UK Broadband - The Haves And The Have Nots

[GhostShip]

More statistics..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30375854

Ofcom, the UK's telecoms regulator, says fixed broadband connections are now "almost universally available" throughout the UK.
Average download speeds are 23 megabits per second (Mbps), it said in a report on the UK's telecoms infrastructure.
But it admitted that 3% of premises do not have basic broadband of 2Mbps.
And 15% can't receive 10Mbps - the usual requirement for a typical household these days.

There is also a huge gap between the minimum and maximum broadband download speeds available in Britain, Ofcom finds, with some premises receiving just 0.1Mbps and others 350Mbps.

While some claims of faster speeds are true, in many cases such upper limit speeds are distorting the reality of those on the poorer performing lines, as usual corporate cherry picking means the higher populated areas deliver faster profits but such short termed strategies leaves those on the fringe of services out in the cold.

 My report is "coming along steadily , but must do better".

[Pri]

Where can I get 350Mb/s ? lol

[White Stripes]

the UK is smaller (by a surprising margin) than the state of texas in the US.... why doesnt the UK have blazing broadband everywhere like say... south korea?

[silicon_toad2000]

could be worse, could be living in australia...

now where's that kangaroo with my packet delivery...

[White Stripes]

australia confuses me even worse... most of the population is along the coast or close to it so why a 'ring' of broadband hasnt been made i dunno.... now the folks in the outback i can understand having a hard time....

the land down under could be a leader in satellite internet (-everyone- fast no matter how far inland they are... or if they are even mobile since self pointing dishes are a thing and have been for a while now..) if the government would put its mind where its money is...

[Pri]

the UK is smaller (by a surprising margin) than the state of texas in the US.... why doesnt the UK have blazing broadband everywhere like say... south korea?

From what I've read in the past (this may not hold true now I don't know) but the councils in the UK charge a lot of money to companies who want to dig up pavements to lay infrastructure.

The planning permission itself takes time and costs money, it has to be approved by the local council and then they charge a huge amount for each meter of pavement that has to be dug up for the cable laying.

I remember my own ISP (and this could just be them bullshitting) that it costs them billions of pounds to lay new lines in the UK.

But that's not to say it can't be done. I feel that Virgin Media for example who is my ISP are doing it all wrong. Instead of running Fiber to the premises they are using DOCSIS 3.0. So that alone is a limiting factor in the high speeds they can offer. They are trying to push performance out of equipment that wasn't originally designed for it. So ya know it's a hard problem they have to run around the country every year upgrading all their equipment for every little bump in speed they offer usually 25Mb-50Mb a year if we're lucky.

I wish they would just say look DOCSIS that's great for what we have but from today we're only laying Fiber to the home. They already dig a trench to your house to lay the DOCSIS cable, it doesn't go over the pre-existing phone line so to switch to the other kind of high speed capable cable which can cheaply deliver 1Gb/s with current generation tech would be smart instead they still lay and use the same coaxial cable from the 90's.

But of course Virgin Media is a national ISP and we have a sort of duopoly at the moment. Virgin Media and BT own probably 90% of all internet lines in the UK. Their speeds are round about the same as are their costs.

If you look at some of the fringe ISP's that don't use those networks built by VM or BT you'll often find better service. Hyperoptic for example which is a london based ISP that only serves right now a very small footprint of apartments, flats and offices in central london currently offer 1Gb/s fully symmetrical for £50 a month. Trying to get our national incumbents to offer service like that is like pulling teeth. They have little incentive to do so because they gobbled up all their competition at a national level.

Back in the day before Virgin Media became what it is now we had two cable suppliers and BT. Telewest, NTL and BT. Telewest and NTL combined to become what is now Virgin Media and with that it has killed competition. BT and VM find themselves in this comfortable position where for most people you have to pick one of them, even if you use a company like Sky, TalkTalk etc they rent space on BT's infrastructure and can only offer speeds as high as BT do. And since BT isn't investing as heavily as they should be the speeds are mostly stagnant for all those ISP's that rely on that network.

It's very frustrating. I just hope that internet companies like Google, Amazon, Netflix. Companies that serve video and are pushing the cloud heavily will help to drive speeds higher.

[White Stripes]

i really need to visit the UK sometime in my life... ....bury the cable? the cable i have coming to my house goes along for the same ride as the AC lines of the power grid... granted the cable is further down on the pole.... it still runs from the pole to the house... no burial.... easy upgrade... just run new line along the poles.... in 'town' and the suburbs its all buried but not deep (my definition of deep may differ from yours) and usually through dirt... easy upgrade just too big of an area to do that much of an upgrade.... very lazy isps suck major whale hork here as well unfortunately ... docsis 3 is actually the newest tech most of them offer.. DSL is an option but it is just a joke... dont even bother...

ive seen plenty of youtube videos from the UK that show poles as well... one transformer on the pole running to many houses (rather more efficient than a transformer for each house like the US) in what looks like the suburbs... do the power and cable companies not get along and take advantage of this in the UK? they dont have to tear up the streets if they get clever...

