The BBC Strike Again

[Jonny M]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3353911.stm

Here we see yet another story of the government backing some wacko scheme rather than admitting they should have invested in cabling the country up.

Is there any real possibility of the quality of service of radio broadband being sustainable, what with the awful security currently offered by wireless connections (speed dropping if people work out how to access the connection for free and using up the bandwidth for everyone else).

Doubt it will take off tbh, at least not for a good few years.

[Jiff Lemon]

They're trialling something similar dow here in Milton Keynes. The problem with laying cable is the cost . It costs roughly £10k per mile to lay before you start looking into the disruption caused by doing so.

Whilst I too would campaign for us all to be using fibre lines and have the 26meg pipes that places like Sweden and Japan have, you've also got to conceed that something is better than nothing. Sure it's not the best solution, but for peeps stuck on 56k, you could offer them damp string connected with tin cans and so long as they got 512 from it, they'd be happy.

[këö¬t]

wasn't milton keynes 'fibred up' so to speak when it was built?
us on cable are waiting for the analogue shutdown, once all those bandwidth hungry analogue channels are gone, they're more room for broadband.
those out in the countryside will never get proper full speed broadband, there isn't the demand, and it's costly to bring it to them. 'tis a problem with bt being commercial, looking out for profit, whereas a state owned telecommunications giant would let broadband be free for all. then again i'd dread what the government would be like with something as technical as broadband internet.

[Jiff Lemon]

Originally posted by këö¬t
wasn't milton keynes 'fibred up' so to speak when it was built?

Indeed it was, and therein lies the problem. Whilst fibre can support silly amounts of bandwidth, the exchanges wont. This has led to BT ripping up the fibre in some places to lay copper Milton keynes other big problem is that its taken BT over 3 years to admit there's a problem, and that in all honesty, they haven't got a clue where the cables are routed!

For example, one bloke has broadband, and is 3.7 km (cable length) from the exchange. Another bloke lives across the road from him (less than 100 yards) but can't get broadband cos he has a cable length of 7.8 km! You work it out cos BT can't!

I ended up moving house simply to get broadband!

[Rythmic]

You've got to firmly base the blame here with BT. They're run so badly that it took them two years to implement a process for upgrading an ADSL line (rather than removing it, retesting the line, reinstalling...)

If they'd have stuck with the project, they could have had digital exchanges in the 1960s. They should now be installing equipment to take advantage of optical lines, but they aren't.

[wasabi]

BT have been left to run as a monopoly too long and the political will to force change isn't really there - if the govt really does slap BT by forcing local loop unbundling etc, BT will get really snotty and mess things up for the newcomers and as a result, us the customers.

Mind you, with competition as tru;y parp as NTL its hardly surprising they drag their feet. I suspect that long range wifi is the only thing that will really rock the boat, but thats a long way off.