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Loading ...The case for high speed “Next generation” internet in the UK
combatus
Lets face it. Broadband in the
UK has been a complete farce the last few years. The initial boom has slowed, and while it was great to move from 56K to 512k, finally browsing the Web the way it was meant to be browsed (affordably) 6-7 years ago if you were quick off the mark, recently it’s been a far less pleasant experience.
The “up to xMbits†slogan left many feeling as if they’d been taken for a ride with far lower speeds than advertised. “Fair usage†policies now mean that doing anything more than switching on your PC will land you a snotty letter or email and see your speed reduced even further, especially god forbid if you surf during the evenings when you’re home from work or school (workers call in sick and kids bunk of school please). Ever increasing contention ratios due to over-subscribing and generally poor service add to the list of complaints nearly all of use have had at one time or another.
The situation has stagnated for nearly 5 years. While faster download speeds have meant those big game patches come a little quicker, very little benefits are felt from anything over 3 Mbits. Torrents or anything to do with file sharing rarely go above this speed (3Mbits is equivalent to 375KB/sec) that is if your ISP hasn’t capped torrent download limits already in which case half a megabit would be more than enough for you!
Browsing certainly isn’t any faster on my 20Mbit Virgin Cable Broadband than it is on a 2Mbit ADSL line we also have in the house. The upload speeds for a vast majority of
UK ISPs is still absolutely appalling so we are still left hanging around sending those 5MB emails of holiday pics.
So what is the way forward? Well I’d like to see the same situation with broadband as with do with hard drives. Plenty of room for manoeuvre and keen prices. There is one problem with this though. The outlay for fibre networks would top £15Billion. Now, the companies that would benefit from this have the money to invest but they are reluctant to do it. Why? Because the main feature of this so called “next gen†broadband is WebTV. Internet based streaming TV is already a big hit in Asia and in better-equipped EU countries. It is in my opinion, it’s the future of television and the internet.
Millions of people already download programs over P2P and watch TV programs on applications like the BBC iPlayer. With Internet TV streaming through 50+Mbit broadband connections, HD TV is definitely on the cards too.
Clearly one or two TV companies would be a bit disgruntled with this, namely Sky and Virgin Media, who already hold healthy numbers of subscribers to their services.
Until they back down and let broadband take it’s own course, the UK will be stuck in the Dark Ages as far as the internet is concerned. We are approaching the limits of what the current networks can provide so the crunch time is only just around the corner.
I just hope we do the sensible thing and go all-out for a decent fibre-based broadband network and not a piddley speed upgrade to 30 or 40 Mbits which will benefit no one.
I don’t think I’d use the terms farce to describe broadband in general, after all even with 512kb/sec, the internet is a much better place than it was with dial up. What has been a farce it that fact that companies (with government support) have been allowed to advertise an 8mb service when it can’t be had and unlimited service when it is limited. These are marketing flaws, not flaws with broad band itself.
Oh yeah don’t get me wrong, when I used 512k for the first time about 6 years ago it was amazing and I did say this - what I meant was this brilliant change has just halted and in the last few years we’ve seen very little progress, just the mass subscribing with virtually nill investment which is where “farce” comes into the equation. The Internet became a big thing in the mid-late 90’s, especially when you could just pay the price of a call. The early naughties saw the roll out of affordable broadband to the masses but we haven’t really progressed from there and I think it’s time we did.
And of course, I am referring to the companies that manage our broadband networks - not all those gorgeous sexy copper cables and exchanges- they do their job fine!