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The 100Meg from Virgin Media has been known about for sometime, but its worth remembering that their 50Meg service is already available to around half the countries homes. Alas since it costs some £28 a month, not many have as yet purchased it - we love broadband but only while it is cheap.

I am sure many readers of your blog will be experiencing deja vu over all of this, almost two years ago the same speeches/plans were appearing.

If the UK is to be a clear leader in broadband infrastructure we have a long way to go even if you just consider the EU. The Netherlands sits in an ideal position with its wide (90%+) coverage of cable products, something that we will never see in the UK.

At end of the day, we need to spend another £2.5bn on top of the £530m to ensure something that will be a clear leader. Alas the reality is that a metric will be derived that means we come top of a league table, and politicians say job well done. The UK does not need a TV make-over show for its comms infrastructure, it needs a proper job doing with real money being spent.

I thought after the big share deal sell off, that British Telecom (later renamed to BT) became a public limited company rather than a Gov't department (part of the post office).

Doesn't that mean that any expansion to superfast broadband will be the choice of the board of directors of that company and nothing at all to do with Gov't? Or has BT been re-nationalised by Labour while we weren't looking?

We'll only get superfast broadband if BT or Virgin Media (or other ISPs) think it's a commercially viable prospect and can sell it for the right price.

That's before we consider the problem that IPv4 addresses are due to be exhausted in 2011/2012 so any new infrastructure will need to use IPv6 for the end-user rather than just on the backbone.

I think we all know what is going to happen in the UK with the 'superfast broadband' promised...just as every other time we have been promised this. All that will happen is the cities will be cherry picked by groups of broadband companies who will compete on the same turf. Much of the UK will be untouched by any changes,and rural areas will still be struggling with outdated and antiquated copper wired technology.

Free enterprise does not work when it comes to providing national services. They are there to make a profit,not provide a social service.Sometimes the government has to do things for the public good,and this is one such time. But they won't.

A sense of deja vu is right - as with any politician, he loves to take credit for something that he has really had nothing to do with. Labour loved to do this with their spin and announcing things several times over.

We, with the rest of the village, live about three miles from the local exchange. The length of copper involved means that regardless of the capability of the exchange we only get something between 512Kbs and 1 Mbps - on a good day we get 750 Kbps. Delivery of high[er] speed means improving the three miles of cable. Some locally are wanting to get the exchange upgraded without realising this. I would guess we are not alone.

I hope they hurry up and get the superfast broadband sorted across London, I live in Crouch End and can only get about 1.5 MBS, but less than half a mile up the road in Muswell Hill they have got Virgin 50MBS.

I live in a small country town pop 2,000. In my opinion pigs will fly when Virgin broadband arrives here. Only, perhaps, through Virgin using BT lines. Certainly not through their own cables. I use a USB mobile broadband stick, slow, slow, slow.

2Mbps by 2015, maybe half the country with the option of 50-100MBps by 2012. Sounds great till you realise that those "fastest broadband speeds in the world" are today's speeds for other countries but we won't be getting that for a few years.

Japan are already trialling 1Gbps at the moment. Shouldn't we be aiming higher like this so that when it arrives we don't have another network that is so far behind the cutting edge.

Living as I do in one of the Not Spots (SW Basingstoke)The best I can get without Fibre is about 1.2 Mbps. Deadly when Microsoft updates or any evening.

Tomorrow I get BT infinity at a cost of about £30 a month. I am informed my speed will shoot up to a staggering 15.6 Mbps. Hardly the best in the world and no where near the 100Mbps I read about. In fact not even as fast as the standard broadband that other people in the UK can get if lucky enough to live near to an exchange. But I have to pay for Fibre to get it.

While the UK has these critically bad speeds and unfair charging structure, then it will continue to see the information economy being driven by other parts of the world with much better speeds.

It's crazy that Europeans and especially the British have to have calls answered by people thousands of miles away in places like Mumbai which have very fast broadband speeds, because we just cannot get the speeds in this country.

They will be claiming credit for the sun rising each day soon!

Those "fast broadband speeds" will only be for those who live in big cities, just as at the moment. Those outside can go whistle (or get homing pigeons, it's faster). And the government will claim it as a 'success' because all of their cronies will have the faster speeds. No change, then.

I'm sorry, Mr Osborne, but to describe 2Mbps as "superfast" shows an incredible lack of technical knowledge. The last time I considered 2Mbps to be super fast was around 2003-2004.

2Mbps is, quite frankly, the bare minimum. Any less and you're going to struggle enormously to fully enjoy todays media and plugin rich internet.

Today Mr Osborne announced the Government would be rolling out new superfast cars to over 13 million homes across the UK. The new Romanian built Dacia Sandero is capable of speeds...

