UK ministers' Broadband '2.0' report confuses superfast with 10Mbps A report by MP Grant Shapps into the state of broadband in Blighty has been criticised for doing more harm than good, as the research appears to conflate superfast broadband (24 Mbps) with 10Mbps broadband – the Universal Service Obligation goal. The Register has seen a copy of the report, due to be published this week, which …
Seriously though. Cost of HS2: £55Bn. Cost of wiring up the whole country to be proper actual FTTP: <£55Bn. Which one is more important?
Clearly HS2. Because with HS2 a small, but clearly important, number of high earning City types can then commute daily from the Yorkshire Dales to their London office.
Seriously though. Cost of HS2: £55Bn. Cost of wiring up the whole country to be proper actual FTTP: <£55Bn. Which one is more important?
Let's face it HS2 is HMG's latest vanity project so will be built no matter what the actual cost becomes (>£55Bn).
I see the vanity project called the Humber Bridge (who really uses it?) is being granted Grade 1 Listed status.
What Use Cases beyond streaming Super Duper Hi-Res TV require speeds faster then 10 Mbit/s ?
Its not the Download that counts. It's the fact your 1Mb DL probably offers 1Mb upload, which isn't a lot of use if (for instance) you're trying to back up your photo archive to CrashPlan.
It's also the fact that this is not about 10Mb vs 30Mb vs 100Mb vs Gigabit. It's a basic matter of architecture. The people that can't get 10Mb ADSL or 30-80Mb FTTC are in that position usually not because their cabinet hasn't been upgraded, but because they are too far (topographically) from the cabinet, either because of sheer rural location, because BT laid their line along some stupid, circuitous U-shaped route, or because BT (c.1950) connected them up to an arbitrary cabinet 5 miles away which was fine when you were just trying to carry a single voice call, but which will never support more than 1Mb ADSL even if you trunked a 100Gb backhaul into the cabinet.
Gigabit fibre from B4RN or Gigaclear is massive overkill, but the reason people get it is not because they need Gigabit speeds, but because they need more than 1Mb. They'd settle for 10Mb but the copper isn't physically capable of doing it.
In any case, high-speed domestic connections can confer additional advantages. People can host home-servers and low-priority servers, localising traffic. If I were on an FTTP network I'd likely hook up one of my spare boxes as a software mirror - I'm downloading versions of OpenBSD and VLC anyway, might as well have a private mirror and make that available to the other customers on some of my excess 990Mb/s of bandwidth - for geek cred/fake internet points, reduces transit demand for the network (many mirror directors allow you to specify a mirror is only for a private network, so in this case you'd specify the AS/IP-Range of your provider so you're not generating outbound traffic on their transit links, but anyone on their network would be directed to your server rather than one out on the open internet such as UofKent's Mirror Service).
So Use Cases for Gbit/s are:
- Keeping Windows up to date.
Joke, amaright ? if not, well, my Windows stays up to date perfectly well @10Mbit/s
- backing up data at a reasonable speed.
To where ? How many people have massive external sites they pay for, so they can back up large amounts of data to ?
- more than two people watching TV at the same time.
Netfliz says 5Mbit/s for HD. So we're covered.
Meh.
And I'm pretty sure my granny is not going to be needing fast internetating so she can "hook up one of my spare boxes as a software mirror for geek cred/fake internet points and reduce transit demand for the network."
So the remaining arguments (AFAICT ) are:
"We need superfast download speeds so we can get the average upload speeds that come with them"
and "Cos 10Mbit/s is the new 640KB."
Meh.
Yeah and 640k is all you need.
Infrastructure - both broadband and HS2 - *creates* use cases.
When I see that we are arguing over 10Mb/s and 24Mb/s I weep inside. The need for these speeds has already passed. We should be building 1Gb/s and planning 10Gb/s.
Simon
> "What Use Cases beyond streaming Super Duper Hi-Res TV require speeds faster then 10 Mbit/s ?"
Well ...
* In Windows-land, software updates are becoming annoyingly large. The last monthly Windows patch I had was just under 400MB. The last update to Lightroom was over 1GB. Sometimes you don't want to set them off downloading as a background task and wait half an hour.
* Games. Quite a lot of newer games are 20GB+ (I have some breaching 40GB). Downloading 30GB at 10MB/s is going to take about 7-8 hours. Yes, you could leave it running over night, but sometimes you want to use the thing you just bought (and sometimes the game is not available on physical media, so Steam or equivalent is the only option).
