Labour shock pledge: 16.8-meg broadband for ALL by 2012! The Labour party has mounted a strong counterattack against the Tories' determined push to present themselves as the most technologically illiterate of the mainstream UK parties. As part of Labour's election manifesto, unveiled today, the present government was widely expected to renew previous pledges that every household in …
This is typical of the monkeys that are in government. What a load of BS.
Not only is it not technically possible to achieve without serious hardware and copper or fiber upgrades to every household or streen in unban and suburban areas, all the exchanges would have to be upgraded for the extra capacity.
Tell you what, vote for me and I will cook you all sunday roast and send it to you in an email, becuase there is more chance of that happening than what this twit is suggesting.
Ideally by someone who knows WTF they are reading.
The Conservative one should be interesting.
I think the bulk of it could just be "We will cancel what's left of Labour's XXX IT/database project"
and people would still cheer.
Labour have come out with some good proposals in the last 6 months. Most of them *could* have surfaced *any* time within the last 13 years.
They did not.
Whether it's 2meg or 16.8meg makes no difference, you still won't be able to download anything without being assumed you're a pirate and getting locked up under NuLieBore anyway.
Heaven forbid you can get 50meg in your area, new subscribers to such a "pirate speed" line will no doubt bring out the black helicopters and local council surveillance teams to your house.
Detail: 2 Mbps countrywide by 2012 delivered by BT
Actuality:
BT will introduce further caps immediately so that those once obtained speeds of 6.5 Mbps will now be curtailed to 2 Mbps max.
Seemplz!
Tseetch!
And by that kind of reduction it will make a bit more bandwidth available that it can sell on to other ISPs or business at much improved cost.
I mean, let's face it. If that bit between 2 Mbps and 6.5 Mbps (what the copper can handle) is not really part of the deal well put in a governor at 2 Mbps and sell the rest yes?
2Mb/s sync isn't that hard to achieve.
OTOH providing that much useable bandwidth 24/7/365 is another matter. What's the current estimated bandwidth allocation per UK user? 50kb/s?
Ofcom wanted broadband to be cheap and that's the result. Woefully oversubscribed networks. Sadly, last I heard the USC (or is it USO now?) didn't mention throughput or availability. Just connection speed.
In Romania, in the cities, people get fiber optics to their flats, and get 50 or 100 Mbps throughput (not just connection - and to the whole Internet, not just the IPSs network) all day round, no caps, no throttles, no line rental, and they pay peanuts for it too: the equivalent of 10 pounds a month (including VAT @ 19%). In the countryside you get ADSL, and it's still 6 Mbps, for a fraction of what you pay in the UK. To make things even more interesting, I think much of that Internet traffic passes through a bunch of wires that pass near London.
Given these figures, I would've thought they mean megabytes as well. Promising 2 Mbps would sound quite lame to me. Also, maybe they will pay Virgin to extend their network and pull an interesting stunt against BT (because Virgin sure take their time).
The shed dwellers get better Internet than Daily Mail :)
if in 2006 60% of connections were 2mb/s on average, thats 40% not.
in 2006 virgin had an estimated 35% over 2mb/s
We then take the market share of the ISP's and calculate todays current estimated speed, we get a figure of an average 3.8mb/s (I need beer now, that hurt my head calculating and googling)
So the government are promising SLOWER broadband for all by 2012.
If we then take technology improvements, with an average roll out of things like infinity, taking us to the latter half of 2011, then the government are offering people the equivelent of 9600 baud rate hayes modem speed by 2012.
2002 - avg = 56k
2004 - avg = 512
2006 - avg = 2mb
2008 - avg 2.6
2010 - avg 3.8
2012 - avg 6+
Guess what came into the post today. Can you guess it? No? Well, a letter from BT about broadband. According to this letter, the Labour party isn't that far off. Disregarding the use of O2's catchphrase, by itself saying "Become one of the better connected" on the envelope and the enclosed letter, they also say this:
"We're currently rolling out up to 20Mb speed nationwide, depending on line and location*, to bring you our fastest broadband throughout the day".
And where that star is (it's actually a cross on the letter), it says this:
"New network currently available to 50% of UK households, increasing to 55% in March 2010 and to 75% by Sprind 2011. Speeds referred to are download speeds. [...]"
So they may make 2012 after all.
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