5 ms·

It is also funny to look at a map of network speeds in the UK. Everywhere is slow apart from Hull (a relatively gritty fishing town in the North East). This is

It is also funny to look at a map of network speeds in the UK. Everywhere is slow apart from Hull (a relatively gritty fishing town in the North East). This is the only place where the local telephone company wasn't taken over by BT, and was the first city to have full fibre. I understand that it is hard to provide fast internet to some parts of the UK...but most of England, where most people live, is fairly densely populated...this shouldn't be hard. The solution isn't for people to do this themselves, that reverses common sense (how can it be cheaper for some guy to just dig a cable themselves? it makes no sense). It is for the people who should be doing this to just do their job properly (BT have done pretty much everything to make themselves look bad, it is unreal...for some reason people still think Gavin Patterson is a legend rather than a gaffe-prone moron).

iptrans 6y ago
The reason why it’s cheaper for some guy to just dig a cable themselves is simple: 80% of network construction costs are labor costs. If your spare time is “free”, of course you are going to be able to compete on costs with a paid professional.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  And if you're willing to take the risks yourself, you can skimp on health & safety
tialaramex 6y ago
96% of households in the UK can get 30 Mbps. Now, some people do lots of hand waving at this point. Surely, they argue, if everybody had gigabit networking instead of just 30 Mbps we'd find some exciting new application to justify it? Nope. Some communities do have this and they don't invent new applications it mostly sits idle. The other fun thing that people say here is "Well but they don't". That's true, they can get 30 Mbps but they choose slightly cheaper offerings that are much lower speed. So why are you desperate to deploy higher bandwidth offerings? If your company finds that take-up of new 30 litre per second water supplies isn't what you hoped for, do you conclude people must need 30 cubic metres per second of water instead and deploy bigger high pressure pipes? Or do you say "Wait a minute, maybe people actually have enough water?"
- dijit 6y ago
  > 96% of households in the UK can get 30 Mbps. 96% may have 30Mbps advertised to them, but I would venture the question: do they actually get that? When I lived in London, I lived in Lewisham, Bromley-by-Bow and Whitechapel; I had shockingly bad internet in each of these places. I very commonly got less than 0.5Mbps ( for example: https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/757179610 https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/757179610 ) That didn't stop BT from selling me 16Mb/s.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    They don't get it because they aren't buying it. But yes, 30Mbps is what you'd expect to get at those 96% of households if you bought whichever of the mainstream services offers >30Mbps That might be a VDSL product from any of the popular ISPs (if you live with a few hundred metres of a "green box"), a cable product if you live in one of the cities or larger towns that have cable, or dedicated fibre link. Some people see significantly worse performance because of their own suboptimal choices (e.g. maybe the blinking lights on the supplied VDSL modem annoy you so you run a telephone extension to a different room and lose 4Mbps of bandwidth because crappy telephone extensions don't do high bandwidth networking very well) and over a population of millions some will see physical network problems, that may need repair before they see the intended performance. But on the whole this 30Mbps coverage figure is based on extrapolating measurements from real users over data about available service. I'm not aware of any 16MB/s products (16MB/s = 128Mbps or maybe you just meant 16Mbps) but Lewisham, which you gave as an example, has VDSL available at all the consumer nodes, so unless you lived in the £5M penthouse of some mixed use building in Docklands you could have bought faster networking you just didn't. It can seem like surely if they could offer 30Mbps VDSL, why is my ADSL only 1Mbps? But that's misunderstanding the technology. ADSL was deployed in the UK to exchanges, so the signal needs to get from your home to an actual telephone exchange, there's probably one in your borough but it might be well over a mile away. However VDSL is in street cabinets, so your signal only travels to the cabinet which might be only a few hundred metres away. This makes it somewhat more expensive but also a lot faster. Unless (in both cases) you don't buy it.
    - 6y ago
Reason077 6y ago
> "Everywhere is slow apart from Hull" Maybe that's true in areas that only have the incumbent Openreach (BT) fibre, but there are now several alternative fibre networks. Virgin Media, of course, has their own extensive national broadband network (hybrid fibre/coaxial). And smaller fibre-only ISPs such as Hyperoptic, Cityfibre, and Gigaclear have their own physical infrastructure. These guys typically offer gigabit speeds or more. Personally, not having fibre in my building, I've ditched the wires in favour of 5G home broadband, and enjoy ~400 Mbps for £30/month (30 day contract). Even better, I can take the battery-powered router with me when I need mobile WiFi, even roaming around Europe!