* Uploading to backup sites or other online services (photo printing). I get 1Mb/s upsteam on my >>10Mb/s downstream connection. I like taking pictures, and have a camera which generates ~10MB JPEGs and ~75MB raw files (and I have about 1.2TB of images). Uploading photos for printing is exhaustingly slow (nearly 2 minutes per image). For those who don't leave the PC on overnight, using cloud backup is a non-starter.
* Multiple people watching TV on demand. Quite a few people I know don't watch broadcast TV any more - they use iPlayer (or similar).
* Working from home. I have a work-issued laptop. When working from home, a VPN connection is required, and offline files sync (and other stuff) will trigger whilst connected. A colleague found it utterly unusable on their ~10Mb/s connect (they were trying to use Skype at the same time).
* Properties of multiple occupancy (incl. some flats with a single inbound connection). You're basically getting an nth (where n = number of users) of the bandwidth (yes, I know that's a gross simplification, but you get the idea).
* Any of the above in a multi-user situation, especially when combined with on-demand TV services.
Reading the comments here...boy, so much misinformation. Overhead copper is more resilient than overhead Fibre, that is so very subjective. A low 1-2Mbps rates, maybe, at 100Mbps+ G.fast signals over copper, not a chance.
Even Openreach are starting to admit that copper G.fast won't practically work rurally in most existing cabinet rollout situations, i.e. outside small market towns, because the sheer number of powered nodes required/levels of maintenance that would require, as the reliable "up to" working footprint for G.fast is even smaller than FTTC.
The report hasn't even been released and you're all shooting the messenger. FFS, at least wait to read what it says.
BT (and Ofcom) don't exactly have a good past record up to this point on pure Fibre rollout.
Sit on hands, wait for handouts - has pretty much become BT's rollout Policy, of late. Germany on the other hand, seems to have their Ultrafast Broadband digital vision pretty clearly laid out, in comparison.
"Reading the comments here...boy, so much misinformation."
Yes, most of it coming from Anon. Cowards who snipe at others.
If you're worried about your network traffic being transmitted over copper, WTAF do you do within your premises? Someone was complaining earlier that 1 ft of copper would make 5km of fibre irrelevant. I wonder how he, it has to be a he, connects his PC to his home network?
"maybe, at 100Mbps+ G.fast signals over copper, not a chance."
Oh right, I must be imagining the Gb over copper network on UTP we already have then?
It's different sorts of cable, and that matters a lot.
There's also some pretty horrible wiring, network and power and telephone, in some buildings. The old BT telephone wiring was done decently, though I know of one house that had the line running through an orchard, not even clear of the trees.
The old telephone systems were not even made for data, and I remember some very geeky arguments about the difference between Baud and bits-per-second.
There's also some pretty horrible wiring, network and power and telephone, in some buildings.
Yes there is. It it can make a massive difference. At one location (almost too far for ADSL) couldn't even reach 1Mbit/s. Just by replacing NTE-5 with a a XTE-2005 (this was years ago and there are probably even better ones now) bumped the speed up to bit over 2Mbit/s. Differnece in SNR was big. Sometimes disconnecting house wiring can also help.
It's not CAT5/6 UTP Cabling we're talking about here regards 100Mbps+ G.fast though is it, {expletive} - it's BT's overhead legacy copper/aluminium two wire twisted pair, somewhat fcuking different, with cabling bundles run in long lengths in parallel, iffy damp joints/crosstalk a plenty.
Deutsche Telekom is rolling out G.Fast. I'm puzzled why you would applaud Germany for doing the same thing you're criticising the UK for?
It's not a technology designed to increase rural broadband availability, so I don't really see the relevance of your other points.
OR never, ever claimed that G.FAST from cabinets was going to be of much use. It's a quick, cheap add-on aimed at higher speeds for densely populated areas, not rural ones. That point about speed to market is important.
G.FAST from the tops of poles and local distribution points might be suitable for less densely populated areas, but the economics would probably depend on the use of reverse power as getting mains power is a major expense (G.FAST pods will be powered via the local FTTC cabinet).
A lot of development effort is going on with reverse power, but it's a tough challenge to get the power demands low enough to be feasible. However, telcos have a lot of interest in it working.
There's a problem with "Super fast" and "Fibre" because they get misused. There's also a problem with using more accurate terminology like "Crappy Speeds." So they need to rebrand. Something that makes it seem like more than it is without actually contravening "passing off" laws.
I suggest, "I can't believe it's not fast."
