Rural broadband speeds

[Dave Liquorice]

Which AONB? No such restriction here (that I'm aware of). National Parks are different ball game.

[Gordon Henderson]

endty level @£69 is OK for email and some lightweight web browsing if you're patient. Web sites seem to have gone overboard a bit again, however I was at the end of a 512Kb ADSL line ysterday for a bit, and yes, it really felt slow, but it was more than usable with a bit of patience.

Big contrast the day before when I did an install that achieved 23Mb/sec on ADSL2+... However that was in the big city (Bristol!) and 0.5Km from the main exchange...

The faster ones might be very suitable for a small community who were willing to share the costs though...

Gordon (Living on the edge of Dartmoor in rural Devon, getting 8Mb ADSL :)

[Dave Liquorice]

Does that use the satellite for the uplink or do you still need a phone =

line for that? The satellite only providing the down link?

It's certainly an option for the backhaul but you really need one with t= he uplink on the satellite as well. Satellite doesn't do a lot for latentcy= , any gamers would throw a hissy fit. B-) I guess for ordinary browsing =

you'd get use to the second or so delay from click to anything happening= .

[Rod]

Even one on the ground behind a hedge? That was the solution a neighbour arrived at when challenged by that problem. It was accepted. But I'd guess they could have done that without even being noticed - but they initially asked about putting one on their house. (That would have been on a G2 house in small town - can't remember if it was a conservation area or anything else, but it looked like it)

[meow2222]

doesnt make any difference to the fact that one can greatly reduce file size by further (lossy) compression

NT

[meow2222]

Sometimes there is a 'see all', sometimes there isnt. When there is you get to load the page twice - what a waste of time. When there isnt...

NT

[Dave Liquorice]

Not there for a list with less than 10 items?

True it would be better if you could make it sticky with a cookie or something.

[Gordon Henderson]

According to the website, it's 2-way.

Yup. Gamers would not be happy, but for people doing businessey type stuff - ie. no games/p2p, big streaming stuff, it looks OK. They even say that VoIP works OK over it. There will be latency, but that's managable, even in VoIP.

I used an aramiska link some time back for interactive stuff (ssh) and it was mangable. The latency wan't really noticable for general web browsing or email.

Gordon

[Peter Scott]

Thanks for your useful contribution Dave. That's filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge about fibre. If BT were to do the cabling then they would use their own poles of course and they are already there in most places. Satellite is not really the answer. The relatively low speeds and high cost and latency makes them unviable.

As you will see from my original posting I don't believe that there is any intention of providing a remotely comparable service outside of towns. I am encouraged that you think there will be money for community enterprises.

I later made the point that rural areas subsidise the cities and it is not unreasonable to expect some subsidy in the opposite direction for such as data transmission. This might answer your valid point about maintenance costs not being met by income. We now have a generation that has never known other than Thatcherite 'thinking' about the infinite 'wisdom' of the market. There are areas where the market is inappropriate and this is one of them. Don't get me wrong. I remember the bad old days of waiting six months to get a phone line. Privatising BT was mostly a great idea. But as enormous sums of tax revenue are pumped into rail, a similar case can be made for money to be put into the data system. Indeed more people use the Internet than trains.

My point about lower charges for lower speeds was not entirely serious. However whilst suppliers can say 'well they've now got broadband so stop whining' (not mentioning the increasing differential in speeds), the future problems become hidden. Yes there are many inefficient web sites that soak up bandwidth. IT was ever thus. Just take a look at Microsoft's bloatware! Back in the 80s who would have thought that PCs would need to store digital photos each of which would take up more than entire hard disk of 10Mb? Why on earth do we need bus speeds higher than

1MHz? The Internet is a wonderful resource that enables business and draws people together nationally and across the world. It must not be throttled in its application by failure to invest.

Peter Scott

[Rod]

Only available where there are fewer than, I think, 6 'normal' pages.

Hacks me off that even sites that allow a full 'see all' option (or just 'long' pages) frequently cannot remember from one session to another - even when they store cookies anyway.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No he wsn't He was suggesting that te combination of a

a twin NIC windows box a neighbour some unspeified distance away

was a magic solution for bandwidth.

