Rural broadband speeds

[Bob Mannix]

Backup service isn't "broadband". The £69/month "broadband" gives you dial up speeds. For 2Mb it costs £369 per month plus £999 for the equipment plus £275 installation - hardly small beer!

[The Natural Philosopher]

Look I live in a rural location, and out here we dont expect to be pandered, because there ain't no one to pander us. We cut our own trees down when they fall across the road. We hanlde the inch of ice on the roads outside that aren'; gritted, We moan about the fact that no matter how little we use it, a 4WD which is essential, is taxed out of all sense.

We don't moan about the fact that broadband came late, and isn't fast. Nor te fact that postal deliveries are late, and irregular. Nor the fact that the nearest supermarket is ten miles away.

Thats why we chose to LIVE here.

Broadband is a commercial entity: Not a government supplied basic human right.

[Martin Bonner]

I don't think so.

For the last two years I have been an urbanite, but for ten years before that, I lived in a mud hut in rural Suffolk so I understand both sides of the trade-off.

The aggression is partly because many people (townies and country- folk) disagree with the OP, and partly because the post is OT and he won't admit it. (How to insulate the house is on-topic, campaigning for the gas company to reduce the price of gas is OT.)

[TMC]

Having read through this thread, I have been surprised at the aggression of the responders. This NG is normally extremely tactful in its comments to OP's but in this case I found many of the answers near enough offensive.

My assumption is that this is a demonstration of the disconnect that is occurring in UK society between those living in urban and rural environments, with the urbanites all too often classifying anyone living outside the towns and cities as winging scroungers.

I would suggest that all of you who have contributed to this thread should do as I have done and re-read all the responses and you will see the attitude that is coming across.

All I can say is shame on you all.

Rob

I have done as you suggest

I stand by all that I have said

It is not a 'city v country' thing its an 'I should be entitled to it regardless of the cost and my personal choices because others elsewhere have it' thing

I find it difficult to have any sympathy for the OP who does not even have the grace in the original post to acknowledge that he is paying no more for the far more expensive to install and maintain telephone line/exchange that he complains about than urban users do for theirs

Country dwellers make a reasoned choice to move to or remain in the country, they know what limitations exist

Is not the principle of the following scenario much the same?

People who live in urban terraced houses should be provided with adequate parking for several cars as presumably people in the country have this facility. They should all write to their local council to force this to happen as they pay their council tax and as much road tax as country dwellers. Its only a commercial decision after all to knock down some of the houses to provide the extra parking

Tony

[Adrian C]

From their description of the Pro-Range service.

"Our Pro-Range is one of the newest Satellite Broadband Products to be introduced into the UK market, and is fully RoHS Compliant( see FAQ's ). Using DVB-S standards the Pro-range offers both performance and reliability to those who can't get broadband via traditional landlines."

Very engaging to start mentioning RoHS in the first sentence!.

"Hell, it's RoHS! - I _must_ get this service!"

;-)

[meow2222]

Even a humble win98 box supports this. Just need a second nic and the cd or 98 files to install the necessary non-default bits.

Yes, but a) further compression is often possible b) lossy compression is possible for images, this can dramatically speed up webpage loading

to webpage dl speeds its very relevant. To compressed file dls its not

- but it all makes for higher mean speed.

No pause while it looks up dns info, it removes one instance of latency

Its infrastructure that makes businesses work. Taxpayers dont mind lots of other infrastructure with the same goal - and far more expensive infrastructure at that. Although its not libertarian, it may well add up financially for the public purse and country as a whole.

NT

[Andy Burns]

Not to do proper load balancing of multiple ADSL lines it doesn't, no version of Windows does, if you channel bond multiple lines from the same ISP to a single router it's easier, but lines from different ISPs is tricky even with Linux, and any one download will tend to use a single line.

[meow2222]

Businesses have now realised that getting real with potential customers costs money, and its no longer acceptable. 750k isnt bad at all for a rural location. If he were getting 56k I'd be more sympathetic.

Another thing that can be done is to have the local server cache as much as possible with a big disc, then revisits to pages load real fast, plus all the reused elements of new pages on the same site. Browsers already do this of course, but only with limited cache, and only one a per one user basis.

in that it will encourage many businesses to create less bloated sites. Whatever we have, the bloat will simply expand to fill the space and more.

NT

[dennis]

It costs more to give you any sort of communications.. think yourself lucky we are subsidising you. You wouldn't want to pay what it costs.

You can buy a fibre connection or a satellite connection. There is nothing stopping you and some other locals clubbing together to get a faster link to share.

Even though it costs a lot more to give you your connection. I agree with you you shouldn't get it at the same cost. I think double or more would be about right.

Longer cables cost more to maintain, you don't pay any extra.

So you want rural dwellers not to have broadband just because you get less for your money?

