back to article Plans for half of Europeans to get 100Mbps by 2020 ain't gonna happen – report

Insanely ambitious plans by the EU to connect half of the households in member states to 100Mbps by 2020, have unsurprisingly fallen by the wayside - according to a report. The European Court of Auditors has confirmed the original target for ultrafast broadband take-up will be missed, with the region having managed just 15 per …

  1. casperghst42

    When one thinks that in Germany the norm still is 15mb/s for anyone who live outside larger population zones, then yes, the 200mb/s would be impossible to reach.

    In some countries is the "normal" minimum speed 100mb/s; try to discuss that with German Telekom - they still live in the last century. They are quite proud of them self, as they are now upgrading to a minimum speed of 50mb/s ..... and the prices are almost 2x to what it cost in countries like The Netherlands and Scandinavia.

    1. big_D Silver badge

      It really depends on where you are. I live in north Germany and we have 100mbps in our small town. At work, we get 1gpbs at one site and 50mbps at the other, plus 10mbps dedicate line to the other site.

      The real criteria is who you have as a provider. Although we are rural, a local telco (Osnatel, now part of EWETel) invested heavily in fibre at the turn of the century and laid cable throughout the area. If I stick with Deutsche Telekom, I can get 3mbps, with Osnatel, I get 100mbps. All the other ISPs also use the Telekom lines, so they are also 3mbps.

      We could also go cable, which is somewhere between 300mbps and 1gbps. But my other half has had poor experiences with them. In her last flat, she had satellite TV and the cable company came round at least once a month accusing her of stealing cable TV, because the previous tenants had tried to steal cable!

      1. big_D Silver badge

        Too late to edit... I wanted to add, that our Telekom rep lives out in the countryside and gets 1mbps, but has a dual modem, which uses LTE + DSL, which gets him around 20mbps.

        Some very rural areas are, naturally, very poorly provided for. But the OP said anyone outside major population areas doesn't get good speed. Ours is a small town (~30,000 people over a very large area).

    2. Lee D Silver badge

      I live in London (Greater London, but still a very, very urban area).

      When I moved into a flat last year that was only built in the 80's/90's, the options available to me were:

      - ADSL, guaranteed minimum of 1Mbs. Maximum 8 theoretical. "Likely": 3.

      - VDSL, guaranteed minimum of 5Mbps. Maximum 75 theoretical. "Likely": 5

      I didn't even bother, and just bought a 4G box instead (no guarantee at all but has never been less than 10, I've seen it go to 40, and usually it hovers around 30 down, 20 up with pings around 20-40ms).

  2. Claverhouse Silver badge

    >But it seems many punters are unaware they could upgrade their packages at no extra cost.<

    Getting a majestic, in 1995, 2.5 MBPS, in Suffolk/Essex, it would be nice to go fibre as SKY recommends oft-times when I complain, yet since there's no fibre available from any provider that checks the line, it gets kinda difficult. And I do live near a town. Last week it went down to 21 KBPS.

    1. Dwarf

      Have you tried replacing your phone socket with one of the new ones that has the MK4 VDSL i-Plate function included ?

      NTE5C socket with MK4 VDSL i-Plate

      Back when I was on traditional ADSL, the old i-Plate made the line more stable and upped the speed by about 1Mbps.

      Obviously not as good a full FTTC connection, but better than nothing and cheap to do.

      1. Roland6 Silver badge

        >Have you tried replacing your phone socket with one of the new ones that has the MK4 VDSL i-Plate function included ?

        A second thing to try and costs nothing, is to disconnect your phone from the line, reboot the router and see what speed it gets. By doing this I found my old ansaphone, that predated FTTC, was costing me nearly 5Mbps of my up to 38Mbps service.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "But it seems many punters are unaware they could upgrade their packages at no extra cost."

    Vodafone apparently have changed their minds about closing their Demon network - although it took at least half an hour, an online chat, and three phone transfers to get that statement. The sales person tasked with persuading Demon customers to move to Vodafone contracts obviously never thought it necessary to reply to emails when the situation changed.

