News UK Government pays £363m for rural broadband

Broadband coming to the middle of nowhere near you?

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/08/17/uk-government-pays-363m-for-rural-broadband/1

 

I am sure that the council will spend the money wisely.

on broadband upgrades in there area's rich constitutes as well as the areas they personally live in, upgrade the town halls coverage and then spend the rest(95% of the allocated amount) on corporate parties and pay rises(75% increase at minimum) for doing such a wonderful job upgrading the broadband in the area and nope i am not a cynic

 

Pretty much.

 

Since when was 24Mb/s 'Super Fast'? All it means is 'as fast as we can stretch our inadequate infrastructure without having to bother installing new fibre'. Also, the grants are pretty minor when you consider that BT's profits for 2010 were £1029 million...

 

I live beside an exchange in Belfast. Best I can get is 20Meg. It's more than enough for me, but if I can only get 20Meg beside an exchange, how is anyone expected to get more than 24Meg? My parents live 10 miles outside of Belfast, at the end of the line from their exchange. Best they can get is 1.5 Meg from an LLU provider. 24 Meg for them will likely never happen. This is still a fairly populated area.

My main concern is upload speeds. We don't have it at my exchange, which serves most of south east Belfast, but Infinity is pretty much the only option for any form of decent upload speed, and signing up with BT isn't something I would want to do. There needs to be better high end choices.

 

We just got an upgrade and we live ~7 miles away from the nearest exchange to asdl 2 and it us so much faster (1.8mbps dl )

 

Yay, I finally might get a connection faster than 1mbps!

 

We don't need FTTH, but if they're serious about increasing the nation's speed then realistically that will mean FTTC for most areas, with maybe wireless relays for the really remote places.

Whichever way you look at it, £363m will barely touch the sides - it'll take billions. (Looks at the foreign aid budget increasing to £12b per year...).

Also agree that it should be organised nationally. Not so much that I expect there'll be competing standards, (that could be regulated against) but simply for the duplication of effort. Each county will have to organise its own team to deal with this, with its own head, specialists, admin staff etc - what a complete waste of limited resources. A national body could easily liaise with local councils and their specific priorities without having to have 50 duplicates of everything and everyone.

Also, I know it's been done voluntarily in some areas, but how about a little national legislation for the rights to piggyback existing infrastructure? There are enough well placed sewers in most areas to avoid the need to dig up endless new trenches in the roads - and power line poles and pylons could carry a lot of the rest. A small fee could be set nationally to pay the owners for the privilege of using their infrastructure (on a 'per mile' basis for example) - and it would still be a lot cheaper than having to dig everywhere. And it would be a lot faster and a lot less disruptive to roll out as well.

That's the kind of thing that only a national body could realistically organise with any degree of efficiency and success.

It's great in theory giving all the local groups power over everything, but in some situations things simply work better when done nationally.

 

Actually, this money is coming from the underspend in the Digital Switchover.

Personally, I would have preferred this money to fund F1 on the BBC. As people have said, £363m will barely touch the sides for rural broadband, and knowing the government, they'll aim for 2Mbps nationwide as a target.

 

2Mbps would mean a lot to some people I know back home. I know folk on 256kbps and 512kbps connections who would rather like to be able to download faster than 100KB/s. Things like youtube and iplayer will not function on my parent's ADSL, and even many music streaming services run poorly because their phone line is so far from the exchange (about 7 miles) that the thing just doesn't perform very solidly.

 

Is it just me that thinks that 2015 is a long long time away? Surely our mobile technologies will be starting to surpass these speeds easily by then? I've heard some ridiculous speeds thrown about for 4G for example. Maybe the government should accept that our broadband is terrible and try and ensure that when 4G happens, it happens for real; rural coverage and the capacity to cope with thousands of users in city centres.

 

My government issued router has just dropped through the door

 

If anyone is interested in looking at a case Study of a community and a local company getting their **** together to get broad look up w3z, in rural Derbyshire (http://www.w3z.co.uk/). Basically my town was told it would never have broadband as it was to out the way. But a local campaign group and radio company managed to sort out a wireless wired (had no hardlines outside of the house... just an aerial and that went into a special filter and then your standard router) service that was fast (at the time) and stable (uncontested lines, 30-50ms latency). Speed didn't age well but it was always stable. Looking at though they changed their model so I can't comment on it now. as I have moved away.

 

I live in london and all I get is 4.5Mbs. Virgin cable is a no go on my street and bt can only offer 4.5 due to my distance from the exchange. There is not fttc either, was meant to be here in march, has been pushed to december.

in london its pretty damn bad, I feel sorry for the rural areas.

 

If you could get to say a 98% coverage of 2 Meg across the coutry that would be a massive achievemnt for a base speed compared to many other countrys which dont get close to that.

There is always going to be a large gulf between in speed both download and upload between urban and rural areas.

What this money is for, is to fund prodjects to 'white areas' that suffer with very low speed, the money will like the first BDUK funds to go out. Will go into open tender for 2 rounds, one of the first areas was.

http://www.cumbria.gov.uk/broadband/whosinvolved/suppliers.asp

In that link you will see the suppliers that are bidding and have made it through to the second round, the contract will start in April next year, so the BDUK funds will take a while to get through but expect to see a similar list of companies for all of the tenders made by the councils.

 

My Cousin lives in Cheadle Heath a pretty well populated area of Stockport and he cant even get 2mb and fttc is not even planned for his area, so this might be good for him.

Me well i'm on 30mb Virgin and live maybe 1 mile from him in Edgeley we also have fttc coming soon.

 

Here in merry Aberystwyth I can get ~6meg when all of the students go home or about 50kb when they get back. Lucky me! If I didn't have access to the University's network I would be most displeased.

 

Clearly a reply from someone living in an urban area with a decent connection and completely unable to empathise with anyone outside their own 4 walls.

Comments like that REALLY wind me up, and let me explain why. If you go on samknows, I'm on the EANAY exchange and struggle to get even 90KB/s, (so, as suggested, iPlayer streaming is impossible and even 360p Youtube videos won't run uninterrupted without extensive buffering before playing), and my prospects of getting even a semi-decent connection at my house in the next few years are bleak at best.

But, of course, because there's almost no-one on my exchange in comparison to most, that means my neighbours and I and many other people in my situation should be forgotten about and left even further behind in the broadband race. Therefore the logical consequence is the little money which has become available to potentially improve the situation may as well be scrapped as well and spent on a bit of entertainment which will end up being extensively covered by many other media outlets anyway and which people can pay a few quid a month for if they are that desperate to watch it live.

I can't improve my broadband for love nor money, unless I could buy BT and force them to lay cable to my exchange. Get some perspective before suggesting utterly ridiculous things and frankly kicking sand in the face of fellow bit-tech members.

 

Dammit! I need better innernets in Norwich

 

my area is to be the first in my region to get fibre optic installed, itll begin (hopefully) March 2012. i live a mile from my exchange and i rarely see over 280Kbs. Its really bad where i am, imo anyway.