The Future of Broadband in the UK

[thatbloke]

An interesting read on the BBC about the future of broadband in the UK.

What's your thoughts on this?

With filesizes getting bigger and bigger and new high-def formats coming all the time this bandwidth will be required - the problem for the ISPs is that by the time they roll out the tech required for the upgrades, there will be three new standards out there that are even faster, and that people will want - consequently they will make no money.

Are we becoming victims of the bloody fast rate of technological success we re enjoying?

 

[Taffy]

Cable seems to me to be the best option for the consumer. And Virgin Media seem to be making a nice profit out of it as well.

From personal experience, I can tell you that we had untold problems with ADSL, but as soon as we switched to cable, everything was running more smoothly, and faster, than before. We have had absolutely no problems with it.

Could this be the beginning of the end for BT? I mean, if you have the internet underground, why not have the phone on the same line as well?

 

[waterproofbob]

ADSL2+ is currently a very good option if you live in a vaguely exchange adjacent house. It's cheaper than cable and if you do get a good signal it kicks all the ass in world. I'd like to see some crazy multi-billionaire man up and pay the 15bn to get the whole country fibred up but that clearly isn't going to happen. Cable is a good option as you can get a very good multi-faceted service with all your phone TV and broadband stuff together but is still very dear at the moment.

 

[DeZmond]

Bearing in mind I work for the aforementioned cable company, I do have a view on that.

50mb is on the way (I can say that I have been involved in a small part with it, but any more than that) but since you generally speaking don't have as much signal degradation based on the distance from the exchange you tend to get higher and more consistent speeds than ADSL. Of course, that doesn't mean the network is without it's problems, of course. Especially if you want a static IP address - it won't happen on the cable network because of the way it's set up.

And Taffy does make a valid point regarding the telephone line, due to a multi-service discount. If you care about such things.

However, I would take that argument a stage further - why have a landline at all? I use skype regularly to call abroad for pennies and it has near-perfect connection quality. I don't see the need for another phone between skype and my mobile contract.

As for upgrading physical network connections, that is always going to be complicated because planning permission is difficult to obtain for such things. (Again, cable networks are a case in point here)

Next generation network? All very complicated!

 

[KillCrazy]

What about for people who don't have cable? I live in a new housing estate and cable was not placed in the area during the development. I'm sure if this is the case for us, there must be thousands of other homes out there without cable. Most people, if not all, homes have a standard phone line, so ADSL is the only option.

What would it take for these companies to provide cable to everyone? I can't see easy solutions happening soon.

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

What would it take for these companies to provide cable to everyone?

A swift blow to the back of the head, i think.

 

[DocBot]

When you say "next generation network", do you mean to the typical end user or networking in general? Because the University network in Sweden, OptiSUNET, runs at somewhere around 40 Gb/s now, on one frequency. With Dwdm, frequency multiplexing, they could semi-easily upgrade it to 80 times that, (too tired to count but it would be a few terabytes per second). The limitation, in other words, is not on the network but on the equipment connected to it. And until that's solved there really isn't any need for a next generation network, seeing as we can't utilise the current gen one fully.

Sorry for OT babble.

 

[DeZmond]

A swift blow to the back of the head, i think.

As with a lot of large companies these days the operator is heavily in debt (if you believe wikipedia) and as a result really can't afford new cables.

And then you have planning permission... a lot harder to get since the heyday of cable in the '80s!

I saw a T-Mobile service that uses a usb wireless modem to give a mobile up to 1.8mbps service, uk-wide. (about 84% coverage I think) Prices looked around £18 per month. If they could make that a bit faster and increase coverage, I'd see that kind of connection as the ideal way of connecting to the net!

 

[Birdy]

I demand that all adsl folk get Plusnet!!! IT rocks after only 2 hours!!

 

[waterproofbob]

I demand that all adsl folk get Plusnet!!! IT rocks after only 2 hours!!

plusnet like all adsl relies on attenuation and contention ratios, which can make the difference between nice fast speeds and poo speeds. The sooner all exchanges are ADSL 2+ enabled the better imo. Cable does seem however to be the most effective way to get stable fast connections at the moment. It is just a shame that it is as dear as it is.

 

[Birdy]

yea i agree. But virgin was deffinetly restricting me down so much! they could
have let off a bit or charged me less!

 

[SgtFury]

Um maybe this was your problem, didn't make the connection until you mentioned Virgin then.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3321-virgin-media-breaks-gaming-for-its-adsl-users.html

Virgin Media Off-net customers have not had the best experience of late, with some customers complaining of slow speeds for months. Now things have got worse with what looks to be a blocking of online gaming. Our Virgin Media ADSL forum section has plenty of people posting about the problem.

It is thought that some recent adjustments to the traffic management system are to blame, whether this is a mistake or part of planned changes to manage what appears to be limited capacity at present is unclear at this time.

Virgin Media has a fairly extensive fair use policy for its ADSL customers so to see the widespread problems we see now is even more surprising.

Monitoring traffic:
Well each week we’ll monitor how much data our broadband customers download during peak times only. We measure this in kilobytes (KB). Peak times run from 4pm till midnight. We then add up the total amount of data downloaded over the week per customer. We then rank the list of customers, heaviest users first. From this list, we pick out the top 5% of heaviest users over the week. We reserve the right to traffic manage these customers during peak times. Traffic management lasts for just 1 week and is only applied during peak times (4pm till midnight).

Traffic Management:
For the small number of customers who are in the top 5% of heaviest users, our traffic management solution will temporarily set download speeds to no lower than 512Kbit/s. This limit is applied daily, 4pm until midnight, for 1 week.

During off-peak periods our traffic management solution will automatically reset download speeds back to their full speed.

Each week we review our top 5% heaviest peak-time users over the previous 7 days. We then update the refreshed customer list to our servers for traffic shaping.



Extract from Virgin Media Off-net traffic management document
Interestingly it says that download speeds will be set to no lower than 512 Kilobits per second, which leaves customers getting below this speed wondering what is going on. In theory 0.5Mbps should be plenty for online gaming, so it seems unlikely the current complaints are all down to people who have been in the top 5% of users for a week.

We have contacted Virgin Media so that they can respond to this news item and hopefully have some good news for customers.

 

[Birdy]

I know why it was but it gets on my nervers they do it!