iptrans 6y ago

The reason why it’s cheaper for some guy to just dig a cable themselves is simple: 80% of network construction costs are labor costs. If your spare time is “free”, of course you are going to be able to compete on costs with a paid professional.

kalleboo 6y ago
And if you're willing to take the risks yourself, you can skimp on health & safety

tialaramex 6y ago

96% of households in the UK can get 30 Mbps. Now, some people do lots of hand waving at this point. Surely, they argue, if everybody had gigabit networking instead of just 30 Mbps we'd find some exciting new application to justify it? Nope. Some communities do have this and they don't invent new applications it mostly sits idle. The other fun thing that people say here is "Well but they don't". That's true, they can get 30 Mbps but they choose slightly cheaper offerings that are much lower speed. So why are you desperate to deploy higher bandwidth offerings? If your company finds that take-up of new 30 litre per second water supplies isn't what you hoped for, do you conclude people must need 30 cubic metres per second of water instead and deploy bigger high pressure pipes? Or do you say "Wait a minute, maybe people actually have enough water?"

dijit 6y ago
> 96% of households in the UK can get 30 Mbps. 96% may have 30Mbps advertised to them, but I would venture the question: do they actually get that? When I lived in London, I lived in Lewisham, Bromley-by-Bow and Whitechapel; I had shockingly bad internet in each of these places. I very commonly got less than 0.5Mbps ( for example: https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/757179610 https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/757179610 ) That didn't stop BT from selling me 16Mb/s.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  They don't get it because they aren't buying it. But yes, 30Mbps is what you'd expect to get at those 96% of households if you bought whichever of the mainstream services offers >30Mbps That might be a VDSL product from any of the popular ISPs (if you live with a few hundred metres of a "green box"), a cable product if you live in one of the cities or larger towns that have cable, or dedicated fibre link. Some people see significantly worse performance because of their own suboptimal choices (e.g. maybe the blinking lights on the supplied VDSL modem annoy you so you run a telephone extension to a different room and lose 4Mbps of bandwidth because crappy telephone extensions don't do high bandwidth networking very well) and over a population of millions some will see physical network problems, that may need repair before they see the intended performance. But on the whole this 30Mbps coverage figure is based on extrapolating measurements from real users over data about available service. I'm not aware of any 16MB/s products (16MB/s = 128Mbps or maybe you just meant 16Mbps) but Lewisham, which you gave as an example, has VDSL available at all the consumer nodes, so unless you lived in the £5M penthouse of some mixed use building in Docklands you could have bought faster networking you just didn't. It can seem like surely if they could offer 30Mbps VDSL, why is my ADSL only 1Mbps? But that's misunderstanding the technology. ADSL was deployed in the UK to exchanges, so the signal needs to get from your home to an actual telephone exchange, there's probably one in your borough but it might be well over a mile away. However VDSL is in street cabinets, so your signal only travels to the cabinet which might be only a few hundred metres away. This makes it somewhat more expensive but also a lot faster. Unless (in both cases) you don't buy it.
  - 6y ago

Reason077 6y ago

> "Everywhere is slow apart from Hull" Maybe that's true in areas that only have the incumbent Openreach (BT) fibre, but there are now several alternative fibre networks. Virgin Media, of course, has their own extensive national broadband network (hybrid fibre/coaxial). And smaller fibre-only ISPs such as Hyperoptic, Cityfibre, and Gigaclear have their own physical infrastructure. These guys typically offer gigabit speeds or more. Personally, not having fibre in my building, I've ditched the wires in favour of 5G home broadband, and enjoy ~400 Mbps for £30/month (30 day contract). Even better, I can take the battery-powered router with me when I need mobile WiFi, even roaming around Europe!