up to half a mile
As you know I am close to the boundary between two exchange areas..
I get decent broadband, next two blokes up the road get crap..and there's about another 20 houses further on.. and about another 20 on the next exchange.
I'm intrigued to know what "legally required stuff" is "online only" - can you give an example? Also I was talking specifically about
*broadband*, and I'm wondering how much of that "online-only legally- required stuff" actually requires broadband (as opposed to just internet access).
That is more a failure of your imagination than anything else. A bare minimum for watching streamed HDTV on iPlayer is 3500Mbps and you need a connection capable of at least 4Mbps BRAS for that.
Skype and video conferencing needs at least 2Mbps to be comfortable.
The haves will shortly have enough bandwidth to watch 20 channels of HDTV simultaneously where the have nots are already at the stage where some grossly over Flashed corporate sites take minutes to load.
I used to watch sumo from Japan using a special codec on a 56k connection. It was a triumph of bandwidth management at the time.
The universal service needs to be around 4Mbps. The government standard of 2Mbps is fit only for Luddites and technophobes.
Anywhere unable to economically get landline 4Mbps should have subsidised 3G nodes with directional antennas installed to cover the typical linear development profile of small rural villages.
If the government insists that farmers have to fill in loads of forms online they damn well have to roll out broadband to rural areas too!
Co. I used to work for leased 10Gbps point to point links, mostly. Then we started leasing a number of dark fibre pairs between cities in Europe (e.g. London - paris). Lighting that with Alcatel kit meant that, in principle, you could have 96 wavelengths each doing 10Gbps, although in practice there were typically only half a dozen.
I think it was me that mentioned 15m and I assume they stopped 15m short because that's where the pavement ends.
I've yet to find a HD programme on iPlayer that runs at more than 2.5 Mbps with the odd peak to 2.7 or 2.8. I think the spec is 3.2 Mbps but in reality they don't peak at that rate. IMHO 3.2 is just good SD, it's not enough for decent HD that needs 10 Mbps or more, remember that there is over 1 Gbps dribbling out the back of a broadcast HD camera ...
Not convinced that even *4G* has the overall bandwidth required for say 50 households to all stream (current) iplayer at the same time. I spend time at Premier League football grounds, most have 4G coverage and speeds before the crowd arrive are pretty respectable at least as good as the best ADSL2 and not so asymetric. Once the crowd are in speed falls through the floor ...
Agreed but the 2 Mbps Universal Access is adequate for that. HMG's sites are not overloaded with flash and pointless eye candy. Most don't even need javascript, filing a VAT return doesn't need javascript.
cable
So who installed all the cable systems in most towns and cities in the country 30(+?) years ago? It wasn't HMG, it wasn't BT it was the private cable companies who had just got the franchises. They cherry picked of course, just like BT is cherry picking with FTTC now. Except that BT aren't paying for FTTC, we all are ,but not every one is getting the same service.
That is now not back when the cable franchises were issued. Only just over 10 years ago the cable co's were still quite keen on expanding. The frnchise holder for here said they would cable the town if the backhaul could be provided. Back then suitable backhaul cost the arms and legs of several people ...
Backhaul is still a major problem for small/community ISPs, at one point in the BDUK stuff there was rumour of BT putting in 1 Gbps fibre to isolated places for the local/community ISP to distribute over what ever could be made to work, be that FTTC, FTTP, WiFi, WiMax etc. That seems to have been killed by BT cherry picking with FTTC. This cherry picking also effectively prevents local/community ISPs growing as the bulk of their potential customers are covered by BT's FTTC and thus EU funding for the local ISP gets withdrawn as there is no coverage overlap allowed between BT FTCC and local ISPs.
I remember a time when the difference between the haves and the have nots was to do with life's essentials. Watching a sporting event from half way round the world (or watching any kind of TV for that matter) doesn't come into the "life's essentials" category for me.
