News - One gigabit per second UK broadband offered by Hyperoptic

[dcwt2010]

When someone invents robotic deep bore tunnelling robots that can autonomously lay a fibre cable cheaply overnight to outside your front door without hoards of overpaid, incompetent and under-motivated squishy-flesh-bags being involved. Next day a more personable droid knocks your door, drills through your wall and installs your box...

More likely though is that before that happens someone will develop a wireless technology that means Future-BT only need to install the cables to a box on a tower which can serve several square kilometres with cheap if not amazing latency connectivity. Rather like LTE, but better enough to replace fixed line at comparable cost and ability. I'm fairly sure wireless will eventually replace wired for general consumers, once the cost/speed balance is right and comms tech outpaces increasing bandwidth requirements from new content. Probably a long way off though but in theory wireless is a lot better and more scalable than the mammoth task of digging up roads every few years to upgrade the cables.

Kidding aside I'd settle for FTTC for now which is a lot more doable but with limitations of course.

What's more frustrating is cases like a friend of mine who lives just two streets away from fibre from Virgin Media... so they're stuck with a 1.5Mbs line. Yes, literally less than 100 metres away but they can't do anything as Virginmedia can't be bothered to extend their services.

As for Mercutio, your sarcasm is lost on me. What are you trying to imply there? That living outside of busy urban areas means we shouldn't have access to fast internet?

[Legan]

Very tempting offer. I'm at the end of the telephone exchange and end up capped at around 4mbps. Upgrading to fibre seems the next step.

[nexusmaniac]

Unless Google fibre gets here first I'm going for this

[MercutioUK]

This is brilliant, when can we have it in the towns and villages? Next century perhaps or am I being optimistic?

I'm all for progress but this digital divide is only going to get worse and worse.

I'm all for progress but this pollution and crowding in the cities is only going to get worse and worse.

You choose where you live knowing full well the bonuses and pitfalls. Faster internet > good quality air? Move to a city.

[MercutioUK]

Odd, this popped back up in the news feed, hadn't even spotted it was the same news post I'd commented on previously.

In response though, yes. I'm saying that economies of scale say that laying a cable to supply fast internet to 20/30 people in a village or laying a cable to 200/300 people in a city, it's obvious which will happen.

If the folks in the villages are happy paying £200 a month for high speed I'm sure there would be more suppliers happy to help but otherwise - where's the point? Companies are there to make a profit.

You have specific advantages living in the countryside, I have specific advantages living in a city. We choose where we live with (I'd hope) fairly full knowledge of why we live there.

If you want fast internet AND countryside your choices are going to be rather limited. I choose to live in the leafiest, greenest part of Sheffield with the countryside about 10 minutes walk further out of town.

Anyway apologies for the necro.