*cries* 24 Mb ADSL (LLU)

[holy god of nil]

I'm 900 metres away from my exchange, just hoping for a decent speed.
I'll probably find that my line bends and twists to a lenght of 3 km before it reches my house and that its made of that well known line material, plasticine, giving me a blistering speed of 4mbs or so.

[peterb]

Now why didn't BT realise this and use good quality equipment rather than cut corners and try and save a couple of million here and there. Not only that but the use of aluminium cables in certain areas to cut costs now means theres pockets of estates unable to get broadband unless theres an alternative.

Ofcom have just done quite a good study on the next generation of networks and this can be found at the following link ;

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/cond...nfc/statement/

Roll on the future

The "Victorian" telephone lines are often cited as reasons why BB is so (relatively) slow - although in practice there were very few telephone lines installed then!

However modern telephone lines are far different from the old dual lines that were familiar along railway lines in the 1960's and 70s, and modrern cbles have far better characteristics than their previous counterparts.

Aluminium cables are almost as good as copper for carrying ADSL signaks - the problems come when they are joined to copper (or other dissimilatr metals) and the joint gets damp - then electrolytic corrosion takes plce and the joint becomes unreliable.

Some estates in a couple of areas were unable to get BB because they had fibre to the door, or to a nearby roadside box - the system called TPON was unsuitable for ADSL which relies on a wired connection thtrough to the exchange.

The population density in many Asian cities is much higher than UK - making it feasible to run fibre to buildings and install the DSLAMS there and use copper for the last few hundred feet. That is possible in the UK in some areas (and will come) but rural areas wil always lag behid (and the same is true in Asia etc). I would expect the next 20 yaers or so to see fibre delivered to raodsode boxes with DSLAMs installed there, but it will take time to implement. As ever, the limiting factors will be the capacity of the backhaul that aggregates the individual users, and as someone pointed out, the speed of the servers you are connecting to.

[aidanjt]

To think Maggie thatchers government threw out BT's proposals for a fibre network back in the 80's due to BT having an 'anticompetitive advantage' with it.. They should have let BT go ahead and do an LLU.

Here in Ireland the main electricity supplier ESB has recentlly deployed an IP based fibre backbone network throughout the country, this removes the onous on Eircom having control of the telecommunications and networking (even though Ireland passed LLU and regulatory laws a few years ago), giving customers and businesses more choice and better competition.

BT's NGN looks good and seems to be going the same direction, but a second infrastructure provider wouldn't be a bad idea either