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Broadband for all is a fine idea. Problem isit comes with caveats. I receive my Broadband from Virgin Media bundled with my cable TV subscription. I pay approx £31 per month, including about £10 pm for a Virgin land line I never use and do not want. However taking the package without the landline cost more. I think service providers have to be more responsive to customers needs and not create pricing structures that force customers to take unwanted services.

Broadband for all is a fine idea. Problem is it comes with conditions. I receive my Broadband from Virgin Media bundled with my cable TV subscription. I pay approx £31 per month, including about £10 pm for a Virgin land line I never use and do not want. However taking the package without the landline cost more. I think service providers have to be more responsive to customers needs and not create pricing structures that force customers to take unwanted services.

At this pace the UK will end up as a third world country in technological terms. We are already behind much of the world and I regualy speak with people around the globe that consider my 2.5Mbps as laughable. I agree with an earlier post that said it will only be major cities who will get these super fast speeds. I live in a large town where virgin is unavailable and theres no sign of BT Infinity ariving any time soon. I am unable to stream in HD as my speed is not fast enough. HD is no longer the future it is now. downloadable content over the physical product is not the future it is now, so my broadband speed is already inferior

On those with BT Infinity (other providers do offer the FTTC services - an often overlooked thing, just they are not the big household names), the estimates from checkers are generally a lot lower than what people connect at.

The Openreach engineer on the install day should test the connection speed, and let you know what it is. It is not uncommon to see people being connection with an estimate of 15Meg, and getting 38Meg or more.

Whilst a number of the comments made thus far are certainly technically correct both they and Rory seem to be missing the key point, particularly on the question of cost. It is not just the monthly cost for the service which needs to be looked at in isolation, it is also what it does that counts.

I use Voip and Skype quite a lot for communications so, my fixed BT land line which you have to have for broadband wasn't being used that much but the fixed monthly costs and a few calls still had to be paid for. In the end, I cut my bills in half by combining my broadband and telephone with my ISP.

The point being is that broadband and especially high speed broadband, can deliver more services "down the pipe" such as TV, TV on Demand, Films, Video calling and Video Conferencing, Internet Games Playing. The public will decide on the 'value' to them in their own terms and based upon their current spend on the Internet, Sky, renting films, going to the cinema so, the 'price' cannot be judged upon one factor alone and it is, dare I say it, foolish to do so.

Many of these uses of a 'bigger broadband pipe' will be 'disruptive' to current business models, ad free TV on demand is a rather obvious one, if I were a Media owner, I think that I would want to buy into the Fibre roll-out right now, the long term income for its use should be quite good. Shame there are no large scale Pension funds left, it would be a very sound medium/long term investment for their pensioners without the necessity of an immediate 'pay back' which media companies need year on year.

I don't know if it is technically possible, but if fibre optic cable could be installed on telephone poles instead of being buried, the country could be hooked up to superfast Broadband sooner.

Whilst the current 50Mbps offering from Virgin may be expensive for some, it is worth looking into as it comes with some nice little extras, like 100 free photo prints a month.

The trouble with superfast broadband in Britain compared to other countries is partly due to a far less dense population spread. The other problem is that whilst they are trailing these fast speeds in other countries it is only in the cities that these trails occur. People maybe just need to accept that you cannot have everything your own way. If you live in the countryside you need to accept the limitations. No one tries to set up a watermill without a river, so why try and run an online business with slow internet.

I think this is all just an advertising gimmick. It all depends on where you live, how close you are to the local exchange and the nearest box and how many people share it with you. During the world cup and the Chilian Miners rescue, it was almost impossible here to do normal tasks like check email, read the news(never mind watch it) online. I seriously doubt this new fibre optic cable thing is going to make one iota of difference to the end user and only to the companies involved in touting it out. My town isnt on any of BTs lists, I dont mind, I cant afford it anyway, but there is no way I am falling for BTS infinity ads and requests to register my interest for £20! or so said the email. If it comes and is cheap enough, great, if the current bb gets left in place when it does, even better, maybe then we can get some of this mythical 8mg speed we are supposed to get, but in the mean time, its pie in the sky and I suspect fibre will actually be short lived and wont live up to anything like the spiel touted around, bit like mobile networks and this digital tv lark, so far, none of it has lived up to its expectations,and here, it depends which way the wind blows as to whether we get a tv signal or whether we can send or receive a text message, so sorry, but I am highly sceptical of this new technology that is supposed to be so brilliant.

IPTV due to launch next year simply won't function without decent broadband connections - by BTBusiness is, at best 4Mbps despite the premium price.

Heaven help us when IPTV's are launched - It'll be back to the bad old days when you had to get all your important work done before they woke up in the East Coast of the US and logged in.

quote: "Combine that with the support we are giving in rural areas ..."
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Isn't this something the ´óÏó´«Ã½ are paying for? Does Mr Cameron think that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ is just another government department?

