Re: Silly...
@gerdesj: You really think BT are going to have anywhere near the same kind of rollout? There are still places that can't even get a few Mb of broadband, even with VDSL.
I just spent an instructive 18 months with BT. I work for a private school near a MAJOR town inside the M25. Our ADSL gave us 2-4Mbps. We had two business ADSL2 lines. We upgraded one to VDSL. We get "45Mbps at the property boundary" (technically "up to 75Mbps service", so they aren't lying about that). By the time it gets to where it's needed, we were getting about 10-11Mbps. Those are DOWNLOAD. Upload was laughable, and we wanted to run our own services.
Two years after a leased line order, we were still waiting and then got told that there was "no room at the exchange"... .this is AFTER they installed fibre tubing all over the site and down the local telegraph poles.
We're not in the middle of the damn outback, but we had to include such factors into every purchasing decision, governor's meeting and future plan because they were so hindering. And it just didn't matter how much money we had to throw at the idea, they just could not deliver.
In the end, we cancelled contracts while they were still trying to supply - even had them turn up on site after cancellation after not seeing action for 6+ months. Turned them away. Virgin Media were able to run a leased line to us in a few months with only legal hassle over who owns the bit of land they were digging up to delay them (literally, not even the Land Registry knew who owned the land, so they had to go through a special process to advertise it, claim it, allocate it to the borough, who leased it to the school, which finally let us give VM permission to use it).
Just because something exists does not mean you can buy it, it's priced sensibly, it's available in your area, that BT can deliver, or that it's even possible to get it to you in a way that doesn't degrade service to make it unusable. Hell, there is no mention of upload whatsoever. 300Mbps download is useless without at least 30Mbps upload (the sorts of ratio you see with ADSL and which still aren't good enough for non-residential purposes).
Hell, there are still places in Britain that you can't even get a phone line, let alone dial-up, let alone ADSL, let alone anything-to-the-cabinet, let alone anything-to-the-house, let alone this new tech that will need all new routers again. You might get maybe 40-50% of properties able to receive this in ten years of so, and almost all of them will be smack-bang in the centre of the big cities and sod the rest, Jack.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
