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."
Just do it, already. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm getting 160kbps on my ADSL connection, and it sucks. Roll me out some fibre, please...
Remember - It's an investment, not a $50bil loss (Score:5, Insightful)
They're missing the point! (Score:5, Insightful)
Fiber can then be laid opportunistically when infrastructure is upgraded, then connected together wherever the demand arises. To spend enormous amounts of tax money debating hypothetical universal options is stupid.
Still cheaper than... (Score:5, Insightful)
Still cheaper than the money they will end up wasting on ID cards.
Re:Remember - It's an investment, not a $50bil los (Score:4, Insightful)
Then there are distributed systems that have pieces all over the place. I once worked on a system that had printers in all of their local offices and sent out batch jobs all over the World. Even with today's fast everything, things would bog down.
But yeah, for just internet surfing, I agree with you.
Re:Remember - It's an investment, not a $50bil los (Score:5, Insightful)
Businesses involved in delivery of digital content? A lot of the big TV names in the UK are offering on demand streaming video via the internet (BBCi, 4OD, ITV, Sky and Virgin). They're now starting to trial streaming of HD content, but with the lack of high speed connection it's not really a viable option for most people, and with HD devices starting to become more popular, pretty soon most people are going to want it.
Re:The cost is peanuts (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course the management at BT will drag their feet on the chance of a handout from the government, just like our "public" transport operators. Blame the WTO! When we had public utilities we were all shareholders, now they've all been privatised yet the public still "subsidises" (funds) them through taxation. How do I get a job like that, one where I'm rewarded for failure?
I recall trying to get ADSL in '97, our exchange was eventually enabled in 2001; an eternity in tech years. By failing to roll-out DSL when it was current generation tech, BT cut their ROI and now the technology is rapidly approaching obselescence. Instead of FTTH, BT are hard at work on rolling out network level malware known as Phorm. The free market wouldn't tolerate such follies so the only conclusion you can draw from all this is that the incumbent is still very much a government sanctioned monopoly.
Universal Fibre? No (Score:4, Insightful)
If all those households adopted fibre, then none of them would pay for ADSL. So you would have to subtract all current ADSL revenues from the pool of money available to fund this infrastructure. That's a big subtraction.
Chances are excellent that most households which already have ADSL would not switch to fibre unless the difference in price is zero (or very nearly zero). Slashdot audience aside, most households are perfectly content with ADSL "last mile" speeds, at least with the present range of Internet-delivered services.
Put these two facts together and one quickly concludes that, if the cost of the infrastructure is accurate, in order to execute the project the vast majority of funding would come from sources other than household rate payers. I really don't see the point given that there are likely much more attractive alternative business cases, including some combination of urban fibre, wireless, and improved copper-based technologies. Which coincidentally is exactly the approach Japan is taking. New high-rise apartment buildings in urban areas tend to get fibre, most of the rest of the country gets progressively faster ADSL, and various wireless data services keep getting more prevalent. Much of Tokyo has cheap 802.11b/g service available, for example, and the mobile telephone carriers keep boosting their data speeds.
Re:Remember - It's an investment, not a $50bil los (Score:5, Insightful)
I work in a UK satellite office, for a US based organisation. We have a VPN to the US servers, tunnelled over the internet. A faster internet connection could halve the time it takes me to do an Subversion update. It could halve the time it takes me to get a large trace file needed to solve a customer's problem. And it would make me less frustrated. All of these mean more productivity.
However, TFA is talking about household internet.
I can think of two ways businesses can benefit.
Firstly, employers of home workers, for the same reasons as office workers benefit.
Secondly, businesses that stand to gain from this are ones that are feeding rich content to home Internet users. Whether it's ad-supported Flash games, e-commerce sites with lots of supporting movies/sounds/images, or retailers of online content (e.g. iTunes), the faster your customer's pipe, the more enjoyable their experience becomes, and the more they're likely to spend (or gain you in ad revenue).
the internet can replace a lot of human travel (Score:5, Insightful)
How about better real time teleconferencing as opposed to sending humans on expensive jet airplanes all over to meetings, or for workers who can work at home instead of physically commuting daily to the office?
Re:Remember - It's an investment, not a $50bil los (Score:2, Insightful)
And why not streaming HD content at a minimum of 20 Mbit/s? Why not 1 Gbit/s? We always know the connection will never be fast enough... but for god's sake... all we ever seem to do here is talk about it. If we just sit here and bitch about how slow it is, and the super wealthy assholes that own stake in the current infrastructure bitch about how fiber rollout will prevent them from buying their third airliner, nothing will ever get done.
It's about time the phone company spent some money for once, instead of just absorbing tax credits and making more money doing the same thing.
Re:Remember - It's an investment, not a $50bil los (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam, Porn, Illegal downloads, Mafia....
Oh the legitimate ones, Remote tech support, daytrading, Online Security analyst.
If you have a online business, you're mental not having it at a central hosting location. It's not worth being able to walk over and touch the server for the price difference of the broadband and support that needs to go with it.