Fibre broadband has been available for years, but there has been no incentive for BT to roll it out across the country, as the cost to do this is going to be in the £Billions!

No sooner they start than the government tells them they have to open up their fibre network to other providers, preventing them from getting a return on their investment!

Broadband is the same as 3G mobiles. Great coverage in centralised areas but in the "sticks" you don't get anything near as good a service.

4G is already being rolled out in some countries and I imagine it will be here too to much fanfare.

The digital divide gets bigger between the rich and poor, the people who can get fast broadband and those stuck on dial up or half meg ADSL.

What is needed is more equality, not just more speed to the fortunate city dwellers.

Isn’t great, that faster broadband progress is being made for future system. This article implies that the government should be funding it or at least more….. Reality is we are in deep sovereign debt and will not be flush with money for a few years… but at least the government has found some spare money to put in….Anyway the more the commercial world uses their own initiatives for projects the quicker we will see them flourish… not waiting for hand outs which has helped us to get we are (broke)!!

Is it going to be 2Mb for all - or UP TO 2 Mb for all?

It's all very well to dismiss some of the money as "licence fee payer's cash", but who took the decision to spend it on this - the ´óÏó´«Ã½ or the government?

The credit for the decision should go to whoever was responsible for it.

#21"I suspect fibre will actually be short lived and wont live up to anything like the spiel touted around"

Fibre is the future as a single strand can in theory carry a million channels, far more than radio frequencies.

Rustic dwellers moan but it has to be said that they are often affluent and have chosen rustic life, with huge cost savings on property.

All too often, decision makers just don't "get" the importance of speed online. If you want to view a PDF and have to wait for it to download and open you are at a disadvantage to the user who can get that information instantly. I can see that mattering in stock trading, and journalism.

BTW, I checked whether cable can be strung above ground, and it can but is vulnerable and very expensive to fix, so burying is probably best.

I thought I had read on the Directgov site that for the four trials there is an amount of £5-10 Million each, with a total amount of £530 Million for rural broadband overall? So I am now a little confused by this article.

Having Virgin Media and BT Infiniti is all well and good, however I know that they will apply 'network management' on your broadband if it considers you to be a heavy user, i.e. restrict your bandwidth during peak hours to almost a trickle so that streaming movies, etc becomes impossible. It is in their small print. What's the point of having high bandwidth if you can't use it?

David Cameron boasts of helping rural areas with broadband, but there's no sign of it here in hie constituency. I live about six miles from Witney and my best current broadband speed is 0.5 Mbps.

"I hope they hurry up and get the superfast broadband sorted across London, I live in Crouch End and can only get about 1.5 MBS"

Count yourself lucky, we share in Canary Wharf and the best we can do is about 110KB/sec most of the time. 110KB/sec in the middle of one of the most connected areas in Europe. Spot the problem?

BT stands for Bad Technology and 21CN should be renamed 18CN.

FYI yes our experience is a massive technical failure on BT's part (I do this for a living).

Also virgin gave up rolling out networks years ago, if you don't have a VM connection now you never will.

Can the media in this country please stop perpetuating myths about the quality of connections in this country. Even in our large datacenters we don't compare.

It's taken me nearly 5 minutes to sign in to comment, and that with "up to 10mbs" Vigin cable. It's going very slowly again, under 1mbs this evening.How will broadband providers cope in this brave new world of Camerons when they can't manage the modest speeds they advertise today?

Another story about fast broadband sweeping the country and people saying that it's just the cities that are benefiting.

At least some areas have the choice between BT and Virgin, here in Milton Keynes we don't.

It's true there is a FTTH trial going on due to the long telephone lines in MK, but I'm living in one of the newest estates in MK (still half to be built) and we're 1 mile from the nearest FTTH trialists...and we're not included.

Very frustrating when all the other exchanges (Stony, Newport Pagnell, Wolverton, Shenley and Bletchley are to be FTTC by the end of the year).

The change is coming, but like some people's broadband speeds in MK, it's very slow...so yes there are many rural areas being left out, but even some of the new towns are lagging behind London, Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham etc etc etc...

Rory Cellan-Jones.

"..by the end of 2012, "over 13 million homes and businesses - including some in our rural areas - will be hooked up to some of the fastest broadband speeds in the world"."

my, my, that's a big job to get done in just over 24 months. right now we're only .

like twistywillow, I think it's just another gimmick.

Its all a little bit late. They were talking about the brave new world of optical fibres on programs like Tomorrows world back in the early 80s and most of our broadband still uses copper cable. I blame the privatisation of the telephone infrastructure. Fibre optics should have been installed at a loss by a government owned or not for profit enterprise on behalf of the government. For the Greater good of the country. Infrastructure should be controlled by the country, not by the free market.

I think fibre optic cable would be too brittle to be hang overhead.

