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And with an average speed of 18.57Mbps, the UK lags behind 25 other European countries.
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Read more.Quote:
And with an average speed of 18.57Mbps, the UK lags behind 25 other European countries.
35th!!!! how can we be so far behind Hngary!??
Or Romania.
Blame BT for being so focused on shareholders and not providing the service they should have with infrastructure. Could be worse I suppose, we could be in America with little to no competition for who supplies broadband. Least Ofcom got something right.
I think this is a good example of why "average" is always useless.
Mean speeds don't matter, what matters is what the speed say the bottom 10% have.
As someone who's get 78mbits in one place and 1gbit in another, I can tell you the difference it makes to me is practically zero.
However, soon as I'm someplace below 4 mbits, it's almost pure hell.
Well i lived in the UK as well as US and there isn't all that much competition in the UK either I have comcast in the US $60 175Mb actual speed for that price. I could go higher but not necessary. If you are lucky to live in google fiber city you can get 1Gb up and down or go with a basic package which is free.Quote:
Originally Posted by Iota
Yeah but in the UK, at least the regulators are (more) on our side than in the US where the regulators might aswell give up their positions and save the country some tax dollars.Quote:
Originally Posted by rob4001
Precisely.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheAnimus
More useful would be the percentage of the population grouped into speed bands - although that would also paint a distorted picture as centres of population will tend to have an infrastructure that supports higher speeds.
Blame this is some part to the planning regulations (and no coherent approach just ad hoc) that make it really difficult to dig up the roads for fibre connections. Competition in this sector is a myth! Biggest internet players in UK are Virgin and BT. Who are Virgins biggest customer? its BT. Who is BT's biggest customer? Virgin.
That said i get about 191mb on average for a 300mb+.
Doesn't seem difficult at all - roads are always being dug up. The problem seems to be no-one wants to foot the bill for putting fibre in small villages. They're all too keen to install it in towns (where said road digging is more disruptive).Quote:
Originally Posted by Troopa
Just behind New Zealand?
Odd one that, I was paying almost twice the price for half the speed when I lived there for a couple of years. Didn't have many provider options either.
That was Dunedin, not some batch in the middle of nowhere. Saying that some parts were having 1gb/s rolling out to them when we left, think about 11,000 properties in total so that would bump an average up.
Averages are often experienced by nobody.
235 down here on Virgin 200 meg. Useles when their dns server goes belly up however (about 10 times a day at moment)
Used to live in Wales and got 1.1 meg. Now that was painful - small village. And that's the problem - nobody will pay the costs to upgrade a small village to decent broadband unless it becomes cost effective. It isgetting better - but not much. And of course averages are never the best metric to rank these things though I'm hard pushed to think of something better
So this is like a "broadband poverty" scale where if overnight everybody doubles what they get then those in poverty are still in poverty because of how you are comparing? Yeah, that doesn't seem useful.
Easy. Poor infrastructure. The UK is a 1st world country with 3rd world infrastructure.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zak33
And a long term nationalised telephone industryQuote:
Originally Posted by Sunderas
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sunderas
Its true that as a nationalised industry, the telephone infrastructure suffered from lack of investment. Since it became a PLC BT spent a shedload of money improving the backbone infrastructure.Quote:
Originally Posted by 3dcandy
However it has a universal obligation to provide a reliable 999 service (and I believe also a Civil Defence function) which meant that users always had a live line, even in the event of power failure - which meant battery and/or generator backed exchanges and copper wire to power the then rented instruments. In one area where BT trialled Fibre to houses, they still had to provide a copper pair to meet that obligation.
This was addressed here https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/asse..._group_plc.pdf
Of course, that is largely immaterial with many landline telephones are mains powered anyway, but the legacy means that the limitations of copper remain - and replacing that with FTTP is very expensive. FTTC is the compromise (and many FTTP installations in, say, flats, is actually FTTP with the final distribution over VDSL.)
Some countries had even worse communications infrastructure, and so it required a complete rebuild which enables new technology from the ground up, rather than incremental improvement.
But, as has been said earlier in the thread, 'average speeds' mean nothing really, more meaningful would be giving the percentage of population that can achieve certain speed bands.
Romania
FTTH (fiber to the home) connection
1GBit/s download - 500MBit/s upload
7.41£ / 9.8$ / 8.37€ a month