    Trying to find the tariffs is very difficult - and the help lines only appear to know half the story.

    Apparently I can stay on my Demon nominal 16mbps ADSL+ which has deteriorated from 12mbps to 7.9mbps - paying the old Demon price.

    Or I can upgrade to Vodafone/Demon 35mbps or 55mbps "fibre" which sounds like FTTC - at an extra cost. The speed "guarantee" is a 15% rebate if it falls below a specified "average".

    Or I can take a Vodafone contract at about 66% of the Demon price for the existing ADSL+ service - with a bonus of no usage cap.

    Even the deteriorated 7.9mbps still streams video ok - so where's the incentive to go to "fibre"?

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      "But it seems many punters are unaware they could upgrade their packages at no extra cost."

      What if I do not want to? In order to go from 120M to 200M Virgin will force a Puma sh*t down my throat which even if it works in Bridge mode will completely f*** up video conferencing and VOIP. So no. I will not "upgrade" to higher bandwidth even if they pay me because it is in fact worse/lower user experience.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        If you're on 120, then I hope you've got a good price baked in. Since normal practice is to reset all deals to a new contract, I'm assuming that you're on whatever VM want to take off of you as a standard price. You could the Retentions people and ask for a discount, but that means you'll be placed onto a new standard speed (50, 100, 200, 350), although you won't need a Hub 3 for anything other than 350. Potentially you could get a good deal by pushing for a discount on a 100 Mbps, since that's not much above a good Infinity 2 line, but because of the way VM limit speeds you'd probably be on 115 in practice.....

        I concur about the Hub 3 though, I've got one, and it's shit. There is actually a working fix on offer (much to the amazement of cynics like me) but the turds at Vermin Media are currently only offering this to customers on 350, and I'm buggered if I'm paying more just for the firmware fix to their own shoddy hardware.

    2. Roland6 Silver badge

      >Apparently I can stay on my Demon nominal 16mbps ADSL+ which has deteriorated from 12mbps to 7.9mbps - paying the old Demon price.

      I've a client on the Demon 16Mbps ADSL+ who have also seen the speed deterioration, plus some other change that caused their router to drop the connection after a few hours. It seems the equipment in the local exchange has been updated and thus there is a possible mismatch between the old customer equipment and the new exchange equipment, resulting in the exchange equipment seeing a higher error rate on the line - hence the speed drop being experienced.

      Unfortunately, whilst Demon are happily pointing the finger at the client router (it is a little on the old side), they are also refusing to replace it free of charge - even though they do provide a free router to new connections/contracts paying a lower monthly fee.

      Given this is on top of the deterioration in customer services and the removal of the email service, I'm advising the customer to walk.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "Given this is on top of the deterioration in customer services and the removal of the email service, [...]"

        Which raises another question that needs an answer. How long will the outsourced Demon email service continue? IIRC in the original statements there was something like "for two years". That would have been consistent with the closure of the Demon network later this year - and the loss of demon.co.uk from the DNS.

        When Vodafone announced the closure of the Demon network they didn't reply to my email about that issue. Now it is not closing - presumably the outsourced email service will continue at a price.

        The Demon customer service page seems moribund - trying to check my usage gets no response. Unless that means the service is actually the Vodafone ADSL+ in all but name - which has no cap.

  4. Shadowslayer

    Super Fast Internet?

    According to the article 24mbps is super fast? My mid tier 60mbps connection is laughing right now.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Super Fast Internet?

      My mid tier 60mbps connection is laughing right now.

      My 200 Mbps sneers at your 60. And shortly somebody will come along and blow me off with their gigabit broadband.

      Although anecdotally, most public gigabit broadband offers seems to suffer contention slow downs at any moderately busy time, so a mid-upper speed cable will actually be faster when you want to use it. Of course, that generally means Vermin Media, and as a customer I can't recommend them.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    one really needs Gigabyte speed to get a 100 MB advantage.

