Why is the UK's internet so crap??

Backbone connectivity is somewhat different though... I live ~100m from Telehouse, but only have a 3mbit ADSL connection.

It is worth noting that UK average broadband speed is estimated to have risen by around 22% in 2009.

That still means little in real terms when the average UK connection is 3.6Mbits/s. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/media/features/brspeeds

A 22% increase on that would be barely noticeable to the average internet user. And it's certainly not impressive when other countries have average connection speeds of 50Mbits/s plus.

Well yeah, but that would take it to uhm, 4.392Mbps, which isn't too far under say the States.

It wasn't really my main point. We need to go FO->x instead of playing about with copper.

Hah! I knew someone would say 54MBPS or those with the good old wired 100MBS

That is your network transmission speed not your bandwidth speed.

Indeed. BT dug up the roads in a street not far from mine to redo everyone's connections to the exchange recently. But rather than taking this opportunity to upgrade they merely reinstalled new copper. They're definitely dragging their feet about moving onto fibre optic lines.

What are you on about?

I think you meant to say; thats your local area connection's speed, not your broadband connection's speed.

I know we're behind in the broadband and high-speed Internet age, but I think we could do with looking at the figures in a different light.

Japan, Korea, very industrial nations with a lot of large businesses and corporations who will need the higher speeds, whereas our industry infrastructure appear to be coping absolutely fine. I think that's a major contributing factor to the massive spikes in the bar chart!

Finland, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, they've always had amazing Internet and they have a lot to be proud of in their countries. So wish I was there!

All they've done there is take an average, and that doesn't tell us much, because we already know that about 40% of households in the country don't have access to a 2Mbps broadband line, and we're urging to get this sorted. The reason for this is the distance between houses and telephone exchanges. We have a lot of country roads, lanes and houses, who are going to be quite far from their exchange. This in itself isn't an issue, but the technology we're using is. We're still going for ADSL2+, and whilst BT is rolling out its 21CN network, it's still reporting hours on end of access outages, and we need to bear in mind that speeds are still limited to around 24Mbps.

The 21CN network isn't due to finish rollout until 2011. By this time, ADSL2+ will be even more outdated. Although it would require replacing a lot of wiring, from house to exchange, I think we need to go fiber optic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibre_to_the_home - we can get better reliability and faster speeds out of this, and let's face it, we're likely to be replacing the old copper cabling in some more years time anyway, so might as well future-proof and do it now

21CN refers to the upgrade of BT's copper backbone to Fibre as well as delivering all their backbone services over IP, rather than PSTN.

Who will pay for Fibre to home though? NTL went bankrupt paying for fibre to cabinet. BT have made it perfectly clear that they have absolutely no intention of investing in a last-mile fibre service, nationwide.

The reason we have a poor broadband speeds is that BT has an incredibly extensive, monopolised copper network. The cost of upgrading a network of that size is prohibitively expensive, without government subsidy and the government's plan to subsidise upgrades with it's joke 50p tax on broadband isn't going to cut it.

Average price $6.50? My ass.

http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/

7.5Mb internet in canada is $45 a month standalone.

My understanding is that 21CN will see their services delivered via a central platform, as you rightly say, delivering via IP, removing the need for (amongst other technologies mind) PSTN. However, I've not seen anything about upgrading their backbone physical media... Do you have a source for this? I don't doubt you, but am interested.

I think that if the capital costs of rolling out FTTH can be covered initially, or quickly recovered by a sign-up fee for new fiber customers, then plenty would sign up to it. I would for a start, and I'm sure plenty of teenagers would have their parents go for it so they can download a bunch of music, movies, apps, and so they get good performance in online games. People playing games consoles over IP I imagine would jump at it. This would assume that the monthly subscription is affordable of course, which is why the capital costs would need to be covered without adding too much to subs.

I know they've expressed no interest in it, or at least, I remember them bringing it to our attention in 2006 at least. I believe that it would be ideal if they rolled out such an infrastructure though. I imagine the costs would be huge though, as it's not just replacing network device-network device connections; it's network device-home media.

Of course, the overall point against it, especially for BT, is the cost. We have a habit of complaining about everything we get taxed on, but complain when we're not matching other countries; we're Britain - we should be exceeding other countries and at the forefront of technology. I wouldn't mind paying a £6/year tax on broadband; I'd pay a lot more than that, and whilst I agree some won't want to pay for a broadband tax because they don't feel the need for a fiber network, I think maybe a fair few people don't want to pay a broadband tax because it's a tax.