ADSL is nothing more than a bad joke. I live in the middle of Gateshead by the river and the best Virgin can offer me is 1-2Mb/s at peak time, despite the fact I signed up for their higher end broad band service. To add to that, Virgin managed to disconnect my phone line instead of activate it when we moved in 2 months ago and supply us with a modem that is barely capable of staying in sync with the line. This is most embarrassing given that my mum has "Tesco Value" broadband in some remote poorly cabled council estate that is only half the price outperforms this!

Based on this alone, I have little hope for anything based on ADSL. I have better speeds from my 3G dongle! Cable on the other hand (which surprisingly was also provided by Virgin when I lived across the river) is another kettle of fish.

As for the government being involved (or pretending), I'd rather not. The service is bad enough as it is and if New Labour and Thatcher is anything to go by, the government will only make it worst (while finding an excuse to tax it).

Talk of improving the broadband infrastructure is nothing more than a bit of hot air in my opinion.

"Re 37: I think fibre optic cable would be too brittle to be hang overhead."
Its all down to cable design. In many countries optical fibre cables have been strung on poles for years. They are of course more vulnerable to weather and attack from animals etc, but they are cheaper to roll out and in rural areas they may be the quickest and cheapest way if they used the existing poles. However there are planning rules in the UK that encourage buried cables.
The fibres themselves are quite strong with a breaking strain in excess of 100,000 pounds per sq inch (but they are small!)

Broadband - impressions on the current technology:

DSL Max (up to 8MB on 20CN exchanges) is better, more reliable and far more stable than ADSL2+ (up 24M on 21CN exchanges) is yet - on the same exchanges, on the same lines. I have seen this set of experiences duplicated in several parts of the country.

ADSL2+ has also got far less reliable and less stable since the mid year. It is my suspicion that the new update to rate optimising software is not well suited to real BT lines. I have seen lines that were providing 6.5M-7M down (DSL Max) slump to as low as 1M down - even seen .5M and zero M! with a consistent 0.4 M up - (and BT are continuing to struggle to fix their problem on ADSL2+ CN21) Sorry for being a bit technical.

I suspect that the rate optimisation software that BT Wholesale is currently using is at fault either directly or because BT Wholesale (who provide the equipment for many suppliers including BT) haven't been trained to use the software properly or in the worst case it was misspecified.

What seems to happen is that the software management system decides that the line is too noisy to support a rate and tries to lower the rate to get a more reliable service. However, unlike DSL Max, with ADSL2+ this is a one way process that can only be reset by the engineers/bt faults - whereas just reconnecting fixed the problem with DSL Max. This is basically a self inflicted technical and commercial disaster for BT and they need to urgently get a grip!

I work for Openreach, as an Engineer, and we are constantly being battered with questions about whens and hows of superfast broadband, the problem is money, while people who live in the 'sticks' do get some very slow, if any speeds at all, the actual cost, and man hours required to provide every household in Britain with a fast speed is ridiculous, while we may not win any speed contests, it is worth bearing in mind, many of the top ten BB speed countries actually dont bother with any kind of service to rural areas! i have to agree with the comments in the threads, if you move or choose to live in these areas there are certain things which you should consider

also to answer your question, Fibre can be provided overhead, but just think of the amount of telegraph poles which BT own to fibre everyone would probably bankrupt the company! Again, this all comes down to cost

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I think Virgin and ALL the cp's should be forced to provide service under the uso (universal service obligation) just like BT is forced to do.
BT have to provide a line to a remote hut in the outer hebrides if required and all for around £120. BT are also forced into having their competitors equipment in BT exchanges.
When the playing filed is levelled then we might see a national roll out, otherwise why should BT bother spending the money if the likes of Virgin can come along and cherry pick all the profitable parts of the network leaving all the unprofitable bits for BT to service.
Ofcom has well and truly messed up the national telephone network/industry and like all administrations Ofcoms only real interest is it's self.

"Also virgin gave up rolling out networks years ago, if you don't have a VM connection now you never will."

Not always true like with BT you have to show it will be profitable for them to dig. I had 4 months of waiting when I moved into a new build area but they dug it and installed it all based on more people around me signing up.

We will never get the UK hooked up Until our Government values its IT policies enough to give it to someone other than the Department of Painting and Running About while we are at it lets merge the Secretary of state for Business, Chancellor of the exchequer and Agriculture and with the Olympics coming do you really think they have there eye on the ball. Previous governments can't even get a grip on their own IT projects let alone handle a market warped by BT a provider so large it has to be told to allow the other kids to play and is forced to behave in other ways like an arm of the state providing lines where nobody else will (just like the post office and the trains)

BT is nothing more than a one legged donkey in a shark tank the big player is being ripped apart and expecting it to run superfast broadband to areas it is not profitable to do so is such a dated way of thinking. lets face it could you imagine David Cameron telling Richard Branson he had to unbundle his lines like BT and let Sky put there broadband through his lines.

