man i knew that would happen, you are right, i apologise.

i was maybe pointing the finger at fundamentals, relatively speaking.

on the other hand, back to the point then, why is it that other countries
have it sorted out, and have better connections, less beurocratic factors hindering their progress in broadband services?

by all accounts it does sound messy, from what i know over here, its really just up to the company to invest in providing the service, taxation rules everything in the uk (even sanitary products) so it doesnt really discriminate, towards services such as telecommunications etc.

a company either provides/can afford to provide, or it cant.

and other countries are doing this better than others, i'm sure it will get better.

just a quick note to say..... (as it was 4am when i last wrote!)

please feel free to respond to me privately, on matters straying from the thread, i have already engaged in some excellent discourse regarding this limb, with another member, and i am happy to continue this. as almost off topic as it was, i didnt really want to start a thread with it in an open forum either, but nevertheless a worthy disscussion.

thank you.

miss beehive 1963


....carry on then!

As I was reading yesterday's New York Times (today's is probably out there in the driveway under a foot of snow) I found a small article on the issue at hand. They quoted a new e-book "The $200 billion broadband scandal" available at Newnetworkshttp://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm.

According to the author, the Baby Bells promised to Congress in 1996 to deploy ultra-high-speed broadband via optical fiber to millions of homes. In return, they got tax breaks and other benefits in the 1996 Telecommunication Act amounting to more than $200 billions. 10 years later there isn't a single household in the USA with speeds of 45mps which was the promise they made.

Now, the good news: according to the author, the Baby Bells owe every household in the US $2,000. Sadly, he doesn't provide a form to collect but maybe that's in today's Times. I'll start digging.

$2,000 would be nice! :) Dig away.

MissBeehive, I take some of your your rant on board! And I think although The US and the UK are very close in many ways we are also very different in attitudes to alot of things... (very long drunken chats with my American cousins made me realise this!!) And whilst we are talking stereotypical.... lets not forget that Scotland have by far the highest proportion of obease people living in the UK... and what about that 11 yr old kid who collapsed in class a few weeks ago from smoking heroin! (eek)

Back to the point...

I think as far as technology goes the rest of the world are usually 3 or 4 years behind the Japanese!..

They estimate it will be about 2 years till we all have 15-20 mb connections hat will allow us all to watch live streaming TV on our computers in the UK.

I once worked in one of the sky scrapers in Canary Wharf that housed god knows how many floors full or servers (BBC, Teletext ect..) and the main guy that overseed them all had a 'bandwith' connection... I cant remember how fast it was.... but he said he could set a movie downloading off the net and by the time he had walked down the corridor to take a waz and walked back again it would of finished downloading!... and this was 5 or so years go!

eek indeed! but thats actually just glasgow! a law unto itself, and nothing to do with the rest of the world!


where was he downloading the movie from at that speed 5 years ago?

surely that could have only been LAN ?

i chatted with the last telewest engineer we had out, a year ago, and he told me that they had the cpabilities for 18-20 meg, but was pretty cagey about discussing it, but you could tell he wanted to a bit.

i'd heard a rumour about them boosting our speed during 2005 and i was just fishing for info, we got 10mb eventually, but like a said, he assured me they were capable of a lot more already.

i reckon telewest may be offering at least 15mb by the end of 2006 and all other services will be no greater than 12mb in the uk, but i'm no russell grant.

speaking of streaming though, i get full screen quicktime trailers almost instant now with no glitch, surely this is pretty much happening then?

I would take a optical connection to my house over $2000. Call me crazy...

The scary part for me is reading here or there about service providers wanting to charge per bit for content say like movie downloads etc. All that will do is drive up the price for everyone or impose download limits per month. Now I know some of you guys outside of the US already have this but I don't believe in it. With a fast connection having the potential to provide you with all services to/from your house then it should be flat rate. Verizon's FiOS.... If you got cable, phone and internet you would be paying them upwards of $180 every month already (based on Comcast rates, I'm not lucky enough to have FiOS.

As of now, I'd much rather have my modest cable (5mbps down, 368k up) with no real 'cap' than have a bandwidth limit or charge per bit/byte.

The only problem with supplying folks with a lot more bandwidth is companies that host solely web servers and other upload-bandwidth intensive items will suffer because in order to take advantage of such large bandwidth we are given, they also have to increase our upload cap. 45Mbps down and 200k up will net you nearly no gain over 4.5Mbpsdown and 200k up.

Not that I worry, I would really like to be able to host my website and games reliably on my own computer.

Yes I would also settle for my 8mb/768k then having a cap on a way faster connection. I just wish the upload speeds would be a little faster. I'm already paying I think it's $10 more a month to get the 768k up. This is with Comcast cable.

You are not going to believe it, but I found the NYT when it got caught in the snowblower. 5 minutes to get it out, and there was nothing left when finished. It was one of those days in New England, 22" of snow where I live.

Well, I guess we can wait a bit longer.

My first post addressed this; tax subsidies and population density. We can't compare a monthly broadband bill with that of another country unless we also compare their tax structure. Not to mention how much it costs to lay the infrastructure; do you think Korea Telco is forced to pay their ditch digger as much as Verizon has to pay a unionized ditch digger?

On the other hand, how much does broadband cost compared to the available income of the average citizen? Broadband is pretty damn cheap in Mexico; I can walk into an internet cafe and pay about $1.10 per hour for usage of their computers. But a typical citizen makes $10/day or something like that.

ADSL2+ if only i knew when i joined my ISP
 

Australia
ADSL 1500/256:D 10GB monthly usage down/up load counted
currently 6 month half price at $46

Other ISP plans can reach up to 24000kbps download 1000kbps depending on distance to exchange, if only i knew before i joined my ISP but only e few from around 30 ISP have ADSL2+:mad: