[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

Given BT haven't announced any plans to go above the current speeds I'm not sure what discussion you're referring to. Quite the opposite actually, they're on record as saying vectoring, at least initially, is not seen as an opportunity to increase headline speeds.

The one I was replying to:

Originally Posted by craigj2k12

Last I heard it was being rolled out to enable a possible 110Mb/s or 120Mb/s service, merely rumours however

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

Roll out if it happens will be for enabling more people to hit maximum speeds initially.

No plans for higher speeds on the current profiles, beyond rumours of a ~100Mb service. 110Mb or 120Mb will be achievable by hardly anyone, even with vectoring.

Nobody said they announced anything, it's all rumour at the moment anyway.

I couldn't care less about our comparison with Germany, owing to the fact that I'm in the UK, not Germany, and have no more interest in comparing our services to Germany's than I do comparing the private parts of my anatomy with someone else's

We can play games by comparing ourselves with countries that are far more sparsely populated, hence have far higher costs of deploying NGA, doesn't change that we could and should be much better.

A far more accurate comparison would be if we compared ourselves to Switzerland or the Netherlands. 85% of our population live in England; England is more densely populated than anything in Europe apart from Malta. 98% of the Netherlands has access to SFBB, there's more FTTP in one city than in the whole of the UK.

Well I could also say I couldn't care less about England, I'm in Scotland, not England but then the anti-nationalists would get me

Now the comparison countries used by Ofcom are Germany, France, Italy and Spain, all countries with similar population density to the UK as a whole (not England on it's own). The UK's overall population density is barely higher than Germany or Italy. But if you want to make arbitrary divisions within a "country of countries" I haven't seen separate figures for England vs. Scotland vs. Wales vs. NI so I can't really comment. Similarly I've seen no figures for FTTx availability vs. population density in separate countries, since that's what you'd really need to compare if you want to get super pedantic. After all nobody's expecting the top of the Swiss Alps to get FTTP any more than the Peak District, and there's parts of the Netherlands with zero broadband availability whatsoever (granted, there's nobody actually living there). That said, both Netherlands and Switzerland are far smaller than England or the UK (both less than 1/3rd the size of England alone) so that's hardly a fair comparison either. Switzerland, also being non-EU, has considerably different economics too.

Then again, looking here (again slightly old data):
http://point-topic.com/press-and-eve...age-in-europe/
The Netherlands, despite being the best connected country in Europe still only has 1% more FTTP coverage than the EU average (13% vs. 12%). Oddly enough the UK's LTE coverage has kept pace with that of the Netherlands for coverage and speed as well.

Strange - you're constantly spending money on IT, seem to have more hardware at home than you support at work and have a NAS larger than some SME's but are fine with broadband way slower than many comparable urban areas outside of the UK.

Would have thought symmetrical gigabit would be of huge interest to you.

Sure, I'd take symmetric gigabit if I could get it, I'd happily also take BT FTTPoD once it arrives. Yet being in the far reaches of Scotland I'm glad to be getting 80Mbps whereas friends of mine in "comparable urban areas outside the UK" are stuck with 1/10th the speed or less. Indeed, of my four flatmates, the one from Switzerland only gets 6Mbps while at home, the one from Germany has 2Mbps at home. I think the gal from Estonia is the only one who gets broadband of even the same magnitude available but even then it's only 10-20Mbps.

And then, even I personally, can't think of any real justification for symmetric gigabit. Most of my big-file downloads either come from Steam or my own dedicated server which only has a 100Mbps link, and most Steam games already complete within 10 minutes on 80Mb. If I was desperate for symmetric gigabit I could install a PtP wireless link on my roof and steal it from work, but I just don't see any need. As for streaming HD from my home NAS even that doesn't really need more than the 20Mbps upload I already have, given that's sufficient for near-perfect quality full HD and I can't reliably get more than 20Mbps while out and about anyway (nor can any other country - the UK has among the fastest average LTE speeds in the world)

Oddly enough though, all the largest EU economies have considerably lower FTTP penetration than Europe as a whole, or several exemplar countries like Holland. While the politics and economics of smaller countries will always be different, chances are if you look closely enough you'll find areas of England with the same FTTP availability as parts of the Netherlands. Extend your stats for the Netherlands outwards to include a land area the size of England though and the picture won't be nearly so rosy.

(Oh and I don't have anywhere close to as much hardware at home as I support at work, for one, just the current underspend in this year's budget alone is three times than my annual salary. Then again, since it's my job to find something to spend that on, maybe I should try wrangling 'Installing a dedicated, symmetric 10Gbps fibre line from the office to my home to enable more efficient remote working' as a business expense)