back to article Mediocre Britain: UK broadband ranked 31st in world for speed

Broadband in Blighty ranks 31st in the world, with average speeds of 16.51Mbps, according to a comprehensive analysis. Singapore topped the list with speeds of 55Mbps. Both Romania and Bulgaria beat the UK, racking up average speeds of 21.33Mbps and 17.54Mbps respectively. Yemen came last with speeds of 0.34Mbps. The data of …

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    1. inmypjs Silver badge

      Re: All I wanna know is...

      "...when can I drop voice from my landline and just have purely data?"

      The cost saving of not having voice would come from not using a bit of old hardware that already exists in the exchange - in other words nothing. So - just unplug your phone.

      My annoyance is that I can't easily transfer my existing land line number to a SIP service without also ceasing the line carrying data.

      1. jason 7

        Re: All I wanna know is...

        I just want to pay for line rental and the VDSL. I don't want all the other call packages that you have to have currently.

        Not interested in the tech, just lowering the cost by not paying for what I don't need.

        1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

          Re: All I wanna know is...

          "I don't want all the other call packages that you have to have currently."

          They may call them "call packages" but they don't really cost the phone company anything. They only have one product and it costs them the same almost regardless of what you do with it (*), but they make more money by slicing and dicing it in these strange ways. The same is probably true for mobile providers.

          (* One might guess that sheer volume of usage was an additional cost, but the near-universal offering of "unlimited" packages suggests that this isn't the case. I suspect that the reason is that the provider can just throttle your pipe if your usage starts to inconvenience them.)

    2. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      Re: All I wanna know is...

      You can drop it now, by not using the phone.

      No, it won't save you any money, but not having to support voice calls won't save the telephone company any money either, so I fail to understand why they should be offering it as a (cheaper) product.

  1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

    Brexit will fix this in no time, as we will be wallowing in money.

  2. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

    Don't forget, though, that UK is a vast country where the long distances makes data infrastructure very expensive, compared to the other small European countries! Hang on..

    Oh, I meant, don't forget though, that UK CEOs are payed extremely well, because they are so very, very good (or went to Uxbridge, perhaps), so the funds available for improvements are quite slim. Bit like BBC. Besides, plebs don't really need fast broadband.

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  3. adam payne

    "Dan Howdle, consumer telecoms analyst at Cable.co.uk, said: "Relatively speaking, we are near the top of the table. However, many of those ahead of us – some a long way ahead – are our neighbours both in the EU and wider Europe."

    31st isn't really near the top of the table, if we were in the top 10 you could say that.

    Many of those ahead of us are our neighbours, not quite sure why you felt the need to say that as it's completely irrelevant.

    "Howdle said that superfast rollout is continuing at speed. "Goals are being met, new initiatives undertaken and public funds being made available. However, clearly there are lessons to be learned both from Europe and from those topping the table."

    The superfast rollout has seen half of the town I live in upgraded and the other half left without it. This has been the same over almost two years now.

  4. poohbear

    FWIW, here in South Africa, while the 'state' telco is busy with rolling out fibre to the home, so too are numerous other companies. Yes they dig up the streets and pavements and gardens and make a mess, but I think in the end it will be worth it. I should finally get what I've been waiting for since 1995 or thereabouts... a high speed (up to 200Mbps) permanent connection to the net....

    Been a long journey from my 2400 baud modem...

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  5. rssfed23

    Feels good to be in the 2%

    ....admittedly I'm on virgins RFoG fttp but that's just a case of switching the R-ONU to a normal ONU (if VM ever decide to go proper gpon) and volia...done.

    Not that I care really if it's RFoG or GPON as with DOCISS3.1 we could easily get gigabit+ speeds if they choose to deploy them (and unlike non fttp virgin areas have the bandwidth and optical infra in place to handle it!).

    All in a tiny little remote village that got voted in as part of project lightning. Took our Zen 12Mbit line to 300+ overnight for the same cost. Can't complain there.

    1. David Nash Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Re: Feels good to be in the 2%

      VM I get, fttp even, but RFoG, R-ONO, ONO, gpon, DOCISS3.1 ? You what?

      I know I could google it but I don't think I should have to just to read a comment here!

      I don't think these are particularly well-known abbreviations, or am I being unreasonable?

      Plus you omitted an apostrophe, so not forgiven!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Feels good to be in the 2%

        He’s referring to the different specs of broadband behind dsl and cable.

        RFoG = RF over glass. traditional cable but uses fibre to the customers house (where a box converts it back to coax)

        Gpon= gigabit passive optical network. A common type of fttp deployment

        ONO= box on the side of the house in Gpon turns optical to Ethernet

        R-ONO = box on the side of the house turns optical RFoG into coax

        DOCISS = a cable internet/tv standard

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hang on, so we're worse than Peru for mobile data aren't we? and they are ranked 141 @ 1.41Mbs in this latest fixed line survey - does that still make them better than us or do we just pick and choose what makes us look the worst?

    That reminds me, I saved that birch branch to give myself a good whipping later I might not have to after this article.

  7. Prosthetic Conscience
    Happy

    What I think is not mentioned is

    that in Bulgaria and Romania even though they might be the 'poorest' EU countries such internet incl FTTP is dirt cheap even compared with the Big Mac index.

