ought to be spending on something important gets diverted instead into a revenue stream for Microsoft and the like.

We desperately need a new law to be passed which would make it an offence to require anyone to use any kind of proprietary technology in order to obtain goods or services; or to discriminate in favour of users of proprietary technology, for example by differential pricing.

Anything else is tantamount to privatisation of the law.

Well 90% of the country could be up with the best right now but you just know someone on a farm in [insert area people have hardly heard of] is going to whine about it until the whole process grinds to a halt.

I'm quite happy to subsidise giving Old MacDonald decent broadband, I'm a Londoner, it's my job to subsidise everything and in return everyone generously puts up with my obnoxiousness. But since it's going to take 5 times as long to hook up the farmhouse could I at least have my connection while we wait?

@1

You may not know how to use the bandwidth but I surely do. I use it for legitimate reason as well - PCOIP. Give me a 1 Gbit/s connect any day I can used it up 24/7 for you.

People need to stop blaming BT, they are private company now and need to make a profit, they can't just roll out all the fibre optic cable if they don't think they can make a profit with it in the next few years and no one should expect them to. What really should happen is the government takes control of the actual cables and runs it somewhat like a cross between the national grid and post office. With no interference allowed like the 大象传媒, its the only way the whole country will get a next gen broadband network.

We are paying market rates for a cheap affordable best effort broadband + market rates for two phones services (fixed and mobile) and a TV licence.

Digital Britain has offered some 'forensic' investments for not spots, digital inclusion with a nod to a minimal univsersal service.

From this lot we need to construct a national data transport infrastructure which can support multiple key services, that's existing legacy voice services or there replacement plus everything else we would like to do.

The analysis on latency (thus quality) should be ignored. The detail we need is the change in latency as the network load increases, so we know what user experiences can be sustained during busy periods.

A national plan for a UK Data Transport network, (combining fixed and mobile access) ought to be specified so all packets (1 packet of 1 byte) gets delivered in 20ms (anywhere in the UK, with a defined loss rate. The outcomes we want define the overall scale in terms of volume.

We also of course need to abandon the spectrum auction heist, and re-invest the 拢240m a year collected in spectrum fees by Ofcom and handed to Treasury.

We should also stop the EU Telecoms Prison package being pushed through a conciliation process in Brussels as we speak. That piece of legislation will slow things down a bit.

And I did not even mention fibre.

Number 5. Ah, had forgot about that sort of thing. I guess the OnLive project will need it as well. Does it really need a 1Gbit/s? Although thinking about it, if you're transmitting commands, would you technically need a bandwidth equivalent to the ram you were using, is it is solely the input/output, i.e. video, sound, control that you send?

I ask, as I've occasionally used the various forms of remote control on PC, and the image updates are pretty terrible.

The problem with peopleblaming BT is that BT are ina really tough position. They were sold off as a private company, and as such need to make a profit. However every time they spend millions laying down new infastructure, the regulatory body then forces them to let their competitors (who haven't spent a penny on it) make us of it at a very reasonable rate, allowing the competitors to undercut BT who have to run at a higher price to recoup their initial outlay.

So why should BT spend billions to get the entire network up to top quality if their competitors who have sat and done nothing then get to reap the rewards? This isthe downside of privatising a company and then expecting it to do the work of a nationalised body.

From the 'positive' EC PDF:

'The UK performs well in most indicators but lags behind in speeds and take-up of advanced services...'

Not surprising. We like our broadband shallow and wide, that London is 107th in the world is a minor issue.

The survey actually notes we have a negligible 'digital divide' and that proportionately our rural areas actually compensate for the relatively poor performance of our urban areas, so what better way to deal with things than have the urban areas, along with the rest of the country, pay to subsidise roll out of higher speed services to 30% of the UK.

It's actually perfectly feasible that in the not too distant future the best services will be found in rural areas due to this subisdy from the more populous urban areas.

Ofcom's contribution to broadband in the UK, hamstringing operators, restricting innovation and preserving the status quo of Virgin Media and BT in their cosy duopoly, along with patting themselves on the back over bringing us 'competition' in the form of hundreds of companies reselling the same BT products.