Honestly you can very easily support an online Store over 128K line. I have a friend that supports his 6 figure online income via a cellular connection.
If you ae dealing with high bandwidth content, then what is wrong with your executives being located in a place where you dont already have very high bandwidth availability? You need to physically beat to death your advisors that told you to build 64 miles away from the nearest optical node the telcos have.
Re:Just do it, already. (Score:3, Insightful)
Hello, American.
Re:Remember - It's an investment, not a $50bil los (Score:3, Insightful)
fibre to the street cabinet (Score:2, Insightful)
Digging up streets is extremely expensive and labour-intensive, which is why when all the little local cable companies had built their networks, they had very little money to invest in the actual serice, and they ended up being taken over by what eventually merged into Virgin Media. Virgin Media seem to have no intention in laying cable to areas that never got finished in the initial build 12 years or so ago, and villages and small towns will probably never get cable. Remote rural users won't either.
Even if BT Openreach did run fibre to the street cabinet, there are many lines in rural locations that are many km from the nearest street cabinet, and wouldn't be able to get much better service if the DSLAM were relocated closer to their premises, and BT Openreach are hardly likely to install fibre to a new cabinet and install a DSLAM that is only going to serve 10 houses in a remote hamlet.
Re:Just do it, already. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The cost is peanuts (Score:4, Insightful)
As Portugal is already ahead of the UK in any broadband ranking [itif.org] and is already deploying a nation-wide fiber optic network that will offer 100Mbit/s connectivity in any domestic connection [diarioeconomico.sapo.pt] then maybe, just maybe, you could not only get your facts straight but also avoid sounding like an idiot with all those racist remarks.
By the way, I'm Portuguese and I already pay 19 euros a month for an unlimited, 8Mbit/s connection.
Re:Just do it, already. (Score:1, Insightful)
Britain has had Digital TV for years now. Free over the air digital in the form of Freeview, paid for satellite with Sky (there might be a few analog boxes left out there, but I think all new ones use digital signals), cable from Virgin (same caveat as Sky). The only issue we have here is the big digital switch-over which is going to happen across the country in the next 4 years.
Just about every new TV comes with support for Freeview, with Panasonic even rolling out a very nice model with support for Freesat (free HD over satellite)
Re:Just do it, already. (Score:3, Insightful)
Because some people might want to buy them who already own set top boxes?
Why would you want a PAL tuner in a TV that is plugged into a set top box, given that the STB should be connected by SCART, not UHF...
Who cares, it's not up to the government to stop people buying obsolete things.
Actually, it is part of the government's job to stop companies misleading people into buying stuff that will very soon be useless. At the very least they should mandate that big "This TV will not be able to receive broadcast TV in a few months" stickers be put on them. Not everyone is well informed about the current state of the digital switchover - I imagine that quite a few people still buy PAL TVs with absolutely no idea that they will cease to be useful (without a set top box) within months.
We simply don't have "boondocks" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:e pluribus unim (Score:3, Insightful)
UK supply is actually 230V +/- 10% in line with the rest of the EU.
(OK, actually it's 230V +10% -6% but we're getting a bit technical now...)
Re:Just do it, already. (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you know the TVs being sold don't have SCART? Pretty every TV I've seen sold in the UK in the last ten years does
So why do you need the soon to be obsolete tuner? May as well just remove the tuner from the TV - saves cost and reduces confusion.
To be honest, I think TVs with integrated tuners will go the way of the dinosaur within a few years anyway - no point in paying for an integrated DVB-T tuner when you are just going to use the TV to display the output of your PVR or DVB-S/DVB-C receiver.
Hmm, maybe the government should put stickers on Linux machines to say "this machine can't run Windows software" too.
A Linux machine is just as capable as a Windows machine, even though it may not run the same software and that isn't something that is going to change soon. On the other hand, a PAL tuner is shortly going to go from working (as it has done for decades) to receive broadcast TV to being of very little use to anyone.
The government is putting rather a lot of money into trying to inform people about DSO. Informing people that the TV they are thinking of buying may well become useless to them when DSO happens seems like low hanging fruit.
It's like people buying cheap HD DVD players after HD DVD was killed. I'm not sure why, but a lot of people did. What you're suggesting is that some government bureacrat work out a set of rules to decide what was obsolete, if people understood the implications of the obsoleteness.
That is a *very* different situation. In the case of DSO, the government themselves are mandating the obsolescence of the devices. After DSO, a PAL tuner will *not* be able to receive any broadcast TV, but an HD DVD player will still continue to play all your HD DVDs as it always did, even after it is obsolete.
They'd have to fine people for not displaying the right sticker
Not really - you just give the public the automatic right to a refund when they discover they were never informed about the impending obsolescence of their new TV.
which means someone would need to check. You're far better off just allowing the market to handle this.
The American way is always "let the market handle it" and it patently doesn't work very well (unless you consider consumers being regularly screwed over by large corporations to be an example of it working). The European way is to regulate the market to protect the consumer and historically has worked rather better.