Why is the UK so far behind?

[wasabi]

Politics and a big near-monopoly (BT).

Kill the monopoly and you get better speeds for most but some areas massively left behind where not profitable (read anywhere rural) Politicians don't like 'excluded' people as it makes embarrassing newspaper stories, so they stick with the awful monopoly incumbent and add rules to make sure people in the sticks get coverage. Downside is people in big towns and cities have to effectively subsidise all this plus live with crap service due to lack of competition.

[MrNeil]

Like everything else we invent and pioneer from the 1st jet airliner to toad in the hole then we always start to fall behind !

It's the British way

[yefi]

Virgin offer 100Mb/s where I am, but:-

Then when it fell under Virgin, They started increasing the speeds. They exceeded their contention ratio 10 fold in the area and in the evening when everyone was using the internet the speeds were slower than a sleeping tortoise.

This was my experience of Virgin cable on a 20Mb/s contract. Switched back to ADSL2+ with ~8Mb/s up, 1Mb/s down and it was much faster. Also, I notice in the small print that Virgin throttles p2p traffic on all of their services... great.

[pctech2012]

We also have a lot of NIMBYs in the UK that don't like cabinets

Example of this is what's happened in Chelsea http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18277561

[Sputnik]

We also have a lot of NIMBYs in the UK that don't like cabinets

Example of this is what's happened in Chelsea http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18277561

Ironically, It is usually the people who protest about the cabinets, Mobile network masts etc. That also complain about the lack of services available where they live too.

I remember a small village in Surrey where the residence refused to have the roads dug up for new cables to be put in but, Also complained about not having a decent internet connection.

[Sputnik]

This was my experience of Virgin cable on a 20Mb/s contract. Switched back to ADSL2+ with ~8Mb/s up, 1Mb/s down and it was much faster. Also, I notice in the small print that Virgin throttles p2p traffic on all of their services... great.

That was exactly the same as what I had, I had originally gone with Telewest as they were cheaper than BT in 2001 and the service on that 512k package was good, Then we gradually got free speed upgrades and then the prices started going up and the service went down. Network outages became too regular, Speeds too slow etc.

I changed to Be and being miles from the exchange I got a healthy 8Mb that just worked and worked well. I'd have stayed with Be but, They don't provide in this area so had to switch to BT.