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About LinkBacksRead more.Meanwhile, Openreach UK has begun ribbon fibre cable trials for 5X FTTP rollout speeds.
Read more.Meanwhile, Openreach UK has begun ribbon fibre cable trials for 5X FTTP rollout speeds.
As ever the devil is in the detail...
Singapore - a city-state where people live in very large appartment blocks so getting a few hundred meg is easy if the building is getting a gig.
Iceland - most of the population live in 1 small city
Hungary - we paid for their infrastructure so it's much, much newer than ours
USA - cable is faster than POTS, they have a lot of cable
A lot of the rest shown there have higher averages for the same reason as Singapore - much higher propertion of appartment block acccomodation. We've got gigabit connections to many such block in London now with it being pretty standard in new higher-spec blocks.
Another thing for blighty is it's fast enough for most people - as long as iplayer works and people can browse tinder/facebook they are happy.
Define "most people". It's highly subjective if OpenReach provide adequate speeds, personally I think they're positively antiquated compared to what Virgin provided me more than 10 years ago.Originally Posted by gagaga
What about Sweden and Spain then.
About one third of the population live in the capital.
I am on Fiber and get 18mb down and 1mb up, it's shocking how bad broadband can be.
Salazaar : <Touching wood as I write this...>
Try telling that to my parents - 3.5 MBit on "fibre" with 0.4 up.
"In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship."
I would have expected Germany to be a bit better too, considering they're the largest economy in Europe.
Just to add to what gagaga has already correctly stated: Sweden have a load of overhead cabling from what I recall, and it's less-than-tidy in some areas. Same in parts of the USA. It's a fair bit cheaper to roll-out that way vs ducting but can cost more in the long run e.g. with breakage, maintenance, etc. BT's early trials/rollouts of FTTP were using very labour-intensive installation methods more like what you'd see for leased lines, but they're now switching to things like pre-terminated fibre and IIRC using mechanical vs fusion splicing at the customer handover point. It should mean cheaper/faster FTTP commissioning going forward, and that's indeed what we're seeing with the current push.
No idea about Spain.
You also have to remember the UK's copper network is relatively good quality vs what a lot of the rest of the world has (e.g. aluminium and/or very long lines) and the range to things like cabinets/exchanges has been more suitable for DSL. Some countries don't share our telephone architecture of being within a couple of km of a physical exchange building for DSL equipment either. Sure, there are some outliers in mainly rural areas, and some on long/poor quality lines for VDSL, but overall the need was arguably less critical than for countries where faster DSL technologies just weren't a commercially viable option, VDSL was in the UK, and has done a good job for a majority of UK premises.
Virgin's network already has the capability to offer greater configured speeds than it currently does, but Virgin clearly aren't seeing enough of a demand for it yet.
TBH though there's far, far more to overall broadband quality than averaged burst speeds. And rankings like this are certainly not comparing apples to apples.
It's possibly down to them being closer to the UK's situation then, taking account of existing infrastructure, types of premises being served, terrain, usage patterns, etc then. It's not all down to economy or government.
Edit: As the ispreview article says though, the source isn't even clear about their testing methodology, so apply a large pinch of salt to the numbers and assume a large error margin.
Last edited by watercooled; 21-02-2019 at 06:05 PM.
Biggest problem is a lack of flexibility for private companies to install their own lines. Few companies have the investment power to install cables in ducts/drains etc like Virgin but nor do they have the capability of upgrading lines themselves. If OpenReach were out of the way, EE, Vodafone, TalkTalk etc would have the ability to offer upgraded lines for a price to individual customers. Given I can't get Virgin, I'd happily pay the right price for FTTP
I'm from the US, in a major metropolitan area, and I find their claim that the *average* download speed is 107 Mbps... rather dubious. That may be the speeds ISPs *claim* for any given area, but I'll be damned if anyone ever gets that. I don't know how many times I've either sought or been advertised for higher bandwidth, only to be told "well, yes in your area, but not in your house."
Lack of what sort of flexibility? Also why do OR get the blame for other companies' decisions here? The likes of Vodafone and TalkTalk can and do install their own physical networks in some areas, but I'm not sure what sort of 'upgraded line' you're talking about? Rolling out FTTP involves far more than just replacing the last drop wire with a length of fibre! Don't forget EE is part of the BT group now.
Vodafone is a huge company, bigger than BT (and have done FTTP rollouts in other countries too), so it's not like they're a little guy in the industry, and OpenReach as far as I know are required to allow duct access to other companies if they don't want to go to the effort/expense of laying their own. I'm not sure if that includes OR helping them out when they run into the same real-world problems of e.g. full/collapsed ducts that OR themselves have to deal with though.
Even at peak times, I get fairly decent speeds on Virgin Media. I hear very few complaints about their service and speed in general.
Like quite a few rural properties / areas, I'm still stuck on ADSL2+ and 2k+ of copper. Can't really "ever" see them running fibre up here for half a dozen properties. So articles like this make me smile.
Live long and prosper.
wtf is the chart cropped, just show the uncropped? feels a bit click-batty
Sparse rural areas will undoubtedly be the most difficult ones financially, maybe we'll see some sort of government subsidy to push out to the last few percent? And IMO it would make sense for new builds regardless of length to have fibre run alongside copper even if it's not connected up yet, given the civil engineering part is often the most costly, particularly in those rural areas.
Satellite broadband is often suggested as an alternative but the latency is pretty high for anything like gaming, and I imagine it's high enough to make general web browsing sluggish too.
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