OT: my broadband

[charles]

in my case, the cabinet being installed is about 100m away; the exchange is

2.5km away. So yes, it is closer.

[Adrian]

Perhaps they could divert a bit more, then, so that something noticable happens?

[The Other Mike]

300bps ought to be enough for anyone

[Tim Streater]

In 1968, when I was doing my postgrad CompSci course, we had a visit from some PostOffice suits who were convinced that 2400bps was plenty.

[Dave Baker]

I really can't imagine ever needing anything faster than the standard copper cable broadband we have here in the middle of nowhere in Scotland. Fortunately it's only a couple of km to the nearest exchange so I routinely get 500 kB/s which equates to about 1.7gb download size per hour and it occasionally rises to 700 kB/s which is over 2.3gb an hour. That means I can download movies or tv programmes several times faster than I can actually watch them and I'm not sure what benefit being able to go even faster could bring me. As it is the main problem is more that the hard disk is always full with stuff I haven't had time to watch and I don't have space to download anything else.

This fibre optic stuff which I believe can go 10 times faster still seems pointless for the average private dwelling unless things I never do like online gaming need even faster speeds.

I remember my first internet connection which was on a 3.3 kB/s US Robotics modem in 1998 and it could download an average 3mb song track in about 20 minutes. A whole album took a few hours. Videos were nothing more than a pipedream. Then 5.6 kB/s modems came out and song track took less than 15 minutes to get. Wow. Then broadband appeared at an earth shattering 50 kB/s and you could download a whole album in less time than a single track had taken before. Now we're at least 10 times faster still. I can download a

700mb 90 minute play length movie in 20 minutes or less. By the time I've managed to watch it I could download 5 more movies I don't even have time to watch. I think there are better things to spend money on than ever faster broadband.

[Tim Lamb]

The danger that has already been identified is that site designers will assume that everyone has access to superfast BB and ignore those hanging on a mile or so of copper.

[tony sayer]

Just how far away are these other 50 people then?..

[tony sayer]

Dave .. do you have others in your house doing stuff like watching BB delivered TV and homework and Skype etc?..

[Bill Wright]

We do live in Doncaster. The address is Rotherham but we are in Doncaster.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

In the days of public service broadcasting TV relays were installed for small communities. It wasn't financially viable; it was just a small part of social equality. If you post a letter you put the same value stamp on it whether it's going a mile or 500 miles. When you pay your council tax it's the same amount whether you have one person living in the house or a dozen. 'Financially viable' is all right for most things, but not for everything.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

I already have two phone lines...

Bill

[Bill Wright]

I think the rollout to urban areas should be halted until the rural areas are slightly in front of them.

Bill

[dennis]

Maybe rural users could pay a more reasonable price to cover the extra costs in supplying them.

[Dave Liquorice]

That depends on what your household uses the net connection for. Couple of kids both youtubing or video calling over skype, parents downstairs watching somthing "on demand" will push a 4 Mbps connection rather hard...

Now jump forward a few years and HD TV streams at decent bit rates for HD, like 10 Mbps each, and that household will want a 30 Mbps connection. Oops, that's more than ADSL2+ can provide full stop and only available to FTTC customers if they are within 1km or so of the cabinet. IMHO FTTC is a mistake and it will come home to roost in 10 years or so. Bunging FTTP in is expensive but that didn't seem to stop the cable companies digging up the pavements in towns all over the country.

[Dave Liquorice]

built

Have you swallowed the BT marketing and think that BT Infinity is a Fibre To The Premisis service? It ain't it's FTTC, the hop from cabinet to customer is the existing copper pair using VDSL. The speed of that drops of drmatically with distance, you might get 75 Mbps for the first few hundred metres, then it plummets.

[Dave Liquorice]

Ah, ... Fibre does slow down but it's more like "you can't have 1 Gbps past 10 km on GPON". GPON is Gigabit Passive Optical Network, instead have having point to point fibre connections you optically split the fibre so one head end transciever can serve 32 customers. This is at the cost of range and speed compared to the point to point fibre which could do say 10 or 100 Gbps over tens of km.

Aye, multiple filters are bad and so is CCS CW1308...

[Michael Chare]

Quite often they already do if there is no competitor equipment at their exchange.

[Dave Liquorice]

Trouble is with so much moving "online" and some legally required stuff being online only internet access is rapidly becoming an essential utility. This is recognised by the setting of the 2 Mbps minimum Universal Access service. *Every* household should have that available to them as a minimum, it doesn't matter where they are.

[Adrian]

Or it might cost considerably more to send it 25 miles. In a couple of years time, it may cost considerably more to send it one mile than 400.

It costs one third more for a second person to move in to a house previously occupied by one.

[Adrian]

Umm, yes, it did. It stopped them so effectively that there's people in this thread moaning that the one remaining cable provider won't install another 15m of cable - and that's been the score for at least 15yrs now.