FTTP saturation: Western Europe broadband speeds plateau

[ohmaheid]

It goes a lot further back (In the UK). In the 1980's, the GPO (The publicly owned Telecomms Company), built two factories. One was to produce the Fibre cabling, and the other was to manufacture the interconnects, with the intention of running fibre to the home, all over Britain. That would've made the UK undisputed world leaders in telecomms. Thatchers government closed them down, because there would be too much financial strain on the upcoming privatisation of the UK Telecomms industry.
The rest is inglorious history.

[Gentle Viking]

In Denmark we put a couple of billions in cash into our former national telephone company before we sold / privatized it, when sold, 1 hour later, those money was gone.
We also sold off / privatized our postal service, it can barely float and now have to pay XXX million grants from the government back as EU said those grants was illegal, Denmark could well be without a postal service soon.

It is a good question, when will we form and elect parties that have a genuine interest in running and developing our countries, the current options for my vote at least i cant see having much interest in that.

[LSG501]

While I'm not saying I wouldn't like faster internet etc for work reasons, and I personally blame bt/openreach more than the government (although the real issue goes back many many years), I'm honestly struggling to find a reason why normal home users need more than 80Mbps connections (yes they should ideally get everyone to this) but 25Mbps is supposedly enough for 4K streaming....oh wait the kids might needs to learn patience when downloading game updates due to their sizes (to be fair this is mostly them being poorly packaged and/or not 'modular' for updates)....

I can understand business use needing more and I wouldn't be shocked if more people would like a bit more upload speed but apart from bigger downloads and higher res streaming I don't personally notice much difference between 8Mbps and 80Mbps for daily use. I'm fortunate that I'm on an 80/20 fibre connection but I find it far more common for my line to not be maxed out from a single server because it can't saturate my line.

If the overall infrastructure isn't improved to supply the data at the faster speeds, headline download speeds mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.

[Unique]

I think you are being a little judgemental. I work with a lot of Ukrainian's (and more recently Indian's) and they all have decent 100Mb+ connections way cheaper than I pay for crappy 30mb FTTC. While eastern Europe has lower standards of living than the UK they are fast catching up and decent cheap internet has helped significantly with that. (They also have invested in getting highly educated work force - we just can't get enough Brits to do software development/IT)

As for your second point - sure you can survive with 50Mb nowadays but anyone working for home would benefit from a more stable faster connection - its not like we couldn't easily have had them had anyone had any vision in government or BT 15 years ago. We're behind and while we're starting to improve we're still not competitive.

i'm not judging, just explaning why figures can appear that way. like those experiments or data that shows one thing, with the presumption being X is the reason why, when it's really something else. such as finding pirates spend he most money on media, when the reasoning is people most interested in media may be more inclined to pirate in addition to spending


not everyone works from home, so again, no need to pay for a faster line if you don't need it. but even some people working from home online will find 50mb is more than enough for them. whilst i have gigabit internet, the amount of data used for my WFH use is hardly anything. it all depends on what you are doing

i tend to look at examples of other things that i'm not that interested in, by may need or have a passing interest, so as long as i can get what i want for a low price, the basic item is fine. on the other hand, the things i want/like the most, i'm more likely to get one of the best options as long as i can reasonably afford it, but i'm not talking buying ferraris. if the extra cost isn't justifiable to me, i won't bother

[TeePee]

Advancement over a two year period, including 18 months of shutdown. Not exactly unexpected...