Re: @ Anonymous Blowhard
@codejunky: "Trying to create a "market" for this to attract private investment has been a failing policy since Margaret Thatcher cancelled BT's project in 1990."
I had a read of the linked article and finished up feeling a bit annoyed. While I understand what Dr Cochrane was saying (it was quite clear after all!) I still think that as written the article may be misleading - albeit not deliberately - or it also may or may not fully represent Dr Cochrane's views. (If they are fully represented then I would have to argue with him (risky!) about his conclusion. I will paste a paragraph from the article, being a quote from Dr Cochrane.
"For example, I am sitting here, I work all over the world and say I want to upload a 350MB file. 350MB is not huge. With my old broadband, when I had less than 0.5Mbps upload you'd start in the morning and finish sometime in the middle of the night. Now I've got 32Mbps upload, I can actually watch it going. If I was in Hong Kong it would be instantaneous. Imagine having a discussion and putting a 10 second delay between each word, it wouldn't work."
Was Dr Cochrane concerning himself solely with the world of work? I can fully accept that "work" needs fater BB than residential use does, but the problem then becomes "of all the broadband circuits currently provided how many are for "work" and how many are for "leisure" applications, i.e. residential?" I don't know but I strongly suspect that the vast majority of the total circuits provided to premises are not for work applications, even allowing for those who want or need to work from home.
If we accept that the difference in usage "types" exists then we have to decide what general standard of BB provision should exist; (a) extremely fast to suit "work", in which case residentail users have to pay heavily over the odds to subsidise business user; (b) a fastish network with user costs set to be affordable by residential users, but which as a result may not be fast enough for (some?) business; (c) a mix whereby there are greatly different speeds available depending on how much the end user is willing to pay, and so on.
His argument appears to be based on the idea that it has to be "one size fits all", which in a way I can understand, but it ignores the economic reality that non - business users won't want to pay business rates.
If I have misrepresented what he was thinking then I will / would apologise, but to me his case is so "business - centric" that I cannot really see it being relevant to non - business applications.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
