Also Nozzer what you said in the post above makes sense but for one reason and one reason only!!! It makles sense to earn this stinking Governemnt cash!!!
Why?
Because they can't can't be arsed to upgrade our infrastructure to let us have high speed access. Which in fact the majority of Europe already have in place and have done so for a long time, and these are countries who are supposed to be far inferior to ourselves.
I suspect the government may not want or see the need for us all to have high speed internet. From the work they've done, they seem to have the idea that the speeds we already have are adequate for at least the next few years and, tbh, for the vast majority of domestic customers, they are probably correct.
I'm sure the government has looked closely at what other countries have done but they really aren't in a position to do much. Mostly because when BT was de-nationalised the government effectively barred themselves from interfering in the UK telecoms industry. A lot of the countries with fast internet have single monopolistic state controlled telecoms providers and seem to be quite happy to heavily tax their populations in order to get showcase telecoms.
Considering we founded the telephone, we pioneered telephonic communications and our own BT (British Telecom) was at one point the most advanced technological communications in the whole world, why are we so far behind everyone else?
Basically, because we were the first and now have to live with a vast antiquated system. The cost of ripping it all out and replacing it is phenomenal, especially as the present system has suffered from massive underfunding in both its nationalised and privatised forms.
Also, a lot of the countries with fast internet systems have built there telecoms systems at a much later date than the UK system was laid down. One of the consequences of wars is often that the looser ends up with massive reconstruction often laying much more advanced infrastructures than the winner. This partly explains why Japan, Germany, Italy and, to some extent, France (and even Korea) have relatively good internet
Fair enough if our country had succumbed to a desolate place, a country of total annihilation over the years, a country out of control. But it has not, the only thing out of control is out government who do not realise that they have to act and act much quicker than they think to get us back on track as being a pioneering company in both technology and in fact, just living!!!
You paint a bit of a bleak picture here !
Yes, we have a telecoms system that has suffered from under-investment but the technological wizadry of BT has solved some amazing problems to give us the speeds that are adequate for the present. ADSL and its progeny are quite remarkable systems considering what the engineers had to work with and, tbh, are testimonials that good old British ingenuity is still alive and kicking. The fact that a good chunk of the world has adopted ADSL shows its a world class product and its overseas sales has financed a large proportion of the installation of this system in the UK.
Ok, we need investment to make sure that the speeds stay adequate to the job but i'm reasonably confident this will happen as and when necessary. For the present though, anything over 2Mbit/sec is effectively redundant, Most servers dont serve at anything near even that (exceptions being a few of the big server farms and multi-connection Newsgroups). Even most internet video feeds run at far less than 2Mbit/sec.
So, the question is, why are you so dissatisfied with what you have ?
What is it that you want to do that requires so much more bandwidth than you already have ?
