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It's an interesting debate. If we look at the internet as a separate entity, then having fibre to the home is the equivalent to having motorways for freight. If other countries update their internet infrastructures ahead of the UK - then we can expect a talent-drain out to those countries. Investing in the infrastructure now is vital if we intend to stay competitive.

Working from home I could use 100MB up 100MB down as moving any sort of large file is far to slow on 256kbits up!

100megabit is only about 8-9 megabytes per second anyway. If your on a newish local area network you can get 80-90 megabytes per second and this is about as fast as a consumer hard drive. If you are using these speeds in the office to go down by a factor of a thousand is far too slow.

Government should vigorously push the development and use of high speed net access, and offer tax incentives to companies, and employees to allow work from home.

The tools to do this have existed for some time, it's just convention which prevents it happening.

If most office workers did this London and most of our cities would be a lot less crowded and polluted, and efficiency would increase if workers don't have to spend 2 hours or more a day just travelling.

The key here is CITYnet. It is in a CITY. If this was done in London it wopuld make sense and likely pay for itself very quickly. The problem here is that every tom dick and harry thinks he deservs equal service on top of the brecon beacons to the city of London.

While having a 100mbps connection would be great, I think there is a major aspect people seem to be forgetting here.

When you connect to a website, download (or even upload) a file, stream a movie etc it is not just your own net speed that comes into consideration.

While improving the net speed of the home is all fine and good, it seems to me the technology and net speeds behind the world's web servers seem to be getting left behind.

I have a 20mbps line with Virgin and on some sites can get right up to and over 1mbps download speeds. Yet other sites, including large corporations like Creative, am only able to get around 30mbps because the company hasn't put money into a faster web service.

So while certain technologies like HD TV over the net may be calling for these high speeds, shouldn't effort be made into trying to improve the speed of the fundamental backbone of the internet itself?

There isn't the case for government intervention or state aid to mega-rich telecommunications companies

But there is the need to ensure rural communities are to benefit from any future development

Some places are still on dial-up, and some peoples 8meg broadband runs at less than half a meg

The government can look at these factors when making policy decisions not just whether they need to hand over money or not!

100 mb/s is really needed if you want to watch HDTV streamed over the net but has anyone found much real business application for anything more than 2 mb/s?

There are niche markets - online video surveillance for example - but most companies require reliable links with limited latency time. I really don't care if the 10 MByte document I'm sending takes 1 second or 60 seconds to squeeze down the pipe.

Antarcticstorm: I work from home on my PC about 3 days a week. I remote desktop into a couple of other PCs and look after a few servers. Sometimes I host conference calls using Skype. Data speed has never been an issue.

So if gamers want 100 mb/s let them pay to play.

well, well, well. I have had 100mpbs access for the last 3 years. And I live in a so-called developing nation...Brazil!! Britain is so behind the times, I was flabbergasted when I read that people there only have a 3-4 mpbs connection.

Cheechwiz, what amazing things can you do with your 100Mbps connection that I can't do with my 8Mbps connection? I suspect the answer is very little.

@3

There is no way the government will seriously encourage working from home, just imagine the loss of tax generated from fuel and snack machines etc.

Frankly though, I totally agree with you.

@9

You can't watch HD Movies on 8mbps... as 1080p HD is around 36mbps. So forget digital renting if the service is streamed.

@4

Tom, Dick and Harry on the Brecon Beacons produce the food you eat, is it so wrong for London to give something back for a change?

It is the Londoners who complain about traffic, pollution and crime the most so why should Tom, Dick and Harry pay for Londoners to have a better life?

@11 and @ 9

Thank you Ranger, you took the words right out of my mouth.

I can also upload and download heavy files without them taking all day.

The whole situation is a farce.

The report by Caio is a joke, the guy still has many interests in cable in wireless (stocks, shares) so has a vested interest in ensuring that the company he's so closely tied to doesn't lose it's current joint monopoly with Virgin on fibre to companies like BT. As such he's absolutely bound to suggest ludicrous figures such as £28.8bn to roll out fibre to the home.

It has been stated that the £28.8bn figure consists 80% of the costs of digging up the roads and that's exactly why the figure is so wrong- we simply don't need to dig up the roads. There are countless methods of laying fibre without such interruptions as you get with major roadworks from systems that dig small slots deep into the road, lay the fibre then cement over as they go which can be done alongside the road with minimal to no traffic disruption and miles to overhead fibre to fibre by the sewers. The fact is we can easily strip £15bn to £20bn off of Caio's estimate.

