The State of UK Broadband — Not So Fast 279
Barence writes "The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec. More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput, which means that many more British broadband connections are effectively below the 2Mb/sec barrier. Better still, a separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection anyway."
Tell it to the people who cannot get broadband (Score:5, Insightful)
Concerned as I am with slow speeds, I'm more concerned that I cannot at home get broadband at all because there's insufficient regulation of the monopoly landline supplier. BT is not interested in fixing the twisted pair arriving at my house such that ADSL will work. The UK government is not interested in extending the Universal Service Obligation - the thing that forces the monopoly to connect you to the phone system for voice calls - to broadband.
HMG's insistence that broadband is of economic and social importance is just so much humbug and cant if they will not bother themselves to lift a regulatory finger to ensure that the whole population can access at least a basic service.
Perish the thought that the vast additional profit arising out of millions of DSL connections should be put towards improving the basic infrastructure.
But I can get 2kbps downstream (yup, that's right) through my 2.5 or 3G connection. Yay. I think I was getting better than that on dialup in about 1995.
Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
I've contacted [any telco anywhere in the world] about the poor state of my line, and they basically ignore me.
There, fixed that for you.
Re:Headline speed isn't that important (Score:3, Insightful)
I pay about £5/mo over the going rate for Zen.co.uk, because they're still geek-run and Very Good Indeed. They also superlatively BS'ed British Telecom to get my DSL connected faster than usual at my new house, and that's the sort of service I'm willing to pay for!
I have Sky as well - I looked at the "free" Sky broadband, and to get the equivalent of my Zen connection would be £5/mo less. It's entirely worth it for competent service.
Re:Fast enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
My bet is that these are closely related. If consumers knew about their comparatively low speed connection (i.e., knew enough to know they should care and how to figure it out) then they'd be pushing for faster speeds. They'd leave providers who are providing "slow broadband" and move to better ones, and the screwups would have to get right or get out of the broadband business.
But your average Peter Pint doesn't know enough to know better. (Hey, I'm not putting down you folks over the pond--the average Joe Sixpack thinks broadband is a woman's belt)
Just my two cents
Re:Fast enough... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fast enough... (Score:1, Insightful)
It's a chicken and the egg problem. I assure you if everyone had 100mbit(both ways, thanks) plenty more use would pop up.
Take Steam for example. Right now I own plenty of games that aren't installed on this machine. If I wanted to play them, I'd have to tell steam to download them and then wait between 2-4hrs to play. If I had enough bandwidth, this task would be instant and I would essentially have the entire steam library at my disposal.
Same with movies. Why own dvds when at the touch of a button you could start watching any movie in an online library? We're close to there already with netflix on demand and similar services, but a lot of people dont even have that kind of bandwidth(and I assure you 1mbit is not enough), and then theres upgrading to HD..
The only thing 1mbit is enough to stream is really compressed video, or good music. Look at services like Real's Rhapsody where you pay a monthly fee and have 'unlimitted' access to all the music you want. Thats possible over 1mbit, but as you scale up to larger things you certainly need more bandwidth.