Don't quite follow the last point. I don't see how I benefit from cities. Did you mean by not having lots of houses?
I entirely agree about subsidies however. There are all kinds of them, including, I hope, one for the cost of providing better broadband in the country. I was attempting to point out that rural areas subsidise the cities, and would like a bit back.
To pick up the child point, without people willing to devote time and money to bringing up children there would not be the future earners to pay for the care of older people. Even if an older person is entirely self-sufficient on investments, there has to be a thriving economy to keep up the value of those investments, and this relies on young generations.
I live in the middle of the city and my broadband speed is barely 1MBS (because the BT lines are rubbish and I can't have cable) while my TV reception is also rubbish (and I can't have satellite). Can I have a subsidy to have a more rural lifestyle to compensate for this?
Won't happen. Web sites are designed by gel-haired, oddly bespectacled weirdoes dressed all in black with perfect eyesight and huge monitors connected to their servers with gigabit ethernet. That's why so many of them are crap. Someone pointed me at a "5 a day" video this morning on an HMG website; it's 176Mb. Like I'm going to wait 30 or 40 minutes for *that* to download.
Depends on your definition of rural. I've seen many rural village residents get excellent broadband speeds, as nowhere is within more than a mile or so at most from the village's exchange....
I don't like the way ADSL is marketed with the "up to" in a 6pt font or in a footnote against the 8Mbps or 24Mbps in 144pt. Neither does OFCOM and is attempting to do something about it.
And there would be no rural broadband at all, just like there is no cable outside urban/medium sized town areas.
Solution is to get off your bum and get a community broadband service running. Plenty of experienced help available, good starting point:
formatting link
DTH is possible, digging up roads is expensive and complicated legally. So you don't dig up the roads but bring the land owners on board to have fibre ducts laid under their land. Commercial contractors charge for digging holes but out in the country there are plenty of people with diggers, get them involved. There may even be some one with kit that can mole the ducts through rather than having to cut 'n cover.
Fibre is the way to go if possible, should have life of 20 years or more and upgrades just mean changing the kit on the ends. Symmetrical 100Mbps internet connection? See if you can sell bandwidth/services from third party content providers.
Backhaul rather than local distribution (fibre or wireless) is normally the hard bit, not sure how much BT want for a gigabit fibre connection these days. How are your local schools connected? Or hospital, is there an e-Health initiative happening or in the pipe line? Maybe the community can piggy back on those connections.
Does fibre have to be laid in ducts? I know it is fragile in itself but surely the cables are robust? The copper runs are all overhead once the edge of the town is reached about 3km away. Has fibre ever been installed overhead? I can see that fibre or wireless is the way it must be done, but my original point is there has to be some commercial imperative to get companies to do it. Allowing them to charge normal rate for inferior service (and yes of course I know there are people worse off than me) is not going to motivate them. It all smacks of the English habit of putting up with things.
yes, that is what was being suggested. 2 lines achieves upto twice peak and mean data rates. The clever bit is that it doesnt increase ISP subscription costs any.
Why would lossy compression of images, which can reduce image file size by a factor of say 8, make little difference?
I was discussing national investment in rural broadband. I would think it clear that this will have a positive impact on british business. Do you not think it would?
Thats exactly what we need more of. I load so many webpages using 100s of k, and would be happier if they used just 1/10th that. Grossly bloated code plus bloated content are a pain.
The other thing that totally pees me off is the likes of screwfix displaying just 10 search results per page, which grossly inflates total data dl and dl time, and for no visible reason. People who do that typically say 'but we have to think of dialup users' - do they not realise that for dialuppers theyre making it even worse by loading
TheOldFellow gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:
Bollocks.
They "refuse" to offer faster ADSL because of the limits of the technology.
They "refuse" to offer cable, because new cable hasn't been laid _anywhere_ in the country for YEARS, because of the back debts from laying the last lot.
You've been given links to faster rural broadband options, available today. But they're clearly too expensive for you. Oh, wait, you've claimed that's not the problem.
You'll get faster broadband at some stage, when BT's 21CN upgrades get around to you. But that probably won't be fast enough for you, because other people will still have better than you.
I bet you're a _nightmare_ whenever a delivery wagon pulls up outside next door, trying to see if they've gone a step ahead of you so you need to go and buy a newer/bigger/faster widget to stay level.
For the first page of say a search result but after that there is the "See All" option. What pees me off is sites that don't have that and/or no crumb trail.
Normally yes. You lay the duct then blow the fibre through. So each end =
point needs its own duct all the way back to a fibre hub. The fibre itse= lf contains two optical cores and two balancing ones but is still pretty light and feeble. "Duct" might be misleading, AIUI, it's more of a bundl= e of tubes one for each end point, I believe a 24 tube duct is about 2" di= a.
Robustish you can get robust fibre cables but I doubt they come cheap compared to stuff you blow through a duct.
Attached to the outside of the terraced houses is one of the ways that fibre might be distributed in the town. It would make sense to be able t= o fly across building gaps rather than go up and down.
Putting poles in probably isn't all that cheap, 20 poles per km? Not to =
mention the visual impact. Not sure BT would let you share theirs.
With low rural population densities it just isn't going to happen. Even =
the government are baulking at the cost of a full UK wide "Next Generation" installation, figures of =A325bn being bandied about, they m= ight spend =A310bn. The big plus is that the government are aware that commer= cial companies will not cover rural areas and don't want that digital divide = to get any wider. I'm confident that money will be available for community =
based enterprises to install fibre or WiMax type systems. Money won't be= available (as always) to keep such a system running, the on going cost o= f the backhaul could be crippling, income streams other than the end user =
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.