The fight for faster broadband

Two important news items today about broadband, one from the politician in charge of government policy in this area, the other from the company with the biggest role in making the fast internet happen.

The Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt unveiled a pledge that 90% of British homes and businesses would have access to superfast broadband, and BT told us that it was now racing ahead in the broadband market, leaving its cable rival in the dust.

But both stories deserve a little further examination. It's certainly good to have a clear benchmark to back up the government's previous pledge that Britain will have the "best" superfast broadband in Europe by 2015.

Until now, we haven't known what "best" meant, and by combing factors like availability, price, and quality as well as speed, there would have been plenty of wriggle room to allow ministers to declare victory.

Now they have to reach that 90% mark - and as nobody thinks there's much of a commercial case for anything more than around two thirds of homes to get fibre-based broadband, that's quite a big ask over four years.

Making connections

One key question is how "superfast" is defined. The government will say it's about giving people access to any fibre product, whether that's BT Infinity, Virgin Media cable or perhaps the new offering planned by Fujitsu.

The broadband purists will argue that BT's fibre-to-the-cabinet product will offer many people little more than 20Mbps, and that's not superfast.

But BT, which has long been aggrieved at the stick it gets over what some consider the slow progress of its broadband rollout, is hitting back.

As the company unveiled some decent results this morning, it started bombarding me with facts about broadband.

Namely, that its Openreach and Wholesale divisions added 1.1 million new broadband connections in the last year - compared to Virgin Media's 151,000 new connections. For every new Virgin customer, BT is adding seven, I was told.

That, of course, includes all of BT Openreach wholesale customers, like Sky and TalkTalk. But BT says its own-brand broadband from its retail division is also caning the opposition, winning 64% of new connections in the last quarter.

Networked nation

Oh, and when it comes to fast fibre connections, BT is adding customers twice as rapidly as Virgin. What's more its fibre-to-the-cabinet technology is getting faster and faster, whatever the sceptics say, and is fully future-proofed.

I ran some of these claims past a Virgin Media spokesman - and got a rather different take. BT, he explained was going after the "cheap and cheerful" end of the broadband market, slashing prices in pursuit of market share. The same strategy had been tried by the cable industry a decade ago and had proved disastrous.

He said that many of BT's new customers were probably coming back from TalkTalk - which lured millions away with bargain basement broadband when it got into the business.

And he told me that BT's boasts about its fibre service didn't stand up either - BT Infinity, offering 20-30Mbps should not be compared to Virgin's 50Mbps product.

Now if the government is to hit that 90% superfast target, it will need both BT and Virgin Media to play a big part. So perhaps the fact that the two businesses and the likes of Sky and TalkTalk - are scrapping so furiously over the broadband market is good news.

After all, come 2015 they will want to be able to claim that they played the leading role in making Britain a networked nation

Source:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13382701

well ive used 600 meg in data in the last 3 weeks i will never use my 3gb so blindingly slow is what i havelol

On checking my current landline capacity it has a maximum potential of 8Mbps.
Mind you it seems OK for the work I do

Im sorry I will read that again

I've read that Talk Talk customer service is not great.
Mind you, I'm with Virgin and that's not good either. Luckily I hardly ever contact them.

The BT ad messages tell of wonderful broadband.

Do you have any idea why that was ?
Just interested.

Mmmm. That is odd.

My speed is not great, but seems to be consistent. No reason for me to change.

they pretty much all oversell capacity

If you imagine a pipie with water good for 12 they sell 15 or 20 and hope you dont all turn on at once if they can get away with it they keep reducing your broadband till you squeak well worth checking every week

I live about three miles from the exchange and get up to 2.2 Meg with TalkTalk - much faster than other providers I have tried, consistent speed with very few cut-outs. The downside is the appalling customer service from TalkTalk, but I put up with that cos I make up to 200 calls/day to an 0845 number for free!

That's called 'contention ratio'. The specified standard ratios used to be 50:1 for residential lines, and 20:1 for business lines, although it was very rare for the value to be as bad as that. I don't know whether those ratios still apply in UK.

When I enquire what the contention ratio is here in Philippines, I get blank stares. I don't do much better when I try to explain what CR is!

I haven't checked recently, but the last time I did, the fastest connection I could get here was 3Mb/s - all this talk of 35 or 50 makes me green with envy! My first adsl connection here was costing me PHP4,500/month for a 640kb/s service

640 cor your lucky im sometimes down in the 100bt range