Well it isn't.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes, but they dont have to be underground.Its normally 'blown' dwon plastic tubes.

I know it is fragile in itself but

Trouble with overhead, is that its not as simple to replace a bit of optical fibre that a tree has crashed onto..

Mind you since a fibre is currently capable of about 8Gbps*, you don't need a lot of em.

The real issue is taking power down to repeaters and splitters.

A whole new architecture is needed.

• from memory.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Why would backhaul be anymore crippling than for anyone else?

Ive dne te costings for all this, and becoming a 'village ISP' is viable at the ongoing level. Its the cost of customer acquisition and fibre laying that kills you.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Images are always compressed. GIF, JPEG, PNG - all compressed to the hilt.If you mean reducing image *size* or *quality*, that's a different matter. Most compresion f data streams is designed to give 100% recovery of the actual raw data: with an overcompressed JPEG you don't get the quality back ever.

I did that on the fly to ensure that thumbnails weren't massive pictures displayed small..

Not really, no. Since the numbers of people living at the end of very long lines is rather small.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Why not replace all images with a line saying 'here used to be an image here' and be done with it?

[The Natural Philosopher]

I resent that. Apart from the bespectacled weirdo bit.

My eyesight is crap and I never wear black, and never use gel.

[Tim S]

The Natural Philosopher coughed up some electrons that declared:

What happened to mesh WIFI deployment?

I've experimented with meshing out in the fields and it works pretty well and the nodes are cheap (like 50-100 quid plus any waterproof housing as needed).

If you've got a fairly compact village, you might be able to serve a few hundred houses with comparatively few nodes and one decent uplink.

That at least reduces the harder part of the implementation problem to "get a decent uplink" and with a 100 or more customers, there's more of a chance of being able to get something off BT. The mesh is totally DIY-able by a couple of clueful people and you'd only need a few customers to volunteer to house and supply the nodes depending on geography. The more adventurous might be able to get permission to affix the nodes to lampposts including taking a supply.

It's easy to show a proof of concept with a couple of nodes to persuade the Parish Council to get behind it, should their political abilities be advantageous.

Wonder if any village has done this?

I've heard of someone doing a DIY medium range radio link down a welsh mountain to a mate who was in range of ADSL. Involved a couple of woks (yes woks) as signal directors.

Cheers

Tim

[pete]

Prices may have dropped, but have you seen the (frankly unusable) data limits? 1GB before they start to drop your speed from 512Kbit/sec. If you're unhappy with a 750kbit/sec landline speed, then I can't see that a 1Gbyte limit will last long. You certainly couldn't run a web- based business with such a poor and expensive service agreement.

[Gordon Henderson]

I did this for real some years back. Supported 3 communities in Devon & Cornwall via Wi-Fi. 2 companies went bust trying to make it work. (fortunately I just staff/contractor) I only kept it going with a grant before BT enabled the exchanges...

It really wasn't financially viable. Probably still isn't. Our biggest hit was the installation because we did it properly with outdoor kit, proper line of sight and so on. We had to pay farmers, and others for the use of their roof-tops to put the kit on, then getting in a 10Mb backhaul feed wasn't cheap. (Neither was the kit to send that signal

17.5Km via a 5.8Ghz link to the local head ends)

You can bodge it with mesh, indoor antennae and so on, but it won't be reliable with no guarantees of service, limited bandwidth, and so on.

Ah well, those were the days. Money up-front if I ever had to do it again.

Gordon

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not cost effective versus BT copper basically.

If people were prepared to sign up to £30 a month for high speed broadband, many things would be possible.

With people offering deals at £15 or less, its not worth raising capital for.

Wifi only covers the last couple of hundred yards at best anyway. - you still have top lay fibre or tight beam microwave TO it. And it congests fast.

Yup. Its doable if thats what people want.

But you need s strong technically competent local team to do it.

You can get anything of BT/ISP's if you pay for it. 2Mbps to your house rock solid 1:1 contention ration and zero throttling..for a mere 12k a year or so.

WE tried, but it was doomed. BT imply saw where the interest was, and broadband enabled the villages that looked like their act was getting together. At silly prices as hey get their backhaul at trade prices..

Woks are good, yes.