Category: Broadband
Virgin Media aiming to launch 100 Mbps broadband service in the UK
Virgin Media are setting in motion plans to roll out a 100Mbps broadband service across the UK. Beginning with 50Mbps trails in the Berkshire village of Woolhampton, as many as one million homes could be set to benefit from the…
Tories plan super-fast broadband network by 2017
The Conservative party have vowed to deliver a super-fast broadband network to UK homes by 2017. Is this a case of pre-election carrot-dangling or do the Tories have some concrete plans up their sleeves? The Tories plan to end BT's…
BT announce new high-speed Infinity broadband package
BT have announced the launch of Infinity, the first consumer broadband package to use their new next-generation access (NGA) fibre-optic network. For £19.99 a month, customers can get download speeds of 40Mbps and upload speeds of 2 Mbps. Data is…
O2 offer home phone deals to broadband subscribers
As of March, network providers O2 will be offering landline phone deals to their broadband customers. It's a move the company hope will help bolster their trailing home broadband position. "This is the most important launch for us in the…
CES 2010: Final Thoughts
The Consumer Electronics show, the behemoth of tech, the Valhalla of gadgetry, has come and gone for yet another year. But this time, rather than arriving with a bang, it slinked into sight with something more like a whimper. CES…
BT super-fast broadband rollout on schedule for 2012 Olympic launch
BT have today announced that they are ahead of schedule for their super fast broadband rollout, and plan to have the network ready nationwide in time for the 2012 Olympic games. BT aim to have a 100Mbps service ready for…
D-Link launch tiny DWA-131 Wireless USB adapter
D-Link are set to launch the DWA-131 Wireless USB adapter later this month. Little bigger than a 50 pence piece, the tiny adapter connects to a Wireless 802.11n network and can provide download speeds of up to 300 Mbps. The…
TeliaSonera gives Swedes mobile broadband network that's 10x faster than our 3G ones
TeliaSonera are today launching what they claim to be the world's first commercial 4G network. Though their have previously been trials of similar services, this is the first time a commercial 4G network has been available for consumers to use….
£6 a year broadband tax heading to UK households
A £6 a year tax will be added to your landline telephone bill, Chancellor Alastair Darling has revealed today. A further 50p per month will be added to the bill for each extra phone line installed in residents' houses. Following…
Britain's broadband 'not fit for the future', but no surprises there
There seemed to be a real kerfuffle on the news this morning caused by a Cisco-sponsored survey which showed that UK finished 25th out of 66th in the broadband quality league table, lower that is than Bulgaria and Latvia. The amazing thing is that anyone was really surprised by our relatively lowly position.
As anyone who has been to South Korea and Japan – the two countries that top the table – can tell you they are simply light years ahead of us in terms of broadband penetration, speeds and quality. Indeed the South Korean government recently promised universal speeds of up to 1Gigabit per second by 2012 while we struggle to meet the global average speed of 4.75 Megabits per second (Ofcom’s April research revealed that our average broadband download speed stands at 4.1Mbps.)
Now I haven’t been to Bulgaria and Latvia so I can’t vouch for their broadband (though one wag commented on the Daily Mail site of course that the roads were much better in Bulgaria than the UK). But again it doesn’t really surprise me.
So what’s the problem? Why does the UK lag behind seemingly less developed countries when it comes to high speed delivery of internet services. The reason is largely because of lack of fibre-optic cable which is the only way of delivering the high speeds necessary for superfast broadband (currently we rely mostly on old copper telephone wire via ADSL networks). This is because for years there were dozens of tin-pot little cable companies with no money who spent more time squabbling with each other than actually digging up the roads to lay high speed cable. Even today there are large parts of densely populated neighbourhoods in London which still don’t have fibre-optic cable.
The good news though is that could be about to change, albeit slowly, with Virgin now the only cable company on the block. It is rolling out a 50Mbps service while 24Mbps ADSL2+ services via BT and others are becoming more widespread. However, it seems there is still some way to go before we reach the average download speed of 11.25Mbps that’s needed to handle future applications such as High Definition Video.
Until then Britain will have to be content with the survey’s label of ‘Meeting Needs for Today’, the broadband equivalent of ‘must try harder’.