UK Internet and the Rest of the World

[jtwn]

So, as every single phrase i punch into the search is seen as too common apart from 'internet' , i'd thought i'd ask.

Why is the UK so behind in terms of the internet to Europe, Asia and N America? Our prices are so high but we get very little in return compared to the rest of the world.

I hear many arguments, BT and its monopoly, lack of demand, technologically behind etc..what are the reasons?

Would be nice to answer those smug europeans why :o

[Russ]

Because too many people are unwilling to complain high enough when they're presented with a creaking network and mail servers which work on a part-time basis (not aimed at NTL btw). It's part of British culture to accept crap service and products, this is what the rest of Europe finds amusing about us.

if only more people were willing to stand up and take ISPs to task over their failings then maybe we'll get somewhere.

[Halcyon]

It also depends if we get government backing or not.
Look at that company in Sweden that offers 10mb/s internet. It got government funding and practically every house has cable installed and it costs nearly nothing.
I think in this country we were just too slow and as loads of little companies set up, they had to get their own networks up and running which meant more time getting established.
However now in 2005 our speeds are still poor and maybe thats becuase of the technology. Or has there maybe been research in that people may not want to pay for such services.
If anyone knows, I'd quite like to know as we are falling behind rapidly.

[Graham M]

A guy i know in Holland has been selected to trial an uncapped 100MBit connection!

Originally Posted by Zeph

A guy i know in Holland has been selected to trial an uncapped 100MBit connection!

ummmmm....thats quite fast

[ntl customer]

OFCOM or some other regulator now thing 128k is broadband. WHAT?!?! You could get that with ISDN years ago if you had the money and could find an ISP that could do 128k. They should reset the limit up to 512k, AIUI that was the first speed when ADSL came around and when it cost something like £50 per month to have. They should call everything below 512k midband or narrowband.

I would also say BT are a main factor in this. They are a bunch of money grabbing *******s who screw the British people and companies out of every penny they can get.

Just take a look at how "broadband" is now. A fast-ish connection but stupidly low data cap such as 1Gb a month. Caps everywhere even for what were "unlimited" packages. I think UBC/CBC is set to make BT even more money and leave ISPs more worse off - they either have to squeeze more users onto crowded pipes thus lowering the QoS for the end user or introduce a low cap with PAYG/restrictions of some sort/no internet until the next billing period.

Also won't it leave people with the impression that broadband is now the next dialup - out goes the uncapped usage and freedom of not having to monitor how much you use and in comes the clock watching, monitoring every byte you download to ensure you don't go over the cap.

If only people actually stood up and made a fuss then I don't think we'd be in such a bad situation as we are today. Blair talks of Broadband Britain but we sure as hell aren't going to get it anytime soon.

[Russ]

Don't forget, it was only about 3 years ago that 64kbps was considered "copper" level broadband...

[mrlipring]

by NTL, it was. Not by anyone but them.

Thing is, it's a hard term to define. With practically the rest of the modern world ahead of us in terms of speed (but hey, generally our network infrastructure is a pieced together piece of ****. It's all being made to run on old ****ty cabling. BT, buldog, etc are doing a lot of work to squeeze the last drops from the network) the websites that stream video, generally one of the main selling points of BB, are more geared towards the faster speeds. 300KBPS seems to be an absolute minimum, so allowing for overheads etc, you're looking at a half meg connection to be the bare mimimum. I'd have to agree. Sure, i'd love to have a 10mbit pipe, but that's not gonna happen any time soon.

Actually though, thinking about it, the networks would be better off giving us higher speeds. With 10mbit i could do all my downloading off-peak (sure, with the higher speeds, i could download more, but i don't think i'd have all that much to download) and play halo 2 the rest of the time. My connection would be idle a whole lot more.

Not that peak/off-peak means anything when transferring data across the world...

[ian@huth]

The problem when you look at broadband worldwide is that each country tends to be judged by the fastest service that you can get there. Yes, Canada and the USA may have some very fast broadband but it is not available to everyone in those countries. Many users can get nothing more than dial-up or sub 512k broadband. Cost of broadband that people regularly quote from elsewhere is often based on special introductory rates which are not representative of normal rates. Canada has one of the highest broadband usages in the World, although they regard broadband as anything other than dial-up so 64k would be classed as broadband there. Details of Canadian ISPs can be found at http://www.thelist.com/misc/canada/

I think that part of the problem with things in the UK is that the Government want to milk as much as they can from issuing licences for the supply of services. Just look at the £ billions that 3G licences were going for. If Government had financially aided development of technology instead of making a profit from it we could have had significantly better and cheaper services.

[Millay]

I think we are forgetting that being at the forfront of most of the 19 and 20 century technologies we are now left with a creeking system that isnt really able to hande the demands we put on it, this goes for oads rail and telecomunications, I think on the whole we are quite lucky and we do get some good service levels and we are hell bent on amking it available to everybody not just people in new builds.

Its all very well sasying theyt get this and they get that, but there infrastructure is modern, they have more cash to ploay with from the EU, donted by us. and we only ever sing about what is great in there countires.

We dont get it that bad we just think we do..

[AndrewJ]

My dad calls it progress.

I call it greed from the companies but as a few have said, its gonna take goverments to get involved, and a massive amount of customers of isp's to make there point known.

I would sign myself up, I was at a friends place once while in Holland, and it was amazing 6.28mb a second download speed at his workplace.... i would drool over that and even 1.5mb speed seems slow coming back to UK...and we still have dial up...which scares me.