Yeah, I stole that idea. Can't remember where from, though. :)
I live in France, and a friend of mine in Lille gets 350 megabits per second. For €33/month. Line rental included.
I on the other hand, live in the middle of absolute nowhere, and get 7 if I'm lucky. For €10/month.
Bouygues are now offering their 4G box which gets you about 20 megabits down for €29/month (plus €3/month box rental) over their 4G network (it's a Huawei Wifi router), with no limits official on data (I bet there are some in the Ts & Cs somewhere) but it doesn't include a telephone service - data only.
I've thought about switching to mobile data, but mobile in the UK is a complete joke.
Was talking to a friend of mine who lives in the ass end of the middle on nowhere in Finland, and gets superfast unlimited 4G for a reasonable price.
The UK? 10GB/month or some stupidly low quota.
As per usual, the UK lags behind the rest of the world, and I doubt that'll ever change.
With proper broadband speeds comes the possibility of hosting your own content, or IPTV becoming a viable solution to the dominance of Sky. Both things are going to be vehemently opposed by the people involved, and because they do have quite a lot of clout in the UK business market, it's entirely possible they're making damned sure that fast broadband is only a pipedream.
I find it utterly amusing to see 4 and 5g speeds overtaking standard broadband in the country. That is a clear indication that something is very wrong.
Oh, and whoever said 10mb is more than enough - I'm pretty sure you don't speak for me, so please take your narrowminded irrelevance away back to your own idyllic corner of the world.
They haven't got a clue. The civil servants advising the government know very little apart from how to cover their backs. The ministers know even less. The whole country is brainwashed into thinking fibre comes down phone lines. The statistics can say anything BT order them to say. A superfarce from start to finish with millions cheated out of a decent connection.
nobody cares for BT, only 45% of the 86% on home broadband connections have a landline, and the 45% would be split between BT and virgin
the government take back the ownership of the telecom network, then they can talk the talk, otherwise nobody will ever care about BT and its bullshet
I could just be totally wrong, but, it does appear as of the last few years (decades) the government has chosen to take its advice and information from lobbyists and vested interests rather than impartial experts. We've seen the way that expert advice is automatically distrusted. But also, it appears that there is a rather incestuous group of companies that "advise" the government, and get given huge contracts despite their repeated failures. G4S, Crapita, PWC etc etc.
To paraphrase Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen... Eeeee..10 Megabits? We'd been appy wit' dprice of a two cans and a bita string.
We still dream of 10Megabits. Be like heaven to us.
But you know in a way we were happy in those days. Time for the family, fighting to see who's turn it was trying to download, and likktle Jimmy unable to download his Tom Clancy update becuase it would take two days and Mum wants to access the office.
I just want to say nuts.
There is no chance of anything above 4mbt/s where we live in Northampton. The distances from exchanges are too far... even for fibre and Virgin not interested.
Not that anyone actually is interested.
Let alone no business can operate from home unless they move.
I suppose I should be grateful for 4mb/s
It just has seemed politicians not getting good advice, and they still think in terms of what they've seen their kids do at home. That's their level of understanding...or misunderstanding.
Of course you only need 2mb/s if you dont use Netflix, and like all politicians youve divorced and are living by yourself with none sharing your 2mb/s.... it's payback time for all families to have to 'make do' with 2 or 4mb/s and be grateful.
So just like I said when ADSL came out in the late 90's, and BT not interested, politicians not interested
Nuts.
Just in case I'm not clear. Nuts.
@Commswonk
Not sure why At Last The 1948 Show got mentioned
It was on that show that "The Four Yorkshiremen" sketch first appeared, a few years before Monty Python.
Four members of the Monty Python team played the sketch on stage for the charity show "The Secret Policeman's Ball", hence the confusion.
I guess every profession has its own subset of stories where, once you'd heard the basic premise, you could fill in the gaps yourself without actually waiting for the end.
With soldiers it's: "So, this plonker hadn't cleared his weapon properly ..." and you pretty much know that the ending includes a negligent discharge and some poor bastard bleeding all over the floor (if he's lucky). I daresay pathologists have a fund of little horrors commencing something like: "The regular mortuary clerk was on holiday ..."
For UK politics, it appears we need only begin: "Grant Shapps—" for all listeners to silently join the dots leading to a hilariously incompetent outcome.
FWIW I think it's time for the word "shap" to enter the dictionary, as in "Shapp, verb.: to clownishly bungle and confuse, usu. because of ignorance and/or ideological myopia. E.g. 'Davis completely shapped Brexit'".
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