But they don't do FTTP to most places. Virgins "fibre" broadband is copper from the street cabinet, just like FTTC.
Incidently you could have had gigabit (with 100M as a cheap option) ethernet five years ago but the comment I got from Valance was "If we put new copper into the ground the press will crucify us". It was costed up at about £2bn, far less than fibre. All you needed was to drop cat5 wire and waterproof switches into the footway holes and/or poles. Being copper even the BT engineers could cope. (It was intended that the whole thing would become a mesh network using MPLS to route stuff and the core would vanish after a few years, but that's a different story.)
You have been waiting for fibre since then and are still getting copper.
But they don't as they still pay the same as an urban customer for the service even though there is a greater cost. Its not as though broadband is an essential like electricity.
VAT returns to HMRC. Livestock reporting to DEFRA (movements, registration etc). TBH there might still be the ability to use snail mail but it's a good couple of years ago that HMRC was pushing very hard to get people to file VAT online with the statement that it would be the only method available in a not very long period.
In the context and common usage "broadband" and "internet access" are interchangeable. I can't actually think of a currently available over copper pair internet access method that isn't some form of "broadband". Dial-up above 2400 bps(?) is, ADSL/VDSL is.
Of course "internet access" could include access available at the local library. "Local" being anything from yards to ten plus miles...
No they don't. The price is higher because there is no effective inter ISP price competition since it is BT kit or nothing in rural exchanges. We get ripped off for an inferior service.
Meanwhile the Superfast Broadband executives go prancing around town councils telling them what a good job they are doing (NOT).
Indeed they did. Briefly. Then they realised just how expensive it was, they all stopped digging and then they all went under or got taken over to become Virgin Media (this week).
So, yes...
PAYE
I'm obviously a bit out of touch. Can you really not do any of those things with paper, or sneakernet?
It's rapidly heading the way of an essential utility with many things becoming online only and/or non-online attracting higher costs.
Might be BT kit but you don't have to buy your internet connectivity from BT, you can buy from pretty much who ever you choose, so there is competion. LLU is a another block of competion and I guess one can argue that ISP X over LLU might be cheaper than ISP X over BT Wholesale.
Even with LLU the copper pair is still maintained bt BT Openreach. IMHO it just bungs yet another layer of "customer service" script jockys in the way. Under LLU you have no contract with BT, thus you are at the mercy of your LLU provider to contact and negociate with BT Wholesale who then pass it to BT Openreach.
So if you get broadband on the second one as well, then you can do as I describe. It alas means paying two BB subscriptions and buying a more sophisticated router, but it does mean if you have competing uses for broadband (or are doing something that uses multiple concurrent connections like moving files with bit torrent), you spread the load over twice the capacity.
VAT -
Exemptions -
Basicaly if you are insolvent or "HMRC is satisfied that your business is run by practising members of a religious society, whose beliefs prevent them from using computers."
Sheep goat and deer movements comes in from spring 2014.
Cattle movements are web based with options for propritary software to upload data or telephone "self service". The facilty for using the tear out movement cards from the animals "chequebook style" passport is still in existance but cattle they haven't been issued with those since 2011. Eventually there will be no cattle out there with them...
PAYE is now "real time" again like VAT I don't think there are many exemptions to having to send the returns in onlne.
Its also worth highlighting that a major limitation of ADSL is the A bit i.e. its asymmetric bandwidth - hence even for customers getting 20Mbps down, they are frequently stuck with 448 kbps up. That can become a real problem for many applications.
(FTTC is still asymmetric - but you get a big jump in uplink capability to 8Mbps or more)
Indeed. and when you try working from home where you want a VPN to allow file transfers in both directions, or add in services like online backup, and cloud delivery of applications as a service, and you start pushing the requirements further.
Even then its a moving target... 4Mbps will soon become "too slow"
There are higher overheads for off line stuff, that's why some shops are struggling. Do you really want most people to pay more just so the few who decided to live in the sticks can be subsidised?
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