I'd be interested to know what all these "fibre" networks in Sweden or Korea really are. Do they mean cable TV that is fibre to a box in the street and then copper from the box to the homes? There seems to be an assumption that we need fibre to the home, but over short distances copper cables can support very high speeds - 1G for distances of a few hundred metres.
In the UK the cable companies (well there's only one left now, Virgin) practically bankrupted themselves just cabling up the most profitable one third of the UK. No one is going to try that again in a hurry. We are stuck with the cable infrastructure we have and just need to squeeze the maximum performance out of it.

@LondonTom89 - people have every right to blame BT, they own the infrastructure and have continuously gone after profts over service.

Having said that the blame also lies with successive corrupt tory and labour governments. Whilst the likes of South Korea were laying the foundations for a 21st century infrastructure (although possibly at the time even they could not have foreseen the internet) we in the UK were allowing Margaret Thatcher and her cronies to get rich quick by privatising British Telecom, and NuLabour have continued the get rick quick thinking of the Tories, and again we as a nation have stood by and let them do it, citing "it's what the market will bear" as an excuse when pricing of services is questioned.

And now the people who had no say at all in how our telecoms infrastructure was sold off and consequently managed are being told to pay to undo the damage that has been done.

It comes as no surprise to me that we are so low in this anlalysis. I'd like to see one done for mobile broadband, I'd imagine we're even lower on that list.

Still we can take solace in being at the top of list when it come to how much we pay compared to the service we get...

In your UK graph you there are four measured penetrations i.e Cable, Fibre, DSL, and Others. Local distribution of digital broadband in this country is mainly via Optical Fibre Cable or Cooper Cable, using DSL technology to overcome the problems of using a copper based network that was designed for audio frequencies. So the use of the the word 'Cable' is confusing.

The DSL figure is given as 79% which seems reasonable. This covers the majority who receive broadband over the old cooper network with the aid of DSL. But your graph goes on to claim that Cable ? is the balance at 21%. What is this mysterious cable? it cannot be cooper because that is covered by DSL and it cannot be optical fibre cable because that is a separate category and seems to have a zero penetration according to your graph. I wonder what Virgin Media would make of that?

In other news I've sent an email to Boris Johnson's office informing him of London's magnificent showing, asking him his opinion of this and what is going to be done about it. Highly recommend others do the same. The study may not be gospel but just the mere implication that one of only two 'World Cities' should have inferior services to Ankara is ridiculous.

I'm no fan of BT but the fault rests with the government. Opening up the market has given us cheap broadband, not decent broadband. As I write this I sit on a 3mbps connection which, due to a fault BT know about, disconnects regularly and can sync as low as 150kbps. I couldn't understand how BT Openreach cannot properly investigate and fix a fault which affects several hundred homes. But then I put my business brain on and realised that fixing a fault to hundreds of homes isn't "financially viable" for a private company when they can patch it up to run at a fraction of its true speed and still have it pass as 'Broadband'.

The Government have to take control of the network - or at least part fund it. Britain is losing business because of this useless infrastructure. People are making car journeys they could avoid because of this useless infrastructure. It is time to stop patching things up and actually develop a future-proof network.

And please, illegal file sharing has nothing to do with "digital Britain" and everything to do with people's attitude towards copyright. Stop letting it get in the way of building our network.

Liveryman 'fibre optic broadband' is Virgin Media's marketing guff. It's cable, delivered via a cable modem and a hybrid fibre-coaxial CATV network, it is only fibre to the neighbourhood. If you stare at that thing that goes into your home from Virgin it's a bit of coaxial cable it's most certainly not fibre. Some bright spark marketing drone decided that as they have some fibre in their network they could describe it as 'fibre optic' and the ASA waved it through.

We have a matter of a few thousand homes with real fibre optic service to their homes, so few that it doesn't even show on the stats as 0.1%. That's what fibre in Sweden is, fibre optics either to the building then delivered via ethernet cable or right to people's homes.

Ravenmorpheus, the vast majority of the money in South Korea's fibre network came from private industry and the same for Japan, just they had a supportive government rather than one that taxes fibre optics and makes you jump through hoops just to be able to deploy the stuff.

chriswl the fibre penetration stat is exactly that, either fibre to people's homes or at very least their apartment building then distributed to apartments.

I would also like to be higher in the league tables for health service, education, social services and giving to charity. Ask me how much more in taxes I want to pay.

