Ofcom boss warns of low interest in 'superfast' broadband

I have a barrier

My barrier to "taking up superfast broadband" is my experience of carriers' lying in every word they've spoken until now.

I get my broadband from Be / O2. I get a solid 9Mb down and 1.3Mb up, which is pretty good. I live about 3/4 of a mile from the exchange and BT tell me that I can get 5.5Mb from their ADSL. They keep on pestering me to upgrade to Infinity, but I honestly don't see the point. I currently get a free static IP and absolutely no caps or shaping, which BT and VM both do. I'm happy paying for what I get until a faster, *better* service comes along. And I'm fairly confidant that when it does it won't be from BT either!

There is never enough bandwidth

Of course there is little consumer demand for bandwidth as such. If the people running the telecommunications industry don't understand bandwidth, what is the likelihood that consumers do? They no more have a demand for 'bandwidth' than they have a demand for 'ICs', 'DSPs', 'SOI', transistors or silicon for that matter. What they *do* have is a demand to keep their time (nobody wants to wait for the network), use their communications (TV, Radio, Phone, Email, Internet access, etc), keep their money, keep their privacy and ensure their safety. Bandwidth affects all of those things. Many reading this won't be able to figure out how those things apply even after being told 'what' things apply. That means, to me, that they don't really understand 'bandwidth' enough to make an informed decision on bandwidth as such.

The only thing that currently separates and differentiates the broadcast television, cable television, mobile telephone, landline telephone, Internet and satellite networks is legislation whose major effect is to support rent-seeking on the part of incumbents who control them.

A converged network using a universal protocol such as TCP/IP is inevitable. Once it is in place, you will find demand for bandwidth grows to exceed what we can supply. There is a trade-off between CPU cycles, Storage and bandwidth that means that as long as there is a demand for any of them, there will be some demand for all of them. You can substitute, for instance, bandwidth for storage. We do now. We do not all carry our own personal copy of the Internet. We fetch what we need. Were storage less expensive, some of that material would shift closer to us. In fact, portions of what you *do* fetch from the Internet have already been brought closer to you and are substituting storage that is closer to you for bandwidth on the wider network. Similarly, CPU can be substituted for storage by re-calculating things rather than storing the answers and devoting greater resources to more exotic compression techniques.

We could easily saturate orders of magnitude more bandwidth than we have now.

Most in the first world have phone, television, radio and Internet. The aggregate bandwidth of those exceeds the bandwidth under discussion. They belong on a converged network and that network would of necessity have greater bandwidth requirements than current broadband connections.

The people asking customers about this should know better and I think they do. These are rationale for a decision already taken to protect their no longer viable business model.

I went from 10 meg to 20 meg with Virgin due to gaming issues. The service has been flawless, for everything except gaming. Gaming still has its moments of major lag. I don't download much, so why would I need the extra bandwidth? Especially as I resent paying more than £22 for internet per month. If I wanna download, then I can do it overnight. Never fallen foul of their day time shaping. My needs may change as the kids get older though. I would love iplayer etc upstairs, just don't have the kit that will run it.