News Britain hits broadband milestone

We all complained about the lack of broadband a couple of years ago, and now, they seem to be everywhere - Today we have almost half of the connections to the net going through fast connections. With this in mind, several sites have picked up on BT's has announcement that it's prophecy of 5 million broadband connections will be fullfilled sometime this week, one year ahead of schedule:

This week BT is expected to connect its five millionth broadband customer.

The milestone comes a year ahead of the the telecoms company's own predictions and includes broadband connections sold on by third party firms. Lower prices and higher speeds forced by strong competition among broadband suppliers are thought to be behind the sustained growth in faster net access.

The figures suggest that soon more than half of all net users in the UK will be on a broadband connection.

More from the beeb here

 

And the net's still not fast enough compared with other countries.

I think the UK has the fastest rate of growth of broadband users in the world.

 

when BT wholesale finaly opened up the way it should of 5 years ago, everyone gets broadband. Must be some connection there.

But have you noticed how much cheaper telecoms is now?

my rental is £50 per month, including 2mbit ADSL, free calls 24/7 and rental. Nifty!

 

You may also notice that very recently BT doubled the speed of all it's services for free. However, they also cut the bandwidth allowances in half across the board. This isn't the way to go, and they seem to think they can fool people by heavily advertising the carrot in one hand while slyly degrading the services with the other.

 

Ouch , Im a Brit living in germany... With Arcor I get ADSL 3 mbit (Flat Rate), ISDN and Flatrate telephone calls anywhere in germany @ 59 Euros per month...

In US its even cheaper and I beleive that users in Sweden get 10 mbit pumped in to their houses...

 

From a go vernment point of view it makes sense though - the only thing people really need uncapped downloads for is media piracy (thats all I use it for!) - gaming, surfing, emailing and everything else you can do just as well on a very fast, but limited use connection.

OTOH it is annoying having to read the small print on these sites to see who'll let you use torrent.

 

To me it seems contradictory to advertice BB as the high bandwidth, high content media form for the future yet to impose bandwidth limits. I completely agree witht he fact that it will impact the file sharers most of all, but there are plenty of people who chew up the bandwidth allowance in no time at all - as i do @ uni' and I don't even download stuff when i'm here.
Plus there's plenty of legitimate content to be had from the net, such as video news and program highlights off the BBCi site.

 

I get 4Mb for £50. However I have to pay for Line Rental & Cable TV, I think the whole package (I have everything) comes to about £80 a month.

 

Code:

I beleive that users in Sweden get 10 mbit pumped in to their houses... 

I heard that in some of them northern countries u get 100mbit/10mbit lines for as little as 59euro, and the 1gbit/100mbit go for something like 79 euro...


thats quite frustrating when ur still on some 4mbit/128kbit and u pay like 50euro here n belgium....

 

don't feel hard done by - we (peeps in UK) pay about £20 (30 euros) for a 512k/256k....

 

im still on ye old 512kb broadband i want 2mb but my dad wont pay out the extra money for it...

 

internet sucks in the uk speed and limits and price. isp just like making money and fuking us over

 

welcome to britain

 

it does suck having BB in UK... i no people that like in the netherlands areas and they pay around the same as me for 8mb

 

ok now they've uped the download, when do we get to see the upload getting faster? were arent all warez junkys.

 

Whats gonna happen when we reach 8mbps? we can't go any faster as UK lines are not capeable to doing so. Is BT gonna replace all these lines with fibre or something, I don't think so, it would cost billions. How do the other countries have mega fast connections?

 

when we reach 8meg (which UKonline has via Easynet's LLU service) then theyll just flip the switch to ADSL2 and 2+ which can get to 24megs up.

 

They have newer telephone systems, which are closer to being accessible by workmen, rather than our 200 year old phone system which is buried under all the buildings and stuff - replacing a line is much more difficult.

 

ffs you young-ens, we always been raped on net.

in the days of compu-serve been the only people having a dial-up in cornwall (low-call wasnt avaiable yet, so i actually dialed a local number, truro) i could only connect to that one at 2400baud, my 9600 i had to dial bristol (long distance) and when it first came to cornwall i had to pay £2 per hour ontop (or my dad had to ). Was fine when we lived in beconsfeild because a local number gave me the full 9600.

Then came 28.8k most ISPs charged a little bit extra to be able to connect at that full speed, but by then the uk lowcal service was comming to effect.

I went to isdn very swiftly, costing about £110 per month, for off peak only access. (i was very ill and theres **** all to do in cornwall).

Then that dropped to about £80, for 24/7.

when broadband came in, the 1mbit was costing me the best part of £100 (but i was having to do a fair bit of conferance talks with 8+ people at the time so it was needed.)

so for us brits, we've always been ripped off, from cars to transit!

an example i buy say 3mbit tier 3 stuff, in telehouse, will set me back about £60 pcm, a much better conectivity bw in the states, costs me about £30 including 1u !! So when our ISPs are paying more we will too with a government that ignored a lot of advice about schools, and gave them isdn between their entire network
But in brummy land there doing this new networking project thats quite good, cisco are been most helpful apparently, linking all the schools on standard CAT5 running standard 100base-tx, even gigabit, all copper all the way. not bad eh?

but on another note:
https://stats.linx.net/aggregate.html
check the decade graph, kinda adds perspective.

 

I'm just hoping that Verizon gets Fios in my area soon...http://www22.verizon.com/FiosForHome/channels/Fios/root/package.asp
15/2Mb for $50/month Quite a nice improvement over my recently-upped 4Mb/386Kbit cable for probably $60/mo (parents pay, so it's free as far as I'm concerned). It even goes up to 30/5Mbit, but I think dropping $200 per month on internte is a bit much.

Still, you brits are getting the shaft on broadband prices from what I can tell.