If BT is not the state lap dog anymore and you want the Roll outs to go ahead the government is going to have to sweeten the deal for them. This does not have to cost massive amounts of cash though you are going to have to incentives this somehow but making it less costly to obtain digging permits and making the process of performing the works easier would go a long way to boosting the uptake of companies to do the work and might after a little re training soak up some of the construction jobs from the shaky housing markets.

These "trendy" Computer things are not going to go away telecoms is rapidly becoming the next new essential utility and timescales of 2015 to roll out pitiful speeds just won't do.

As always there are lots of issues here. The first is that much as we love Broadband we wont pay for it, and the services we will pay for run over the top e.g. music downloads (money for this doesnt go to the network operator or Service Provider). Bad news they take most of the cost of providing the service but get little of the revenue.

Secondly getting high DSL or fibre access speeds is only the start (Journalists and Regulators please note, as explaining this repeatedly is annoying). These networks are heavily contended either over the outer core network or at the Broadband Access Server, which means if everybody wants service you may get as little as 200Kbps even on a super fast link. See the whole issue with people not paying meaning you share costs over too many user subscriptions.

Another issue is the cost of backhaul, finally thanks to the EU regulator (take a bow Ms Kroes) and in the teeth of Ofcom we now have duct unbundling. This should mean that operators can get access to BT fibre ducts and ideally dark fibre. Dark fibre means the operator leases the fibre not very expensive UK bandwidth. Since the incremental cost of putting equipment at 10Gbps versus 1 Gbps is minimal this should change things. Now a thousand customers might share 10 Gbps not 144 Mbps. Shame the ISP cant afford to serve all this high bandwidth traffic at the prices the customer is paying. However Interconnect standards such as the new UK NICC Active Line Access standard may allow community networks an easy way to connect to established service providers which may help DIY solutions.

Australia and New Zealand are in the process of spending lots of tax payers money making super fast Broadband happen. But (and I do work in this industry) I am not convinced that we need ultra high speed broadband in rural areas more than schools, hospitals and new power stations.

You really can string Fibre from telephone poles, if you dont believe me go and look at Japan where this is done (people even cheekily stick their own private fibres up hoping nobody notices). Will Rural Britain put up with a rats nest of overhead wiring just for broadband, who knows. Finally the reason that BT have to unbundle and not Virgin (at this time) is that they were given the infrastructure by the UK Government at privatisation. Virgin bought their infrastructure from a large number of (strangely) bankrupt cable operators who had built it at vast expense sadly just before the internet was a big thing (Virgin now have a debt to service because of this, BT don't).

I'm with Virgin, I've been with them since I first got hooked up (or on!) to the internet in the early 90's. I've taken them with me to 6 different addresses in that time. In terms of general service, I can't fault them, they've always been a pretty good ISP, in my experience. I have their "up to" 20Mbps service, although tests show I only get an average of around 4Mbps. This is actually adequate for my needs: yesterday a photographer sent me 1.5GB file, which took me 15 minutes to download, hardly a disruption to my working day, and still considerably faster than if he'd used a motorcycle courier (as he would have done a few years ago).

So, in terms of the service I get, I'm happy. What I'm not happy about is paying for the service I don't get! Why should I pay for 20Mbps, when the best I can get is around a fifth or a quarter of that? I would much rather be paying for my ACTUAL usage, in the same way I pay for other utilities, like my gas, electricity, or phone. The whole payment structure of broadband needs to be looked at.

I like the principle of ´óÏó´«Ã½ funded by the public and free of adverts, (long live the fee!), but it is interesting that the phrase "´óÏó´«Ã½ Licence fee" is used by Rory. There does seem to be a view within the ´óÏó´«Ã½ that because the ´óÏó´«Ã½ are the licensing authority (TV tax collector), and that this is the main source of their income, that the licence is their private subscription fund. It is of course not and has been used for digital switchover, s4c and even I think I'm right in saying channel 4 received some for its own digital changes. Therefore any savings after digital switching are not to go to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ but are part of the UK Govt Tax pot and so available for whatever it is decreed (broadband rollout).If anyone is in any doubt about it being a tax, look at it this way... the amount is set by government and the avoidance of it will result in criminal proceeedings.

Superfast ???
This useless government - as with most politicians who have zero technical understanding - think that 2Mbps OK and 50Mbps is superfast.
Why not follow the lead of South Korea where they plan to rollout 1Gbps (yes that is 1000Mbps) within a few years.

Colin #49.

"Why not follow the lead of South Korea where they plan to rollout 1Gbps (yes that is 1000Mbps) within a few years."

or indeed Hong Kong where it's a reality already. :-)

I'm tired of paying for services I don't use (ie, my Virgin landline required for broadband but never used in a decade of service). I work on the Internet extensively in my profession and frankly, the thought of spending more time glued to a computer (or TV) screen each night is not appealing any more. 10 years at £11 per month. That's a holiday in Barbados I'll never take.

