High Cost of Converting UK To High-Speed Broadband 268
Smivs notes a BBC report on a government study toting up the high cost of converting the UK to high speed broadband, which could exceed £28.8 B ($52.5 B). The options examined range from fiber to the neighborhood, providing 30-100 Mbps connections for a total cost of £5.1 B ($9.3 B), up to individual fiber to the home offering 1 Gbps to each household at a cost of £28.8 B. England's rural areas could pose tough choices. In the lowest-cost, fiber-to-the-neighborhood scenario, "The [group] estimates that getting fiber to the cabinets near the first 58% of households could cost about £1.9 B. The next 26% would cost about £1.4 B and the final 16% would cost £1.8 B."
The cost is peanuts (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: here where we are in the UK we have cable. And HSDPA. And we get much more bandwidth to Marin County or Cupertino, CA than we do to North London, UK, or to the non-cable equipped BT supplied town eight miles away. It isn't just rural areas; the whole BT infrastructure badly needs fixing, and there is no way that the company that until recently said the Internet would be a passing fad is going to do the job properly.
The UK is larger than England... (Score:5, Informative)
I would imagine that the rural areas of Scotland and maybe Wales would pose tougher choices, as they are also in the UK.
BT is ineffectual. (Score:5, Informative)
There is a simple explanation of all this. BT is one of the most inept companies in the UK. I used to work for a DSL provider in the UK and had to deal with BT Wholesale all the time, who, in turn had to deal with BT OpenReach. It's a complete and utter mess thanks to the UK Gov't privatising and stifling actual competition.
Add to that, I've seen cases where a new customer signs up for ADSL. If that customer isn't a BT Broadband customer, BT OpenReach will "mysteriously" switch their copper to the cross-wired/noisy pair and miraculously, the BT Broadband customer will have the quietest lines!
It's a complete mess.
How many times... (Score:1, Informative)
ENGLAND != UK
UK is made up of 4 countries, Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Bloody England.
Fuckwits stop with this England is the UK already, ffs.
Money Grabbing Profiteering Gluttens (Score:3, Informative)
This kind of topic REALLY rubs me the wrong way.
BT work great as a company, but have had no intention (until lately) to upgrade their networks or lay down a decent infrastructure for future improvements.
Work great as a company, much like the Petroleum companies in the UK, they can make a staggering profit, while screwing the consumers.
TeleWest/NTL/Virgin Media have had a solid network from the start, while BT prolly ridiculed them at spending such a vast amount on laying fibre.
Now when the profits are being squeezed & the copper core disadvantages are being highlighted, and every kbps is being used, BT/UK Govt complain of the Upgrade costs that have to be passed onto the consumer.
Needless to say I'm an ADSL, BT "boned" user, (although my ISP IS NOT BT), I only wish they had cable in my area.. :(
Re:overtaken by new technologies (Score:3, Informative)
"the last throes of "old" technology?"
Whilst WiMax offers some great oppurtunities, wired solutions offer several inherent advantages over wireless solutions, including:
1) Data privacy & security can be better ensured using wired connections.
2) Wired bandwidth can always be scaled up massively by laying more/bigger cables. Available bandwidth for WiMax has limitations (unless we can utilize "subspace" of course!).
3) Wired connections have better ping times, quite important for many of the things requiring super-fast broadband (e.g. online software & distributed computing). As optical routing & computing develops, fibre optic networks will incur even less latency; down to levels simply wireless will never be able to acheive (again, neglecting "subspace" connections).
Probably actually aluminum cables (Score:5, Informative)
I can assure you that if there was cable in your area with FTTK, BT would be the very last people in the world to tell you. A Telewest salesman once told me that Telewest liked to employ people who had actually been sacked by BT rather than being made redundant, because redundant employees still believed one day they might get their jobs back, and so didn't want to sell against BT. The attitude Telewest liked was the guy who, in WW2 fighter style, put a little telephone sticker on his car every time he managed to move a business away from BT.
Source and report (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Just do it, already. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:overtaken by new technologies (Score:3, Informative)
Countries are already starting to use WiMax and no doubt when the problems around scaling it are fixed...
Unfortunately, that involves fixing those pesky laws of physics.
Re:Some of us can't even get 2mbps. (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry but that's totally wrong. Although you CAN stream low quality versions over the web, BBC iPlayer is PRIMARILY a peer to peer content delivery service. You can download programmes using the iPlayer download manager and you can even watch them totally offline if you want to. You don't need a fast broadband connection at all. If you want you can queue a load of stuff to download overnight or while you're at work.
So, far from "impossible" as you say - the only thing you don't get are the low quality online versions, which is NOT what iPlayer is all about.
I'm feel sorry now that people are seeing the low quality online videos on the iPlayer website and thinking that they're using iPlayer! I hope everyone realises the extra quality you can get when you download the full resolution version using the iPlayer software.
Re:Cry me a river.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just do it, already. (Score:3, Informative)
paid for satellite with Sky (there might be a few analog boxes left out there, but I think all new ones use digital signals)
You don't need to pay Sky - most of the channels on Astra 28.2E and Eurobird 28.5E (which are where Sky dishes are pointing) are transmitted in the clear and can be picked up with any DVB-S decoder with no subscription. If you want a freeview style off-the-shelf solution then buy a freesat box [freesat.co.uk], otherwise get any random DVB-S receiver (I use a MythTV system with a Hauppauge Nova-S-Plus card).
I don't think there are any British analogue satellite channels any more - not for a good few years.
Just about every new TV comes with support for Freeview
Sadly there still seem to be quite a few PAL CRTs for sale - I have no idea why the sale of these soon to be obsolete sets hasn't been banned.
Re:BBC iPlayer (Flash) stops streaming when paused (Score:3, Informative)
Use the get_iplayer [linuxcentre.net] script to download stuff from iPlayer. Something like: ./get_iplayer --html bbc.html && konqueror bbc.html ./get_iplayer --get 123
(Then look at the index numbers for the program you want)
Re:Why not roll it out in reverse order? (Score:3, Informative)