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The UK’s roll-out of “superfast” broadband will see us boasting of having the fastest broadband in all of Europe in 2015, as the next-gen fibre cabinets boost our averages to unprecedented levels.
Jeremy Hunt, the government’s culture secretary, made the claim at an event around London’s Silicon Roundabout web tech hotspot, telling attendees: “I am today announcing an ambition to be not just the best overall, but specifically the fastest broadband of any major European country.”
“Getting the plumbing right for our digital economy is not just an advantage to consumers – it is also essential for our digital and creative industries, all of whom need reliable high-speed networks to develop and export their products as they move large digital files around the world.”
The government wants 90 per cent of the country to have “superfast” connections of 24Mbps or more by 2015, with the remaining 10 per cent on the basic minimum broadband speed of 2Mbps. So we’ll still be a two-speed internet country peppered with slow rural lines, even if the headline averages are inflated by those in the fastest sweet spots. [Guardian via BBC]
Image credit: Fibre broadband from Shutterstock
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Two words:
Rural England.
Oh and we also need to stop advertising broadband speeds in bits, It means nothing to most consumers and confuses them! Files are in Bytes nowadays!
I agree, but no company is going to want to be the first to do it. 8Mbps sounds better than 1MBps.
Data storage always was in bytes, transmission on the other hand is always bits. I don’t see that changing.
“Hopeful Minister” is that an official position, like the Home and Foriegn secretary? He probably heads up the Ministry of Looking on the Bright Side, from whence all Government figures about the economic recovery come from. Although with recent budget cuts there is every chance it will be merged with the Ministry of Bullshit, since they basically do the same job.
Same one who said hosting the olympics would only cost 2Billion
And would save us from the throes of economic crisis.
That’s the chap.
I’d prefer the Ministry of Bullshit to the Ministry of Truth (or minitrue to be exact)…
But the Ministry of Truth is what you get if you let the Ministry of Bullshit handle their own re-branding exercise.
Our government would be better run by the Ministry of Silly Walks!
“Our” Government????
Can’t we just give the lot over to the Ministry of Sound and be done with it?
Oh you
If the SA government had a say in the matter, you would have a bunch of rich, fat-cat politicians, with no idea how to run a country, and spending money frivolously…
oh…wait.
This does bring up a question Tokester. As commonwealth citizens both you and Kat have the right to vote in UK elections, have you ever exercised that right?
One may have had a small part in ousting ‘new’ labour :/
So you’re accepting the blame for the coalition?
Literally nobody voted for the coalition
i think i said this before when “Rural England” came up, but my mother in law gets fast BB and lives in the middle of now where in Devon.. next door is 1 mile away.. nearest shop is 7 miles away! lol
Luckey Bugger
Lucky* dam edit.
Well, it must be easier to set up 4g all over the UK than run fiberoptic everywhere… So why don’t they just do that?
Because then we have to link all the towers by fibreoptic anyway.
so 1000 towers or 65 million homes and business?
a thousand towers? So your idea of all of the Uk is london then?
but yes, although when you add in the cost of building and maintaining the towers and the problems with latency if you want to game on it… It’s probably not much more cost effective or BT would be doing it.
The fastest?
As a 100MB customer, calling 24Mbps “super fast” didn’t wow me at all. What am I then, ultra-hyper fast?
Glad I wasn’t the only one who thought that.
But year on year our bandwidth requirements increase. So by 2015, 100mbps will be the normal, and 1gbps will probably be available. So well done Rm. Government Minister. You have predicted that speeds will increase in the future, and made it all look like your idea.
/corrections
Mr no Rm
Damn it –
not – not no
Are you serious???!!? As a 2Meg customer, damn bloody straight 24 is “super fast”.
If I’m still 2meg by 2015 I’ll, errm, hmmm, well, keep complaining on the internet about how absolutely dire it is I guess
Are You Serious!!! to me 2Meg is Super Fast!!
24Mbps for 90% is fucking awsome – just because you lucky buggers get ultra-hyper fast broadband dosent mean that 24Mbps is by any means slow, websites will load instantly and HD streaming also instant, any more is just a waste unless you download 3D 4x HD Movies and need them within the next 35mins… (subject to overeacting)
Dear Jezzer,
Please deliver this letter to whichever of your ministerial colleagues you feel would be most appropriate to action this request. In fact, give it to all of them because Lord knows you’re not going to be able to do squat about it on your own!
Go and see George. You know George, he’s the one with note paper that has squares on it and the Casio calculator where the numbers 80135 have worn off. Ask him if you can borrow some change, £100 billion should suffice, and take a walk down the road to the London Stock Exchange.
Try to find someone who at least looks like they know what they’re doing, and ask him if you can buy some shares in a company called BT Group PLC. Next they’re going to ask you how many you’d like to buy, the answer is all of them. Offer him about £20 billion, and I’m sure he’ll be able to make it happen.
What you’ve just done is something called nationalisation. It’s what you do when companies are either wrecking the economy, or not providing a particularly good service to their customers which would benefot the wider economy, in both instances putting their own profits and the profits of their shareholders before everyone else. However, as luck would have it, they now only have one shareholder, that’s you Jeremy.
Now if you fancy making a quick buck on the side, talk to a chap called Branson, I’m sure he’d be interested in helping you split up your new company and buying quite a bit of it. Liz has vouched for him, so he’s probably an alright chap. The only bit of your new company that you really want is called BT Wholesale.