The fact is that I would love to have more than the half meg download BT estimates it could deliver me, but the truth is I could not justify the cost for them to put a fibre optic cable along the line of poles through the fields to bring the service to my door. Their shareholders would not pay for it, or for that matter the shareholders of any of the cable companies that are entitled to supply me. So how did these other countries manage it. Do they by any chance have a 'nanny state' arrangement where tax payers money pays for the infrastructure investment. Or do they have a monopoly supplier that can charge all it's customers whatever it pleases to fund the infrastructure, or is it that they have found some killer application that enables them to charge what it costs to install the infrastructure and keep the customer and shareholder happy.

Remember that BT was rolling out Broadband long before Iplayer and YouTube and videogames required that bandwidth. A necessarry investment to retain revenue that would be lost to mobile phones. What then would be BT motivations to replace the old copper with optical fibre.

I'm one of these yokels who live in the middle of the country but as my income depends on having a good connection, I'm glad that I can get around 5-6 Mbps download and about 400Kbps upload. I'd like it to be more symmetrical but not at the cost of slower downloads. However, that's only as far as my ISP - from there on it depends on the vagaries of the system. (The 大象传媒 sometimes being much slower to offer up its files than other sites.) We'll never have enough bandwidth, the bigger you make the pipes, the more people will want to slosh through them.

Can anyone tell me, are we being charged VAT on the 拢6/year tax and is the tax ringfenced?

As for whether or not Britain is 25th or 31st, it's obviously not good enough for a nation that claims to be a knowledge economy so the number is irrelevant. Working day and night on the internet with files whizzing in all directions is not the stuff of fiction but reality - and a reality that becomes so much easier when you get to a country where it works and you can do a job then have time left over to see people or make a meal.

"16. At 6:07pm on 01 Oct 2009, Ignitionnet wrote:

Ravenmorpheus, the vast majority of the money in South Korea's fibre network came from private industry and the same for Japan, just they had a supportive government rather than one that taxes fibre optics and makes you jump through hoops just to be able to deploy the stuff.
"

Which is why I said "And now the people who had no say at all in how our telecoms infrastructure was sold off and consequently managed are being told to pay to undo the damage that has been done."

I am well aware that private industry is involved in the success that Japan and South Korea are having. The difference is though, as you rightly pointed out that their respective governments have dealt with the use of private business to improve services in a far better way than our government has.

Our government has basically allowed BT and all the other companies in this country to go ahead strip mine our assets.

And then we the taxpayer who had no say during the 80s, myself only having been born in 1977, when the root of the problems was developing are expected to foot the bill.

Before long if we allow businesses to run our government and allow our government to carry on as it is we will be overtaken by Africa in terms of productivity via the internet.

I grew up with promises of a information super highway where we could do anything we wanted at a moments notice. What the reality has become is an information super highway that is over congested, falling to pieces and vastly over priced.

How long will it be before our 拢6 a year is diverted to pay for MP's salaries and fiddles ?

We're in 31st place.

It's a matter of quality over quantity. You could have the entire country wired up with a 1MB connection, even if those using it rarely get half that, and still call it "broadband". This seems to be one of the goals of the digital britain report; to subsidize the installation of out-of-date equipment in order to get a few more people some basic network connectivity, and get us further up these results tables in order to meet an arbitrary target.

Meanwhile, over in Sweden, they're getting speeds over 100 times as fast, and almost doubling every 6 months. This is because they're not deploying out-of-date rubbish, and they don't have BT slowing everything down by waiting for more money from the government before doing anything, effectively holding the entire nation to ransom.

In 1966, the proposal that fibre telecoms were feasible was made - in Britain.

In the following 25 years or so, Britain was a world leader in developing fibre technology, including its use for deployment to homes.

But it has clung to Alexander Graham Bell's 19th century copper wire pair.

It has failed to recoup its investment in research and developmental successes.

Short term savings at the expense of a longer term return from a decent telecoms infrastructure.

This reflects a major failure in governance.

Again the true social democracies in Europe lead that continent. Healthcare, teenage pregnancies, happiness stats, government efficiency... Perhaps the UK policy makers and newspapers should have a look to the East rather than the West for making their decisions, which still show a bizarre believe in free-market mechanisms and fear of a nanny state.

This is silly, IMO.

Where I live, BT estimate that I can get broadband, but only a maximum speed of 256kb/s. And that's at best. I get 500kb/s from my iPhone connection!

Yet I live in a village and about 2 minutes away from my parents house and they have 3 meg broadband speed. I think something needs to be sorted about us who can't actually get broadband first, before we try to get people who have broadband up to 20mb!