Last week, I cancelled my Virgin TV services, broadband and (pointless) telephone line. I'll save £35 per month, plus the license fee which I can now opt out of paying. I've done a deal with a neighbour to wi-fi onto their broadband connection for £10/month. I'll use the money saved to buy music, books and films while I wait for GBPS services to become available, allied with the proper unbundling of services which has been promised for years and never materialised.

I'm looking forward to reading more books, listening to the radio, watching films and adding to my music collection.

A little bit of careful planning will allow me to use my office broadband connection, should I need to upload/download any particularly large files for use at home.

So stop thinking there's no alternative, people! Vote with your feet, or think of an innovative way to obtain your services collectively (as I have with my neighbours, who enjoy lower bills because of my subsidy). That's the only way the so-called 'Service' providers will stop and listen to the public - they certainly don't listen to complaints.

On the subject of using telephone poles, surely there's a Gigabit-per-second wi-fi solution in a box that could be nailed to every other lamp post or telegraph pole, drawing current from the telephone system or lamp post and broadcasting to X number of properties or across a certain radius? (and being "wi-fi daisy-chained" to the next box until close enough to an exchange). Even if your house needed some kind of external aerial fitted (lots of people have satellite dishes installed, for comparison) in order to receive the best signal - Now that, I'd pay for - it could become a national yet local wi-fi hotspot service for your home, or ipod, phone, laptop...etc while on the move.

And don't even get me started on the 'A' of 'ADSL'. Grrrr!

Perhaps WiMax and the likes of protocols IEEE 802.16m (up to 1 Gbit/s fixed speeds) and beyond are the answer to slow-spots around the country. Run a single fibre line in and then create a giant hotspot, Bob's your uncle.

@EnglishNeoCon

Problem with your solution is that with many ISP's, it is against their T&C's to resell the connection (essentially what your neighbour is doing for you).

Plus, your neighbour must be quite naive. Again, because of the ISP's T&C's, any illegal activity that is done on that connection is the account holders responsibility. While I am not suggesting that you personally break the law, there is no way in hell I would share my internet connection with a neighbour as I do not want to be responsible for that persons actions.

And I'm pretty sure your boss (or your works IT dept / ISP) wouldn't be happy with you using their internet to download large things.

@53 - I hear what you're saying but...

A) I'm very good friends with my neighbour. They're not naiive, they're skint like the rest of us, and welcome the reduction in their bill that my tenner per month will provide.
B) I wouldn't break the law on their connection, or my own, for that matter, for the reasons outlined above
C) Re broken Ts & Cs - what they don't know can't hurt them - we're only talking two laptops on one connection as opposed to one, in a terrace of houses (ISP: "You're sharing your connection" / Neighbour: "No, I lent my laptop to my neighbour")
D) I'm my own boss, so I pay the bill and waste (my own) time doing this

Seriously though, perhaps I am in a fairly unique position, but the principle remains valid - don't put up with shoddy service ... come up with an alternative solution; the Internet is a great resource for researching other ways to achieve this type of goal.

Everyday thousands and thousands of people pack themselves like cattle onto over crowded trains for their daily commute, everyday thousands and thousands of people all over the country get in there car to go to work on overcrowded roads. Each journey to work can be in excess of an hour for a large number of commuters adding to climate change and over burdening an already creaking infrastructure in the UK that cannot cope much longer without significant investment. And what do a significant percentage of these commuters do when they get to work? Sit in front a PC using everyday applications and a telephone.. For businesses up and down the country, for central and local government as well the cost of providing desk space, heating, power, lighting just for someone to sit at their pc to churn out there daily productivity is huge.

Yet today the technology is there for a large number of these commuters to work from home, the benefits to businesses are huge, the benefits to the environment are huge, the benefits to the individual quality of life are huge.

A number of very large enterprises have trialled providing services this way to their users and seen the benefits on a small scale. Today we have the technology to free desktop services to users from the typical office environment, we can provide a virtualised and secure desktop environment to a remote home worker, we can even provide them there same desk phone and extension number. To take it a stage further as a business we do not even have to provide the pc anymore or the associated hardware support costs, as users can use their own pc. This technology is here today and can provide significant savings to a business running a typical office environment.

Yet the main thing that holds companies back from moving users out of there office and into the home is the broadband infrastructure is lacking and wanting across large parts of the country, users in large towns and cities with poor bandwidth to the internet, latency and poor service availability, that is not even taking into account rural users.

The costs of providing FTTH (Fibre To The Home) or FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) services to the vast majority of the UK are huge, but how much will have to be spend upgrading the road/rail network just to cope with the growth of commuters in the next 10/20 years? What is the cost to the environment from all this commuting to work just to sit in front of a pc all day? The only way we will get the infrastructure in this country to do this is with significant investment.

