Call me a Dick

[Tim Streater]

I *am* sorted. I get 35Mbps now.

[Tim Streater]

There are others?

[polygonum]

Someone I personally know runs a considerable business from his home in the south of England countryside. Until the other week, he had to make do with a pretty poor connection - basic ADSL which didn't manage the best ADSL can provide by a large margin. The only other viable option was satellite - but that isn't much fun.

He had lots of things in place to enable this including a local server.

Suddenly BT Infinity has arrived - and made a gigantic difference.

[Brian-Gaff]

Unfortunately only once at a rural exhibition. World wide Wait is probably the best description I can use. Try speed typing into a form field.

I'm sure that at whatever cost you could get it now with no latency due to the speed of light, but it has to be terrestrial unless they have developed crystal ball based servers now....!

By the way, its all very well boasting about 4G and all that, but even on 3G connections the speed swerves wildly from almost dial up to faster than one might think. the problem is that its not predictable, so you start a download, about 80 percent of the way through the speed has dropped to

800bits a second and the estimated time has gone up from a few minutes to 37 days. Brian

[Huge]

Apparently.

[Capitol]

Also true of some urban areas. Still stuck at 3.4Mb.

[Capitol]

The taxpayer, who else?

[Roger Mills]

Indeed. But much easier to fix in urban areas. Cameron's pledge will probably be fulfilled for you - but there's little hope for those far out in the sticks.

[Roger Mills]

Most likely no-one. I think we'll find that Cameron's pledge will turn out to be not "quite" universal when the costs are looked at.

[Big Les Wade]

The BBC news coverage of this announcement the other day talked about how the majority of Internet users "needed" fast broadband access - at least 10Mbps - because that allows them to watch streaming video.

Well, actually, the vast majority of people don't need to watch streaming video. They, or their teenage children, might quite like to, but they don't need it. Most business purposes - certainly those run from one's home - are quite well served by a 6-8 Mbit/s.

[spuorgelgoog]

Possibly because if everyone has streaming video the BBC can webcast everything and stop paying for expensive transmitters and radio spectrum.

Also the media types like being able to work from home a few days a week to wait in for the Ocado delivery and keep an eye on the au pair.

Owain

[Clive George]

That's changing. More and more business services are "cloud" based these days. 6-8 might cut it now, but more and more stuff is going to start struggling.

[Jonno]

Clive George scribbled

The biggest drain will be Win 10. Who knows what bandwidth that hog uses when it sends every keystroke back to base.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Back in the day 64k was what most businesses had and survived

[John Rumm]

Yup, about 5,700m further away in my case ;-)

[John Rumm]

and then the world moved on...

[dennis]

It doesn't, only the beta did and people were told that before they signed up for the beta.

[bert]

But then they'd lose all the licence money.

[DJC]

I manage perfectly well running a business from home (including maintaining a website) with a 3 USB dongle. Most months I only use about half of my 10mb data allowance.

[Johnny B Good]

====snip====

I was just making the point that despite the rather remote location, Shetland has had its own home grown ISP since October 1994.