Then of course we have the argument that there's no need for high speed broadband as nothing uses it. This is because you can't build a killer application for a technology that's not even available to use it yet! You need the high speed broadband in for investment in applications to use it- an obvious example might be a high definition 1080p version of the Ö÷²¥´óÐãs own iPlayer but the Ö÷²¥´óÐã can't justify investing in that if there's no one who can use it.

Following from that it's going to be the nations that get high speed broadband in first like Sweden, Japan and now as in Amsterdam also that are going to control the next stage of the internet's evolution. Companies in these countries are going to be developing these next gen applications for use by their citizens and will be ready to roll them out as other countries catch up in speed. Those countries playing catch up will hence be behind. In other words, if we don't invest we're going to continue to be a minor player on the web but if we invest now we can bring massive new companies to the UK- think YouTube, Facebook and perhaps even Google sized companies but to do this we need that initial investment.

One final note is that whilst consumers may not currently have applications available to make use of such high speed broadband businesses do, and current consumer connections are too slow and business connections are too pricey. Fibre to home will bring business level connections down in price by thousands, often even tens of thousands of pounds. If that cost saving isn't a bonus for our businesses that they may invest elsewhere to grow, I don't know what is.

You can't watch HD Movies on 8mbps... as 1080p HD is around 36mbps. So forget digital renting if the service is streamed.
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So what? So I might have to wait 20 minutes before my movie starts to buffer it, wow that's eally inonvenient isn't it?

[/sarcasm off]


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Tom, Dick and Harry on the Brecon Beacons produce the food you eat, is it so wrong for London to give something back for a change?

It is the Londoners who complain about traffic, pollution and crime the most so why should Tom, Dick and Harry pay for Londoners to have a better life?
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I am not a Londoner, I live in one of the areas that doesn't have great speeds (semi-rural South Wales), I understand that this is my choice. Why should my broadband be subsidised by everyone else?

London DOES give back. Believe me without the taxes generated in London and then spurred out to Wales and the rest of the UK those regions would be uch much worse off.

As for us paying for Londoners? where did that come from? Who suggested that the UK government get involved because I dont remember saying that?

"You can't watch HD Movies on 8mbps... as 1080p HD is around 36mbps. So forget digital renting if the service is streamed."

Ö÷²¥´óÐã HD over satellite: 14mbit constant (a net stream would use varible bitrate, so the same quality could be achieved in 12mbit)

Lots of Bluray discs: 15-20mbit


In reality, you can compress it a far bit further if necessary, especially if you're not having to compress things live as Ö÷²¥´óÐã HD is doing. I've seen outstanding quality out of 10mbit encodes.

Thing is..

With fibre, when you pay for 20MBps you actually get 20 no matter what the distance from the exchange. You dont get 10 or 8 or 2 you actually get 20.

I bet on BTs copper network you can sign up for 20 MBps and if you live any more than 500 - 1000 m from the exchange your speed will degrade to who knows what.. If Bt were to offer us 100MBps i bet most of the country would only get say 20 over copper.

And thats why fibre is sooo important!

@17 sadly not.

If we are just talking about the potential speed that you could recieve, then distance isn't necessirely the only thing that can lower speed, junction boxes between the street box and the local exchange will also lower it - and unless you are fortunate enough to be living opposite the exchange, its likely the fibre that feeds the box in your street has gone through atleast 2 other junctions which each take a bit out of the bandwidth.

Add to that the fact that your connection speed is shared with other people from the street, the result is that you'll rarely achieve the best speeds regardless of whether you're on fibre or copper cable - and the people in amsterdam, japan and other places running a 100mbs line or greater are obviously suffering the same thing too.

As a general rule of thumb when using ADSL, you're never likely to achieve higher than 75% of your priced speed.

So people on a 100mbs line are more likely to average a speed of around 70 or 80mbs, so its not really as fantastical as it sounds.

Quite frankly, the most efficient net connection is WiMax. If I were the government, I would be looking at investing in that instead. Ensuring there is a WiMax connection (when its available in 5-6 years) in most areas of the country is bound to be far cheaper than 28bn.

As someone who lives in an older neighbourhood and has to deal with coppers weakness to interference and noise I would gladly welcome fibre at the same speed for increasing reliablility and less dropped packets.

Living near Hull, we only have one ISP. Yep, one.

ZERO CHOICE.

And the fastest it offers? 4mb. Shocking. With the likes of Virgin and BT saying that they will invest, it is apparent that good old Kingston Communications in Hull is going to be left behind once again.