News UK Government pays £363m for rural broadband

I Live in the middle of nowhere and consider my self very lucky to get 4.5mb our exchange only covers around 400 people. The in laws who live literally next for get 1mb

 

For rural areas it makes more sense for companies such as O2, Vodafone, Orange/t-mobile and 3 to invest in LTE or something. It also means that visitors to that area also benifit and In my head Mobile broadband coverage would hit more people for less effort and isn't 4G and even 3.9G faster than most broadband anyway?

I've started loosing faith in piped broadband since BT seem pretty reliable at wrecking things. They upgraded my area for infinity and now I get half the speeds I use to! As for all the wi-fi hotspots, they have either disappeared or became gimped to the point theyre too slow to use or not safe to.

 

Power companies really need to get into broadband infrastructure. Not that they're a model of treating their customers fairly or anything, but it would be much easier for a company like E.On to stick some fibre optic cables up than anyone else excluding BT, who have little incentive to improve things given that their network is normally the only option.

 

You are, I got that in central Aberdeen last year (12 now, wootles).

I can't imagine that this money is going to be spent in areas where anyone actually gets even 1mb just yet though, because there are still a great great many people who's connections are slower than 1 mbit/s.

 

I'd agree here - if you want F1, you can still get it (in 90%+ of cases) through a Sky subscription, even if you do feel the need to hold your nose while signing up. If you have a poor Internet connection, there's far less in the way of options (satellite Internet tends to be limited by greater latency and reliance on a phone line for upstream traffic) and it affects your entire online experience.

I'm fairly lucky, getting 14Mb/s down (translating to 1.3-1.4MB/s) and 1.9Mb/s upstream. However I do also remember the days of dialup (5KB/s max download and limited to 1-3 hour sessions depending on the ISP, unless paying for the call yourself) and how much difference even a 256KB/s (30KB/s) ADSL connection made to that. If everyone's online access could be raised to 2Mb/s, then I'd consider ditching overpriced TV events a price well worth paying for it. However £363m is likely to be a first installment rather than the full cost.

 

Are BT the same as those crooks Sky?

They advertise up to 20 meg, but realisticly all you will get is 3 or 4 meg.

And they never seem to offer a ten meg line, so your forced into paying for a 20 meg line you can never get use out of. And why is the government footing the bill for this?, surely it should be the providers paying for infrastructure not the people. Because if the public pay for it, surely then this would lead to extremely good discounts on subscription charges to offset the cost of public spending?

****ing con men.

 

ADSL and ADSL2 line speeds are critically dependent on your phone line and its length between you and the exchange. If you're getting 3-4Mb/s then you'll likely see the same with most other ISPs also.

The good news is that you may be able to improve line speeds by modifying internal phone wiring - see Kitz: Improve your adsl broadband connection speed for more details.

 

363 million does not sound like much at all when you think of how much it costs to upgrade broadband services almost seems like a waste even starting a project like this with what I would call a serious lack of funds

 

When you have a previous administration that blew and borrowed everything they could, combined with a global recessions, be glad there is funding about.

This money is for white area's, which is needed to help them, the rest will be reached by the market eventually.

 

i live in a village outside winchester, and my speedtest.net results show that my download speed is 33kps!!!

Long live talk talk and shitttttty cables.