    The problem with faster services in Australia was the ballooning of usage, with Cloud storage of Business, System of forcing upload of massive OEM installs and updates, the NetFlix syndrome movie delivery bypassing radio & TV and Gamer addiction and general overall increased dependence causes so much local node overload that it did not really produce such a net gain to the user as you would expect.

    In times with little demand a user can download large loads quickly, but at other times the system forces people back to trying to find a window in both their own timezone & location and that of the servers timezone and locale they are accessing.

    So one really needs Gigabyte speed to get a 100MB advantage.

    1. find users who cut cat tail

      Re: one really needs Gigabyte speed to get a 100 MB advantage.

      Probably depends on where you live... I have 100Mbps (symmetrical) because that's simply the cheapest option my ISP offers (14 €/month) and really see 90+ every time I measure it or transfer huge data from/to the uni (anecdotal evidence this one).

      But most of the time I would hardly notice half or even slower speed. Do really half of people need 100Mbps? For what?

  6. Red Bren
    Joke

    Is Thanos in charge of this?

    What happens to the other half of Europeans?

  7. RobertLongshaft

    Yet more EU propaganda.

    We'll give everyone 200MB - err nah you won't. We'll all use the same currency in economic harmony - err nah you won't. Germany won't use its position to bully all the smaller states - err, yes it will.

    The EU a joke failed project which will hopefully will be dead in 20 years.

  8. Ben1892

    Mega milli Bytes bits

    Mega milli Bytes bits

    Just sayin' - not sure if commentards are boasting or in the 1990's

    ( alternatively; buses, Sheepvacuums, Wales', Brontosauruses, linguine )

    For the record; 59Mbps down, 19Mbps up, UK, Vodafone, £24 per month (all-in including line rental) and happy - I don't need more than that

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Mega milli Bytes bits

      > Mega milli Bytes bits

      Well, if you want to be truly pedantic about it....

      I do believe you will find IEC 80000-13 states that the symbol of binary prefixes should be derived from the SI prefix by adding the letter "i". And similarly for the name, the first two letters of the SI prefix are maintained and the letters "bi" added.

      Thus:

      Mib (mebibits)

      MiB (mebibytes)

      and so on ....

      - NONE (e.g. bytes)

      Ki - kibi (e.g. kibibytes)

      Mi - mebi (e.g. mebibytes)

      Gi - gibi (e.g. gibibytes)

      Ti - tebi (e.g. tebibytes)

      Pi - pebi (e.g. pebibytes)

      Ei - exbi (e.g. exbibytes)

      Zi - zebi (e.g. zebibytes)

      Yi - yobi (e.g. yobibytes)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Mega milli Bytes bits

        It should also be noted that the "original" SI prefixes are *STRICTLY* to be used in referral to multiples of 10.

        Thus the existence of different SI prefixes for data, which hence permit 1024 to be expressed as a kibibit (since it is not a multiple of 10, use of the "kilo" would not be in line with the SI definition).

        If one were being truly pedantic, mebibit per second is a derived unit and so you would put a solidus infront of the "s", and not just suffix it, i.e. Mib/s.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Have 200Mbs now, 100Mbs would be a downgrade

    Lucky to currently get 200Mbs and get that full speed now.

    To be honest dont know what you need it for apart from downloading huge files, GB+ in size.

    1. Tom 7

      Re: Have 200Mbs now, 100Mbs would be a downgrade

      My old next door neighbour had the audacity to complain that their new B4RN fibre was running at 3/4 promised speed - a mere 760Mbps.

      He's a scientist at the local university and uses it for massive data files. Its still barely used at capacity though.

  10. BlokeInTejas

    Rural little village in Normandy; too far from anywhere to get anything even approximating bad ADSL. Even the pigeons avoid the place...

    So the solution is to buy a 4G/LTE box, which offers entirely acceptable up and down speeds (I'm not there at the moment, so I can't measure).

    But the downside is - a budget of only 20GB per month. That goes very quickly, even though we don't stream music or movies. One software update to one phone once and you eat 10% of that. Ouch.

  11. This post has been deleted by its author

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like