  8. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    Hard to believe that the UK is one of the 7 biggest economies on the planet is it not?

    Perhaps a better question would be where do the other 6 (the UK's nominal "peer group") sit on the list?

    Trouble is I suspect they are all a lot higher.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This must be serious. This thread hasn't descended into jokes yet.

  10. Slx

    How do they get away with calling VDSL "fibre"?!

    The one thing I've never understood is how BT / OpenReach and their Irish counterpart, Eir (eircom) were ever allowed to call VDSL / VDSL2 "Fibre".

    I mean a dial up 56k modem ultimately got carried by fibre when the signals left the exchange.so by that logic it was "Fibre" too.

    My view of it is if they're not providing FTTH with a fibre at your premises, it's copper!

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's the cynicism talking...

    C'mon guys, if we try really hard, we can drop to the bottom of that list...

    ...where we belong.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Guess it depends where you live, I get 200Mb/s on Virgin

    Depends I suppose on where you live.

    I have been with Cabletel, NTL and now Virgin Media for over 15 years and always get the speed that was advertised.

    Currently on 200Mb/s, could get 300Mb/s but 200 is way more faster than you really need for almost everything (except downloading 10GB+ files).

    BT and Virgin do really need to lay more fibre but council red tape can be a problem for digging up the roads, had that a few years ago with company I worked for. Took over 2 months to get planning permission to dig up part of the road.

    I think though in some countries there are far more important things than broadband, clean drinking water and food would be a start.

  13. K.o.R
    Trollface

    Real people...

    ...don't need decent broadband.

  14. Borg.King

    It's not me

    My connection is superfast at 256MBps, (which I'm relatively happy to pay for) but the real issue is still the upload speed from the server at the other end.

    If I want to download a 4GB disk image, it still takes an age due to the source server's poor (throttled?) connection.

    Net neutrality is fine and all, but I'll pay a little bit more to max out all the connections in-between me and the data I want to fetch.

  15. Sherrie Ludwig

    Yemen is lucky.

    I am in a rural area on the Illinois-Wisconsin border in the USA. I have two supposed "competitors" for "broadband" services. AT&T (the traditional phone company) and a cable provider (I think it's still Charter, but they sell themselves off so often it is hard to keep up). The cable company says it will give us service, IF WE PAY THE $3K to install it to the "neighborhood" cluster of three houses on our side of the road, AND then pay the $80 or more to use it monthly. AT&T charges us about $50 (bundled into the landline bill, of about $80) for .5Mbps. It WAS .3Mbps, but a call to the Federal Communications Commission (before the Current Occupant dismantled it) got them to do some fiddling to "improve" it (and charge us more). The US is great for broadband, so I hear, but not outside of big cities.

  16. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    "to install it to the "neighborhood" cluster of three houses on our side of the road"

    I may be inferring too much here, but are there houses on the other side of the road that would have to pay their own three grand to install a second link? If so, just how wide is that road?

  17. Slx

    The PSTN has nothing to do with modern broadband.

    I'm finding some of the comments here discussing the POTS/PSTN network a little amusingly irrelevant and I think it's also something that clouds political and media discussion a lot. It's a bit like a discussion about steam trains. It's 1980s technology, used for legacy services and has no bearing on broadband speeds at all.

    Modern broadband networks are using the same copper lines as PSTN services, but they've absolutely nothing, whatsoever, to do with TDM circuit switched technology behind traditional PSTN/ISDN services, they just share the copper wiring for the 'last mile'. Cabinet launched VDSL doesn't even use the full line back to the exchange. In fact it would be a lot easier to just provide the VDSL service without the dial tone and the long line.

    The telcos all initially had a notion that POTS/PSTN was important enough to warrant rolling out MSANs to street cabinets and provide dial tones down the line and various vendors came up with solutions for this, However, with the death of demand for domestic / residential POTS services, the massive increase in use of mobile phones and a consumer acceptance that you can provide a phone service using VoIP from a local ATA in the router or a VoIP handset has changed all of that. There's been a major loss of interest in ripping out the old TDM equipment and replacing it with modern modern gear, rather they will run it down until it's got far fewer users left, then make a switch to much smaller scale equipment for the laggards who still need dial tones.

    If a cable company can get away with providing POTS using VoIP from a device in your home, there's no reason BT, Eir, Deutsche Telekom or AT&T can't do exactly the same using VDSL or FTTH and a similar device.

    Offices increasingly don't use ISDN or PSTN lines either. There's a very rapid move going on to smaller businesses using hosted PBX in the cloud type services and VoIP handsets - it allows home office workers, remote sites, hot desking and far fancier routing options than was ever possible with your own PBX. Meanwhile larger companies are increasingly using SIP trunks in place of ISDN to plug their PBX gear into the telcos.

    Telephony is just an app on a data network. Nobody cares about POTS equipment anymore, least of all the vendors or the telcos. They just want to sweat the last bit of useful service out of existing gear before they have to rip it out.

    What's holding things up in the UK at the moment is lack of real competition. You've multiple brands all using OpenReach networks and then you've got Virgin offering a fairly mediocre cable modem service. If you'd a real FTTH player in the market, or if Virgin really cranks up the speed, OpenReach will be forced to respond. Until then, they'll all keep charging you high prices for mediocrity.

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