Now if I was to say to 20% of the staff in a typical office you can work from home now, you don’t need to come into the office every day, but the down side is you need to provide your own pc from this approved list and pay £100/month for a business class internet connection, how many would say no? You know what I like being treated like cattle everyday on that overcrowded train, I enjoy paying £4,000 a year for my season ticket to get to work just to sit here all day in front of this pc.

The business models are there to make it work, people will pay more for broadband if they can see real benefits such as being able to work from home. What is needed is the seed investment to get it started and that can only come from central government. Having a good broadband infrastructure is not just about being able to watch the latest Harry Potter movie streamed in HD to my PC, it can be so much more.

Secr3t,

Working from home sounds great, but what about the other infrastructure required at home.

You mention the PC but are people home PC's up to the specification required by business in terms of RAM, processor speed, security, etc etc. How secure is said home PC. Does the worker have a pleasant working environment, ie, healthy chair, enough space, lighting, etc etc. Stationary. Telephone lines. Insurance (just in case the cat knocks the workers coffee over office equipment). Utilities costs.

I'd also like to know how much the company should pay the employee for renting a room/equipement in their home (to make an office) for 8 hours a day, or do you expect that to come for free?

I live in financial district of London. Not only I get a pathetic speed of 0.5mbps but also pay a premium price for my broadband service. Reason: BT has not yet opened the poplar exchange to other service providers and the exchange is too busy 24*7. Most of us are fed-up of false promises made by BT and our government. When ofcom and otelo can't fixes issues in places like canary wharf, forget rural areas. Citizens living in remote districts will never get to experience broadband in their life time!

With EU target of 50% to have access to 100Meg by 2020, I presume todays Virgin Media news, and launch in Spring 2011 of FTTP by Openreach which should mean 100Meg to just over 50% means politicians can tick the 'well done box'

Next thing is the other EU 2020 targets, and our own USC for 2015.

57. At 10:28am on 27 Oct 2010, sri wrote:

I live in financial district of London. Not only I get a pathetic speed of 0.5mbps but also pay a premium price for my broadband service. Reason: BT has not yet opened the poplar exchange to other service providers and the exchange is too busy 24*7. Most of us are fed-up of false promises made by BT and our government. When ofcom and otelo can't fixes issues in places like canary wharf, forget rural areas. Citizens living in remote districts will never get to experience broadband in their life time!"


Judging from this, the poplar exchange was opened up 2 years ago:

Personally I think it's incredible that we are wasting money on Trident when it has been said that 2.5 billion pounds of investment by the Government could get the entire country up to 100mbps connections.

We don't need trident as we are close allies with the United States and they have a strong nuclear deterent, so why not invest the money in something which would genuinely benefit a large proportion of the population.

60. At 12:55pm on 27 Oct 2010, soton1990 wrote:

"Personally I think it's incredible that we are wasting money on Trident when it has been said that 2.5 billion pounds of investment by the Government could get the entire country up to 100mbps connections. "

CaptainHulaHoop said,
"llu, sub llu, vllu, £2.5bn for fttc/fttp for next 5 yrs to cover 65% of uk "


Where are figures to go up against CaptainHulaHoops? ;)

During 2009 LEAs across the country rolled out fibre-optic broadband to remote rural schools. The one in our village went right past our house/office where my husband and I run a small business that relies on the internet. When we heard that BT were installing fibre-optic we (and several other people and businesses in the village) asked if it was possible to pay to be connected to the cable. The answer was no. Apparently there is a deal between BT and the LEA to provide the cable that precludes anyone else using it. To my mind this is completely ridiculous. The school is only open from 8.30am to 3.30pm Monday to Friday and is closed for months of school holidays. At the very least the cable could be made available when the school isn't using it. It also begs the question as to why exactly a rural primary school requires 50meg broadband. If the government is really serious about providing fast broadband to rural communities it could start by making the LEAs share the fast broadband already put into schools at tax/rate payers expense.

62. At 1:53pm on 27 Oct 2010, CasFMcDW wrote:

During 2009 LEAs across the country rolled out fibre-optic broadband to remote rural schools. The one in our village went right past our house/office where my husband and I run a small business that relies on the internet. When we heard that BT were installing fibre-optic we (and several other people and businesses in the village) asked if it was possible to pay to be connected to the cable. The answer was no. Apparently there is a deal between BT and the LEA to provide the cable that precludes anyone else using it. To my mind this is completely ridiculous. The school is only open from 8.30am to 3.30pm Monday to Friday and is closed for months of school holidays. At the very least the cable could be made available when the school isn't using it. It also begs the question as to why exactly a rural primary school requires 50meg broadband. If the government is really serious about providing fast broadband to rural communities it could start by making the LEAs share the fast broadband already put into schools at tax/rate payers expense."