I live in a rural area, the telephone line can support upto 4mbps, so I have a 2mbps connection. What's the point for paying for a faster connection when your line can't support it?

Here's an idea, Mr Brown and co sets up a new public company owned by the taxpayer, using the 50p a month tax plus some more money from the tax payer, roll out the fibre network and then charge the private companies if they want to gain access to the network, recovering some of the cost.

If one was to describe the UK bit transport, then the role of satellite in delivering PAY TV has not been touched upon.

The business models to support fibre normally have a TV subscription associated with them. UK TV is dominated by our licence payment and our payments to Sky. I am not suggesting fiber is a cost effective pay of delivering TV, but it one of these variables, such that if we are re-wiring the country, then a structural change in how we consume deliver and pay for TV needs to part of the case. The latter would not work on its own, it would have to be supported by a meaningful effort on changing our travel habits,(1 tank of petrol a month sorry diesal) would pay for most of my fiber connectivity) and how key services get delivered. Education on its own will probably make the case, and future care services would justify it again.

Ofcom and indeed the EU policy are light years away from seeing the need to foster national data transport networks. They are still regulating fixed (calls and access), mobile, and running cost recovery on calls, not bits.

This is nothing but a failure for those overseeing the framework which has allowed this to happen. Fortunately from next May those people overseeing this national disgrace will no longer be with us. I just hope those replacing them will throw the Digital Britain report out of the window, and look to follow the lead of Australia or the US by coming up with a better plan to roll out fibre.

Over 50% of S Koreans live in large blocks of flats, if that's what gets you high speed broadband then you can keep it as far as I'm concerned.

The UK is 22nd in the league of this report's broadband quality per GDP per capita, ahead of Canada, Australia, USA, Iceland, Hong Kong, Norway. Doesn't seem too uncomfortable to me. Makes a change from being #1 in the undesirable league tables like binge drinking and teenage pregnancy.

The report also found practically no urban/rural divide in the UK.

"28. At 12:05pm on 02 Oct 2009, Blue_Blood1 wrote:

This is nothing but a failure for those overseeing the framework which has allowed this to happen. Fortunately from next May those people overseeing this national disgrace will no longer be with us. I just hope those replacing them will throw the Digital Britain report out of the window, and look to follow the lead of Australia or the US by coming up with a better plan to roll out fibre."

I'd rather we look to the likes of South Korea and Japan, we've been looking towards the US for too long, it's what has got us where we are today...

The UK should really look east to the future of internet connection. I live in South Korea and I just had my fiber LAN installed (as another poster guessed it is copper wire to a junction box near my residence). I get a minimum guaranteed 100mb/s connection all for the paltry fee of 15 GBP a month.

While accepting that the UK ranking is nothing to boast about, I would be very interested if someone could explain to me how the "costs" of slow broadband are calculated. A contributor to Robert Peston's current blog (at the time of writing this) quoted Computer Weekly as having specified this "cost" at 拢17Bn.

Now this may be true, but I would like to know how it is calculated. Now I daresay that "waiting for things to down/up load" will be part of that cost, but has that got any strong basis in reality? While drumming ones fingers for a minute or two while something downloads may be frustrating, surely that minute or two is nothing compared to the time that was taken to prepare it in the first place and the time taken to read it and act on it by its recipients.

I might equally argue that every minute or two too long taken to write (or read) a document ratchets up additional costs to the UK that will far exceed the "costs" of its being held up for a short time in transmission. Even then (as ISTR a previous contributor noted) it may well be that slowness of access is as likely to be attributable to a server somewhere than to the network itself, but of course it is easier to bash the network providers than the ISPs if only because the former are more easily identifiable.

I also worry about the dash for digital effectively excluding sections of the population; the most obvious group are the elderly who may have neither the money nor the inclination to embrace a new technology so that "businesses" (however one may wish to define them) can shut down any human to human customer service in favour of keyboard communications alone.

I am also less than pleased at being faced with a tax (拢6 p.a.) to fund improvements; given that a growing part of the demand for digital services seems to be from mobile users, I am at a complete loss to understand why fixed line users are to be levied while mobile users (many of whose applications do not appear to be exactly "important") get away with paying, er, nothing.

I have this uneasy feeling that someone somewhere is conning me. But to revert to a previous point; how much has YOUR taking a little too long in preparing or reacting to a document cost the UK? Perhaps you should look to yourselves rather than just blaming a transmission system.