[dennis]

If people were prepared to pay for a better service someone would provide it. However I doubt if you are prepared to pay. If you were you would already have a faster service.

DIY fibre laying down rural roads?

[meow2222]

... and some found the op offensive. Personally I just think its an attitude that pervades our society today and is absolutely the core of so many problems people face today. And there is only one solution, to grow up and act to solve one's own problems. If/when people accept this, they do so much better in life.

I'm glad you acknowledge it is just an assumption. FWIW it has nothing whatever to do with where I'm coming from.

Shame on society for fostering this kind of foolishness, and many people for never getting real and sharing life's solutions with people. This stuff changes lives. Many people suffer so many problems from being stuck in the foolish attitude presented. And I mean serious problems. I shan't apologise for speaking of the real solution, I only wish people did so more. We still have freedom of speech, and the op is free to add me to the killfile if they wish.

Part of the solution,

NT

[pete]

The ISPs and infrastructure providers are commercial companies, with a certain, limited amount of money available for hardware and cabling. You seem to be suggesting that they spend it on upgrades in your sparsely populated region - which would benefit a small number of people, rather than spending it in a highly populated area, where it would benefit a larger number.

I would suspect that what you pay for your speeds are still considerably less than what *everyone* paid for that speed when it was considered cutting-edge.

I would like to be able to view your situation sympathetically, but I can't think of a single factor that gives me cause to think you're being hard done by.

[Andrew Mawson]

change to

Wouldn't be

exchange

exactly

knows

business

benefit

Well I moved from the fringes of London, where I got about 2Mb/s to here where we have no gas and no mains sewage, but my broadband is now

8Mb/s !!!!!!!

AWEM

[The Natural Philosopher]

That the complicated bit. Easier to order two phone lines and be done with it.

But even so its only double the speed.

[Man at B&Q]

I don't consider my location particularly rural and i only get 1Mbit/ s. it's more than enough for any normal use.

MBQ

[The Natural Philosopher]

And waht will that achieve? you need a second phone line.

Sorry mate, but we tried this way back in the 90's on international links. we got about 10% improvement, at the expense of a doubling in latency.

About the only ting that isn't compressed to the hilt these days is usenet and text emails.

DNS lookup are trivial in the context of even a 9.6 kbps link.

Get real. This is infrastructure for one person,. or at beast 20-30 people in his location.

[The Natural Philosopher]

You need to run BGP on the router, and unless you are technically competent no ISP will let you. Well you can run it, but they wont propagate it. or listen to it.

and any one download will tend to use a

Not if you do the routing properly.

With equal weighting and a choice of two routes, most routers will round robin on a packet by packet basis.

>

[The Natural Philosopher]

Its brilliant. I only changed from 512k last year. That was in fact more than adequate for most of what I wanted.

Well I am designing a web site that has to work on the need of s broadband line: so its only able to deliver at best about 700kbps upload to the net.

So I compressed it, and shrunk a 60k page to 16k..hahah.

[Peter Scott]

Now this really is getting off-topic but I want to answer some of the points raised. The county where I live subsidises cities. I am not making that up, it is a fact. I pay the same taxes as anyone else but the amount of tax-payers money spent per head in the cities is much higher than in the country. That's why, though I pay very similar council tax rates, I get much poorer services like roads, policing and education spending. Central government support is much lower.

Lets take a parallel example - television reception. It is thought proper that the whole country should get a television signal. Some areas like hilly and coastal regions couldn't do so without local relays serving a small number of people. Do we complain about the extra cost? Does the relay user pay a higher licence fee? No, we accept the premise that it is an essential service. Do we object that electricity users in the country have to be provided with long lines at extra cost? No of course not.

Happily I ignore the ad hominem attacks. If you can't win the argument, then attack the person. Such tactics have always been looked down on. Similarly the PC word 'offensive' should be struck from the dictionary.

Peter Scott

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well if you want to go that route, as a single non married childless person for years, I subsidised the rest of the population.

So what?

Cities alos benefit you, by making the countryside a nicer place to live in.

Not the same at all.

For a start the BBC is a subsidised operation, with a mandate to achieve ncoverage. BT aint. Once a tranmitter exists, its trivial to add commercial stations to it.

You should be complaining that the licence fee subsidises commercial stations..

It is thought

Not by me it aint.

I dont.

well actually they do end up with a worse service as a result. Cheap overhead lines prone to lightning damage and trees falling..

Te argument is whether or not fast broadband shuld be considered a basic citizens right, and subsidised to make it so.

So far, Bt has managed to resist being re-nationalised, and we have believe it or not, a better service than we ever had when it was.

If you want a monopoly state supplier of indifferent broadband, throttled back so that we all only get 512k,nbecauseits fair that way, say so.