What you’re going to do with BT Wholesale is give them about £60 billion, and you’re going to tell them to lay high speed fibre optic cable to every single property in the country, and remind them that you expect change! Every home, every business, no matter where they are. If Royal Mail deliver to them, then you’ll be giving them a fibre connection. Make sure they upgrade the backbone connection while they’re at it, we don’t want bottlenecks!
Now even you should be able to work out that you’ve got about £20 billion left. Take that £20 billion and give it to the schools and universities so they can start educating future generations in how best to use this wonderful resource that you’ve just given them. Give it to people who actually understand the technology so that they can help your government departments become more efficient and save you money!
As long as you maintain the connection to all those properties, you can lease the connections to other companies (again, talk to that Branson chap for some pointers). If you do it for a little bit more than it costs you to maintain it, then you won’t be losing any money and things will tick over nicely.
Now at some point George might start wondering where you’ve got to with that £100,000,000,000. Well this is a bit of a tricky one to explain – You’ve not really lost his money, but you haven’t got it to hand either. The thing is that he’s not going to get the money back today, in fact he’s probably not going to get the money back in the next 10 years or more. What you have to explain to him is that this doesn’t matter, because it’s not his money, it’s the country’s money, and the country is going to be around a lot longer than George is residing in No.11 Downing St.
What you’ve done is put it into a really long term investment, one that will build slowly but surely over the course of the next 50 years or more, long after everyone’s forgotten that George really looks far too young to be managing the country’s money. As long as you, and whomever succeeds you continue to use the money you bring in by leasing the connections to maintain them and keep them up-to-date, then the rewards will come.
The rewards will come because you’ve just enabled the UK to become one of the world’s leading digital economies, inviting investment from many different companies, and the development of business strategies and technologies to sell to the rest of the world. All of that is taxable, so if you manage to increase the UK GDP by just 1%, then you get an extra £6 billion every year in tax revenue. Allowing for inflation, in about 20 years every penny will have been returned, and you can start making money. In 20 years time, all of those children you started educating will be either in or graduating from university, with the knowledge to do even greater things!
Remember, you might only be in this job for a few years, but the Bank of England is here for the long term, and long term investments are a good thing for making lots of money, if you’re patient enough!
Sincerely yours,
The Technolicically Aware Electorate
Stay on your guard though, someday a crazy wild-eyed scientist or a kid will show up and try to steal your shiny new network from them. If that ever happens….
Couple of glaring typos in there, but you get the idea…
I read the whole thing, longest comment ever award goes to you I think.
You should see me on the VM forums trying to explain how TiVo works
Dear Technolicically aware electorate,
I think you mean Openreach not wholesale, Wholesale only deal with backhaul which is pretty well sewn up, Openreach deal with the “last mile” which will be prohibitively expensive to completely fibre, thats why they’re only doing 90% of the country to start.
I think the comment on the typos summed it up – close enough, but you get the idea
When you think about it why nother buying BT at all?
Unless you plan on getting future salvage prices for all that copper?
Simply let them carry on with their level of capitalism driven service and set up a new company to run full on FTTP with the billions you were going to spend on shares.
Because however poor and inept the direction from on high, BT already have the man power and established infrastructure to make it happen.
hmm, the technical ability perhaps, but they’re chronically understaffed for the level of work that already exists let alone increasing it.
Hopefully you’d get some more manpower out of that £60 billion, as well as fibre!
Of course you could probably just give BT half or even a quarter of than and then simply alter their universal service obligation to include a set speed of broadband and achieve the same effect. Their profits aren’t exactly that obscene after all, as evidenced by their poor share price.
I think I’d still rather have them nationalised. At least then you could ditch the dividends.
Na that’s not correct, BT Wholesale will connect you up to anywhere, you just need to be a wholesale customer.
Openreach and Wholesale actually compete with eachother to wholesale customers.
What are you on about?
Openreach own all the copper and the FTTC/FTTP service, wholesale own the exchange equipment. the only real competition is with openreach FTTC and wholesale ADSL equipment. (or if you want a microwave link I suppose). You can be a wholesale customer all you like but Openreach will still be the ones who connect you up.
The OP was talking about putting fibre down over the last mile so why would you buy Openreach who own the copper network? Wholesale own all the fibre which is what you’d want to extend into homes and businesses which would be via new ducting and not Openreach’s telegraph poles.
There’s aerial fibre which would use the overhead poles, that’s the way it’s often done now. Wholesale dont own the FTTP service, Openreach do.
http://www.openreach-communications.co.uk/our-network/why-openreach/
Cant reply to your message below… Reply button has drifted into the ether.
We haven’t got many of those left so it’s fine
I’m in Kensington one of the most sought after places to live and lucky if I can download at 200KBps with Sky “Unlimited” broadband.
Rural areas seems to get the better treatment here as its easier to lay fibre through a field than in central london
try RedRaw internet services, they cover my area, get about 5 – 10 Mbps, They dont cover a lot of areas but they are getting bigger. They basically have mast’s arount the rural areas of the UK that provide internet to their little outdoor signal boxes that then goes into your house. its quite good… unlimited data, quite speedy you pay a one off payment yearly witch is about £135.00 (plus first installation fees of around £200.00 ) check it out, it could be in your area.
kensington was going to be one of the first fibre places but your local council didnt like the big green boxes. So BT took their ball and went home.
No need to worry about this at all chaps….since the Lords have declared our communications system to be a strategic national asset no doubt it will be sold into foreign ownership pretty soon. Other countries own much of our water supplies, electricity systems, public transport and probably other, very strategic, assets.
thats actually a good thing, if we go to war with them we can nationalise the lot for free.