I live 300m from my local telephone exchange (though it probably works out more as the cables aren't routed in a straight line). BT say that their 21CN technology could get me speeds up to 24Mb/s. I get around 8Mb. The fact that over such a short distance, users can expect a drop in speed by 2 thirds or more is absurd. I have the optimum setup for connecting my router to the phoneline (split on the BT master socket) and I have fine equipment, so I don't think I could improve the quality of the network at my end.

I pay my BT line rental, I pay my ISP subscription. There's no other options for me to pay to actually get the speed I want.

"32. At 10:22am on 03 Oct 2009, Radiowonk wrote:

I am also less than pleased at being faced with a tax (拢6 p.a.) to fund improvements; given that a growing part of the demand for digital services seems to be from mobile users, I am at a complete loss to understand why fixed line users are to be levied while mobile users (many of whose applications do not appear to be exactly "important") get away with paying, er, nothing."

If you're 拢6 pa was to be spent on the mobile network then you could complain, it's not going towards the mobile network it is going towards the fixed home line network, in theory at least, they are vastly different networks.

And I might add that mobile broadband has more restrictions placed on it in terms of smaller "fair usage" caps and costs more than a fixed home line and is far more unreliable, I know I use T-Mobiles and previously Vodafones mobile "broadband" and will soon be moving to Three if T-Mobile don't up their game.

And the majority of "apps" used on a fixed home line aren't exactly important either.

Oh and for the sake of context, moderators, please do not edit out the names of the ISPs I have mentioned like that which was done to one of my posts in a recent HYS topic, thus rendering my post slightly confusing.

It's unfair just blaming BT when we have also had far too much intervention from govt quangos, who have blundered through lots of information from experts in the field and then, under the pretence of actually thinking they understood what they read, have written reports that the Govt have taken in hand and started working on.

We need a Govt department where industry experts rule the roost, not some bland politicians who have no real knowledge of what they are talking about, and more importantly, what they are deciding is the best way forward.

The whole infrastructure needs a serious injection of cash, this really should come from the Govt, but not gained in putting taxes up, but instead from diverting funds away from those things that are not as important (I will not go into these as I would be going far too far off-topic and opening up a completely separate can of worms).

The way things are - broadband britain will always lag behind its neighbours - but will actually pay more for the pleasure of doing so.

I am not surprised by this. I recently got Broadband installed from one of the well known providers and they told me they couldn't give me their standard package because of where I lived. This shocked me because I live near Canary Wharf London!

Britain deserves the Broadband it has. When you let a private monopoly implement services what you get is a service which first meets the needs for shareholder value and then meets the needs of it's customers. Cynically you provide a service which provides just enough service to avoid continual complaint and support at a price which maximises return on investment. Not rocket science. BT's original roll out of Broadband was predicated on reaching the maximum number of users for the minimum spend and this was not done for altruistic reasons.

Virgin provide much better, consistent, service because they inherited a modern infrastructure (ftth) and have been able to economically leverage this. I you're a Virgin customer outside of their cable network then the probability is that you are a proxy customer of BT with Virgin procuring bandwidth on BT's networks to resell. Any price advantage you see is purely down to Virgin's ability to negotiate bulk discounts and pass some on to the customer.

Strategic national resource should either be implemented as proper competitive enterprise or controlled by the state. Broadband provision to the majority of UK locations is really, only in the hands of BT and they dictate the terms and face no real competitive pressure. Until this changes 拢6pa taxes on all of our wired telephone lines will change nothing, in fact the levy is more akin to a reward for failure.

Virgin say they have about 50% of the UK covered by their Fibre Network.

BT has about 0.0000001% of the UK covered by a Fibre Network and say they will have about 40% of the UK on either FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) delivery speeds of 40mbps or FTTH (Fibre to the Home) delivering speeds of 100mbps. All of this by 2012 apparently.

I am guessing BT will be installing the majority of its Fibre Network where it's not needed, i.e. where there is already a Virgin Fibre Network.

BTs and Virgins Network should be taken into Public ownership, that way we already have 50% of the UK on a fibre network so all we have to do then is install fibre to the other 50%.

Then all Service Providers can Wholesale Broadband, Phone and Cable TV Services to make it 100% fair as no matter how the BT Group try to word it we all know Openreach is still BT at the end of the day.

