Party Vibe

yes, if you emigrate to somewhere like Hong Kong.

This is the UK though where telecoms services often arrive on copper cable that was put in when our grandparents were youths. where’s the money going to come from for all this nice fibre optic cable that will be needed to build the backbone?

BT have already told Ofcom they aren’t going to do any more work other than what is needed for their 21st century network unless first the money is there and second they don’t have to “give the access away” to competitors.

NTL bankrupted themselves putting in their network back in the 90s and are still having difficulty making it produce a profit (oh,and they have outsourced their normal telephone lines to BT, so much for competition!)

Both ADSL (broadband on BT lines) and DOCSIS (broadband on coaxial cable used by Virgin/NTL) are technologies designed to use obsolete infrastructure, as its too expensive otherwise to provide broadband.

24MB/s is the very maximum most ADSL consumers will get in the near future and only if they live fairly near a telephone exchange. Even if the connections go fast there isn’t always the bandwidth.

The next stage will only happen when the money is available to pay for the capital investment (i.e lots of cable-monkeying throughout this nation to replace the old stuff). Bear in mind there is a potential recession and a squeeze on consumer spending soon..

That said I expect broadband speeds will increase as technology always advances, but the services will become more locked down to provide the big traditional telecom companies with their expected revenue streams.

We may get 24-100MB/S broadband to our homes, but over a monitored and censored connection with priority given to the stuff from big companies same as how it already is in Asia.

I expect the web will be mostly accessible but some sites will be blocked or made slow and stuff like illegal file sharing etc will be blocked and replaced by legal commercial alternatives.

interested to know how reliable this is. I expect BT and other providers will roll it out but I can see why traditional telephone companies are stalling on this…

With that much upstream an office could use VOIP and put about 10 or more simultaneous telephone calls through the circuit without it making a dent in the speed most “normal” users would see on their web, email and databases.

They would not have to buy an expensive E1 trunk for their phones, or extra copper lines..

this will knock thousands off some companies planned revenue streams if they run both broadband and traditional voice services so there is less incentive for them to roll out reliable connections at this rate..