OK, you asked BT and they said no, what reason did they give?

Did you ask the LEA's, if so, what was their response?

lies lies lies.
"superfast" is gigabit speeds imho and fast is 50+Mbs so the 2Mbs being talked about is at best standard and more like sub standard, I live in a rural area and get 5Mbs.

to watch HD video you need something like 12mbs so that is what we should currently be at. super HD takes 48+mbs and that will be available in a year or so(standards already agreed) then there is the one above that which needs Gigabit speeds to stream and that is only a couple of years more again so around 2015 when our government wants the 2mb for everyone actually achieved. only 1/50th of what's needed then.

according to the propaganda the government is spewing we are and will be a leader in the digital economy, tell me how are we supposed to do that with the slowest internet compared to our rivals in this market? south Korea annihilate us in speed and access terms along with most of developed Asian and bits of the under developed nations. if we compare our net speeds to war zones we are doing well but when compared to stable country's.

If I set the target it would be more like cities at 50Mb by 2012 and rural areas at least 8Mb(more like 20+ in towns and the 8 for villages/hamlets) in the same time period with slower wifi or ad hoc for the really remote areas(like highlands and islands).
then look to get London and some other major areas to 1Gb/s as soon as possible 2015-2020 with rural areas keeping up in ratio terms at least.

In response to no.62 CasFMcDW

Most of us live surprisingly close to some existing fibre. Alas this is invariably carrying a private network, with the firm/school/lea/council paying accordingly. These fibres invariably connect one private network to another, which may lead out to the internet, but via various corporate firewalls.

Fibre is not something you just tap into like a water main. The network design needs to take into account all of this before it is laid in the ground. It is this process of splitting a big fibre to somewhere locally, and connecting it to all the homes in the area that makes FTTP more expensive than FTTC.

In some areas councils (e.g. Digital Region South Yorkshire) are exploiting a FTTC roll-out that they part funded to link all their premises, with the network being sold to home owners and businesses too. The network was designed and built for this.

56. At 10:19am on 27 Oct 2010, Andy wrote:

"You mention the PC but are people home PC's up to the specification required by business in terms of RAM, processor speed, security, etc etc. How secure is said home PC."

Actually by running the work environment as a virtualised pc it doesn't matter that much if the local pc is insecure as the virtualised PC runs in a separate secure environment, but with a layered approach to security policies it is possible to check that the local pc has the right fixes and Anti-virus installed before it starts and if they are not direct the user to the right websites to fix the issues themselves.

As for the specification of the PC, I did mention having an approved list of hardware users can buy that would meet that need, as not everyone's home pc would meet the requirements agreed. But having said that when we have trialled it most users were enthusiastic about the idea of buying a new pc at reduced cost for home and work use. The cost was cheaper as the pc supplier agreed to the same buy price for the users as the corporate account. Also you can claim for it on yourself assessment tax return as it is for business use.

There will always be those that will say I want paying for the electricity and so on or do not have the space, but for those users they can still commute if they wish, it is not for everyone. But the majority of users that were asked were more than willing to do it as in the long run even providing their own pc and power they still saved a considerable amount of money from there daily commuting costs.

Does Virgin Media actually install any new fibres in residential areas where they weren't available previously?

Secr3t,

My worry is that business will pass on costs they traditionally pay, to their employees. If they're going to pay for these costs, fine, I'm happy with that.

I think both sides should "win". For someone working from home, they should benefit from the lack of commute (time) and travel costs, the employer should benefit from a happier employee (goodwill) and a more reliable employee (not stuck in traffic - productivity).

I think these financial arrangement should be fixed somewhere so an employers cannot take advantage of employees by making them responsible for costs an employer would traditionally have born.

This country, for the win.

Wonder what we are spending the money on.

@ Andy

'The European Union wants to see half of Europe's homes benefiting from 100Mbps broadband by 2020. By the same date it wants 100% of homes to have broadband speeds of at least 30Mbps.

Charlie Ponsonby, chief executive of broadband comparison service Simplifydigital, said it was hard to see where the money will come from for such an ambitious roll-out.

"The UK's broadband infrastructure is much like the railway infrastructure - getting better, but by no means up there with the world leaders. The trouble is, it is likely to cost about £2.5bn to bring us in line with the best in the world," he said.

"We expect the government to continue to make lots of positive noise and encouragement for the private sector, without actually reaching for their chequebook," he added.'


/news/technology-11627507

soton1990,

I really don't see why metropolitan wide wifi networks (WiMax or similar) can't be in place by then. It's mainly only the last mile that's the problem, so string in fibre then WiMax an area - simples :)

We havent got mains gas yet where I live (in sight of the M90). Its only 40 years since North Sea gas was discovered. On that record, we'll get 1Mbs broadband in about 2051.