While I sympathize with the bandwidth impoverished of the UK, I wonder what the average internet user needs this torrent of data for. As an ex-pat living in Fiji, we have to be content with around 256K as a standard broadband offering. For web browsing and e-mail this seems to present little problem, so I presume it is downloading video and graphics that consumes so much. Whatever, it seems that one doesn't miss what one hasn't had. Yes, the digital world is changing with VoIP, streaming video and ever richer web content, but is it really worth crying over, if it takes a couple of minutes instead of seconds? Yes? Get out more. Have a look out of your window before the only world left is a high speed, 1GB/s digital one.

"39. At 11:10am on 04 Oct 2009, fiji_diver wrote:

While I sympathize with the bandwidth impoverished of the UK, I wonder what the average internet user needs this torrent of data for. As an ex-pat living in Fiji, we have to be content with around 256K as a standard broadband offering. For web browsing and e-mail this seems to present little problem, so I presume it is downloading video and graphics that consumes so much. Whatever, it seems that one doesn't miss what one hasn't had. Yes, the digital world is changing with VoIP, streaming video and ever richer web content, but is it really worth crying over, if it takes a couple of minutes instead of seconds? Yes? Get out more. Have a look out of your window before the only world left is a high speed, 1GB/s digital one."

TV is moving online, other video on demand services are online.

The up-coming England World Cup match vs the Ukraine is now being shown online only due to Setanta going under, try watching that on a 256K service.

That's why a faster service is needed, because more and more entertainment is being put on the internet.

Also some companies want to stream TV to TV sets instead of having to use a PC as a go between.

With the current infrastructure that sort of TV will only be available to the wealthy elite who can afford to pay the rip-off sums we pay here in the UK for internet access.

It is perfectly possible to watch television without clogging up the internet, although (and here I digress) why anyone would want to watch much of what is currently on offer escapes me. If service providers make televion available on the internet when the transmission system is fundamentally incapable of supporting it then while I agree it is frustrating surely the problem is one of over - selling rather than anything else.

I would not argue that existing speeds are less than exciting (I get 1.9Mb/s, although my local end ADSL seems to be operable at about 2.7Mb/s) I think we have to be more realistic about what we really need and why we really need it.

Comment 40 seems to getting close to saying that those of us for whom (say) 2 - 4 Mb/s is adequate should be paying more so that those who want (again, say) 4 - 8 Mb/s don't actually have to pay what their "requirements" actually cost.

Er, no thanks...

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

I do apologise for the length of the above post, I seem to have highlighted all posts made and copied/pasted them.

Perhaps one of the moderators would be so kind as to edit my post to remove all but post 41?

All this user's posts have been removed.Why?

I note that Russia is considered ahead of the UK in having an infrastructure to support tomorrow's needs for streaming and fast broadband. I can confirm from my contacts in that country that although there is no doubt the Russians have modernised, the fact that the majority of citizens do not have an internet connection at home and tend to route email through their work sites is down to the expense of having such a connection. At least in the UK, the majority of homes have PCs connected to broadband internet, even if the ISP provider's have over estimated the speed somewhat.

Living in Sweden, this intrigued me. We live in the countryside, several kilometres from the 'exchange' housing the modems. Despite this we achieve speeds of 6+ Mbits download and about .75 Mbits upload. The upload speed is, naturally, throttled back when using adsl. I wonder how rural houses in the UK get on?

Here in Russia, speeds are excellent, and there's a non stop wave of takeups. For the equivalent of about 15 Euros a month, an average householder can get 13mb/s D/L, and 6mb/s upload. Last year, the russian government budgeted for, and laid, over 18,000 kilometres of fibre optic cable, and they show no intent of slowing the pace. They've already expressed their intent to head for GB/s speeds as soon as the first wave of cable is laid, out to the far reaches of the country. (11 time zones)
The internet here is seen as the future one stop solution, for not only web, but TV, and the usual online services. Desktop cable boxes are incredibly cheap to buy, and the packages for internet/tv/radio/other are well priced and within the reach of average householders. It's considered an essential communication service for the future, and is treated as such.

As someone who used to live in the highlands, and then the lake district, with the resulting lack of services, and BT's singular reluctance/arrogance to step up to the sparsely populated plate, it continues to stagger me that the GB government is failing the population in a spectacular fashion with this, and given the massive waste of taxpayers money over the last ten years or so, there's no answer as to why Britons rate so low in the chart. Had the money from the Millenium Dome alone been spent on fibre optic infrastructure, more than half of britons would now enjoy much faster speeds, and a lot more of them to boot.