[Pri]

In the UK the power lines to homes and businesses come in underground. You'll only find powerlines in the sky if its a huge thick cable traveling across swaths of land like the countryside, not for connecting buildings directly. You also wont find those large power lines in cities or towns only where theres large open fields like the countryside.

The poles in our streets are telephone poles put up by BT. Only BT are allowed to use those although there has been some lobbying for other services to get access without much success. BT don't even use them these days for their latest broadband. They do the underground thing too.

As for how deep things go, in urban areas we have pavement slabs and underneath those is usually a cavity for cables and things, for the most part they can run cable through that without pulling up all the slabs in a street, but not always and there is only a finite amount of space in those cavities with everyone and their dog wanting to lay a cable the councils are pretty picky about it.

[Trestor]

australia confuses me even worse... most of the population is along the coast or close to it so why a 'ring' of broadband hasnt been made i dunno.... now the folks in the outback i can understand having a hard time....

the land down under could be a leader in satellite internet (-everyone- fast no matter how far inland they are... or if they are even mobile since self pointing dishes are a thing and have been for a while now..) if the government would put its mind where its money is...

I am off topic but to answer about Australia:
The previous government was building a fibre network to 93% of the population, wireless towers to 4% where there were not enough people to justify the expense of fibre installation, and satellites to cover the whole of the rest of the remote areas of the continent. The fibre [which I have] was offering up to 100mb/s down and 40 mb/s up, with the scope to increase that speed to 100/400 or more, and is very stable and doesn't suffer when it rains. This was intended to replace the old, slow, and unreliable ADSL copper wire broadband system which is unstable when it rains.

However, there was a change of government in 2013 and the Liberal [ie, conservative] Party has brought the fibre roll-out to an effective halt and is working to buy the old copper wire phone system from the company that owns it, as well as the existing two cable TV systems in most capital cities, and use these in a Multi Technology Mix using an unrevealed number of street node distributor points to provide an unguaranteed speed, depending how close to a node one lives, and the condition of the copper wire which typically is corroded and more than thirty years old.

According to sources the original fibre roll out was to cost either $34 Billion or $43 Billion and was to be self-funding through user-pays, whereas the MTM is revealed today as expected to cost $94 Billion, will be tax payer funded as it can't earn back its expenditure in time, and will still have to be replaced ultimately by fibre anyway.

The wireless towers and satellites are still part of the plan, but many more people are likely to be connected to these than initially planned because of the halting of the fibre roll out, leading to congestion issues.

The reason for the change from fibre to a continued use of copper wire is, evidently, a combination of hatred by the new government ["Liberal Party", ie, Conservative] towards the previous party [Labor] that had started the fibre roll out, a directive from the Prime Minister ["Destroy the National Broadband Network!" to the minister for comms], a desire from Rupert Murdoch to stop the fibre to preserve his cable TV model from competition via fibre [and his newspapers do not reveal the truth about this, instead talking about 'Labor waste' and 'Labor's fault', and no I don't like Labor], and a very great arrogance by the minister for comms Malcolm Turnbull in that he refuses to listen to knowledgeable experts, instead appointing toadies to administer his MTM policy, and publicly mocking anyone who asks him questions, yet has invested his own money in France and Spain in companies that are rolling out fibre to the premises.

Thus, the Australian government is unique in the world in it's determination to stop installing fibre [except in greenfield estates where there is no existing copper wire to use] and instead buy back an antiquated copper wire network from its private owner to provide Australians with a slower, more expensive and less reliable broadband system, which is already too slow for modern needs.

And folks, this very long post is the short, incomplete version of what is going on.

[Pri]

It's a real shame what has happened in Australia. I know a lot of people in my own chat room who are in Australia were hoping the fiber network would help them out.

[silicon_toad2000]

the current govt here is pushing fibre to the node, which is the switch boxes in the street and then copper for the last few hundred meters.
Which is better than copper for km's as it is currently.
Back in the 90's our nationally owned phone network telecom was forced to open its copper netowrk to allow competitiors to use it. At that point telecom was going to implement fibre to the node, but then with the forced competition, it said naaaahhhh.
so now 20 years later we need the government to fund it because it deregulated OUR phone network... $%&*^&*)