There are only so many excuses for this, but sooner or later the penny is going to drop with GB citizens, that in this field at least, the government has failed not only the present public, but generations to come. It will take a mighty effort to catch up, and frankly i can't see anyone on the current batch of politicians having the courage or common sense to make this happen, on a national scale, given their fondness for the current business community, and the rewards that loyalty brings.

There are plenty of gov stats to "show" the GB public, that progress is being made. Practically, this simply isn't true. The infrastructure isn't even keeping up, and anything or anyone that professes it is, is practising political smoke and mirrors.

45. njakeman.

I note that Russia is considered ahead of the UK in having an infrastructure to support tomorrow's needs for streaming and fast broadband. I can confirm from my contacts in that country that although there is no doubt the Russians have modernised, the fact that the majority of citizens do not have an internet connection at home and tend to route email through their work sites is down to the expense of having such a connection. At least in the UK, the majority of homes have PCs connected to broadband internet, even if the ISP provider's have over estimated the speed somewhat.

Sorry, but this isn't true. I live here, and i'm involved with a local linux community, putting new and refurbished computers into homes for those who can't afford a computer, or want to take the plunge for the first time, at a modest "try it out and see' level. The take up is tremendous, even in these challenging economic times, and computer shops and supermarkets are thriving. The russian market is booming with no signs of letting up, and evidence of this is in the all the major players investing a lot of money and effort into capitalising on the growth. In Yaroslavl for instance (a russian city on the golden ring, and quite a long way from Moscow and St. Petersburg), where a new business friendly community for foreign investors is taking shape, the infrastructure is state of the art, and the russian government has been almost frantic in getting as many homes onto the net as they can, in the shortest possible time.

Nationalistic persuasions aside, the russians are well served by their government in this regard, and maybe just one reason why they continue to be so popular.

Hearts and minds, at broadband + speeds.

Why should the UK as a country care? I can understand that a customer getting poorer service than he or she could want would gripe about it, but of the measurements of being a "technological society" high-speed broadband has questionable returns.

Sweden and South Korea are usually being touted as broadband pioneers, Sweden went for broadband coverage, the 9 million people live in the third largest country in the EU, and South Korea went for speed. But was this the best way their resources could have been spent? The assumption, fuelled on by the infrastructure companies (Cisco is sponsor of this survey), is that if they built it new applications and riches would follow. On the whole they haven't, the services provided there are not substantially different from for instance the UK.

There are benefits, including intangible ones like Sweden and South Korea maintaining an image of being technologically advanced, which has consequences for where companies and employees might want to move, much like having an address in Milan or Paris is valuable if your business is fashion. However the ability to push a vast number of bits through the network is just a single factor in how easy it is to do technology business in a country, and Sweden and South Korea don't always do that well in other measurements.

I don't live in the UK, and maybe making all your bands a little broader just the missing piece you need to flourish as a nation, but I kind of doubt that. The complaints about BT I could sympathise with, I haven't used that company, but my experience living in any location where a company has a de facto monopoly (as BT seems to have many places in Britain) on connection is that the service is frustrating at best.

For 11. At 5:43pm on 01 Oct 2009, chriswl wrote:
Being a Swede that admittedly have lived here in the UK for the last 7 years, but after the big rollout of fiberoptic network took place in the beginning of the century, I can tell you that the majority if the fibre goes all the way to the house or block of flats before it is converted from light to electric signals, provided you live in a town or city, the people on the countryside still have to contend with copper wire hooked up to the main fible lines.
This mostly because of cost it can be very costly to lay fible cables to a place umpteen KM's from the nearest population centre which may have a polupation of 30 poeple or less, how ever for now everybody with a phoneline also have been offered the possibility to have some form of broadband (mostly DSL over the copper network) no matter where in the country they live so there's no real digital divide in Sweden anymore.
Here in the UK you'r lucky if you can even get broadband some parts of some towns can't even get it.

"For instance, artificial obsolescence is engineered into Microsoft Office by changing the file formats every few years. Newer computers come with a newer version of Office which saves files in a format that older versions cannot understand, thereby forcing users of older versions to upgrade. Yet, the only thing that is wrong with the older software -- which has worked perfectly well up to now -- is that it cannot read the newer files; Microsoft have deliberately done this, in order to ensure people are forced to upgrade"

What a stupid comment! File formats change because of the new fuctionality of the sw. Do you really expect the developers in 1990 who wrote Excel to put together a file format which could handle the functionality that the sw has today. It isn't some kind of consiracy to get people to upgrade.

We are low down on the braodband table because of our copper network. Until that is ripped up and replced we will continue to stay in the bradband backwater.

Faster broadband is needed for the media streaming which is now common place. Watching live TV requires a certain level of throughput. The more people sharing that connection then the higher the throughput needed. 3 people streaming live TV and/or playing games requires a hefty connection speed.

Quick question to the censors - was the post below removed because it's basically a repetition of what I've said before, or because it included every single post because I accidentally copied/pasted them all and you don't have an edit function?

Anyway here's the original post, I suppose this'll either be refused entry to the discussion or removed at a later date, again...

"41. At 8:17pm on 05 Oct 2009, Radiowonk wrote:

It is perfectly possible to watch television without clogging up the internet, although (and here I digress) why anyone would want to watch much of what is currently on offer escapes me. If service providers make televion available on the internet when the transmission system is fundamentally incapable of supporting it then while I agree it is frustrating surely the problem is one of over - selling rather than anything else.

I would not argue that existing speeds are less than exciting (I get 1.9Mb/s, although my local end ADSL seems to be operable at about 2.7Mb/s) I think we have to be more realistic about what we really need and why we really need it.

Comment 40 seems to getting close to saying that those of us for whom (say) 2 - 4 Mb/s is adequate should be paying more so that those who want (again, say) 4 - 8 Mb/s don't actually have to pay what their "requirements" actually cost.

Er, no thanks..."

No actually I am not proposing that those that think a 2-4mbs speed is adequate pay more to subsidise those of us who want 4-8mbs.

What I was trying to say is that we will continue to see the likes of Virgin offering the latest/fastest speeds to those that can afford them, whilst in South Korea even the least well off can afford 10 times what the wealthy are offered in this country and that's not because those speeds have already been subsidised by the well off buying at higher prices, if of course the reports are to be believed.

Do we really want to continue to be treated that way by profiteering corporations? Or do we want an internet where everyone can get online with the same speeds available to them at the same cost?

If it's the latter then I propose forcing the likes of BT and Virgin Media to pump the excessive profits they make into the system to improve it instead of giving those profits to fat cat CEOs and shareholders.

Post 52 (ravenmorpheus2k) Your "hope" is a worthy one but sadly somewhat unrealistic. Given that some locations do not have a gas main or proper sewerage systems the fast internet is hardly unique in not being universally available. Having said that, those in remote locations can at least have a dial up service, for which there is no equivalent in the gas supply or waste water disposal industries.

Exactly *how* is a (very) high speed service to all locations going to be funded? I suppose we could all pay a great deal more to fund upgrades to remote locations, but I cannot see that going down well with many existing users.

IMHO it would be no less logical to insist that motorways should be constructed so that no - one has to live further than (say) 3 miles from a junction, but that would hardly practicable let alone affordable. Or (equally) that hospitals should be built, complete with A & E facilities, so that no - one has to live more than ... and so on. Again, unaffordable.

Those who choose to live "remotely" may just have to accept that their choice means that their internet access is likely to be somewhat slow.
Having said that, Radiowonk Towers is about 4 (route) miles from the local exchange, and I would have to admit that I do not see less than 2Mb/s as entirely satisfactory. I have been told that the service into the exchange is less than sparkling, and I live in hope that sooner or later BT might just get around to doing something about it.
But I'm not holding my breath...

I live in a semi-rural area about 6 miles from the centre of a major city.

There is no cable - so cannot use that.
I have a BT line paying for up to 8Mb but get about 820K download speeds.
This is fine for I-tunes but useless for streaming.
I trialled a 3G "mobile" internet which proved useless with i-tunes and could only get 396k Max 3G speeds (advertised as HSDPA).

I'll then have to pay this extra tax of 50p a month without any benefit as I do not expect my copper line to be replaced for decades.

Something needs to be enforced to ensure that there is a minimum playing field for everyone rather than those of us having to live with limited download speeds paying over the odds for a service we will never get

According to the survey of European Competitive Telecommunication Association (ECTA) has reported that a signifiance slowdown in broadband sector is seen around europe. This slow down is from 26% to 14% of growth over half year period. Moreover ECTA warned that the position would be even risk if regulators don't actively act to the competition and open markets.