Well yesterday GB announced his £6 tax on all landlines to help pave the way for a Digital Britain where broadband is supposedly as important as water. This ‘Digital Britain’ in GB’s own words will make us a world leader in broadband terms. I fail to see how providing 2Mb broadband to a few rural homes and introducing fibre to the cabinet across some of the country will do this. We have an old out of date network that physically cannot provide anywhere near the speeds some countries have. It’s estimated this phone line tax will bring in between £175m and £200m a year, which doesn’t go a long way towards the £27b needed to provide fibre to the home across the UK.

Australia in comparison is investing $20b to provide fibre to the home to 90% of its population by the end of 2010, giving almost an entire continent 100Mb broadband. South Korea and Japan already have 100Mb broadband with most people expecting it as a minimum.

So once again… why is Britain so **** at everything?

Discuss!

I agree we seem to be well behind other countries.

But maybe we need to balance this with looking at what is really required.

I have just less than 4Mb broadband and that seems fine for email and surfing and the odd music download.

I appreciate that there are probably lots of future uses - some of which may not even have been invented yet - but is the desire for an increased speed just something to satisfy high end gamers and you IT techy types? OK - maybe on demand TV or movies need higher speeds but I can get that from Sky. Does getting them over the internet offer any benefits other than perhaps finacial ones?

What I'm asking is what speed does Mr Average really need? Now and in the future?

Just interested in peoples' thoughts

is it because we are led by a namby pamby left wing lunatic who thinks like King John (or whoever the bad guy was in Robin Hood - you know...the one who kept raising taxes on everything:D)

Have I missed the point here?

I agree we seem to be well behind other countries.

But maybe we need to balance this with looking at what is really required.

I have just less than 4Mb broadband and that seems fine for email and surfing and the odd music download.

I appreciate that there are probably lots of future uses - some of which may not even have been invented yet - but is the desire for an increased speed just something to satisfy high end gamers and you IT techy types? OK - maybe on demand TV or movies need higher speeds but I can get that from Sky. Does getting them over the internet offer any benefits other than perhaps finacial ones?

What I'm asking is what speed does Mr Average really need? Now and in the future?

Just interested in peoples' thoughts

I agree to an extent, i dont need 100Mb broadband, it would be nice but i would rarely use it. I am more miffed at the fact that in the eyes of the government of this once great nation the plan for putting britain on top of the broadband scale is a half baked bodge of a job that seems to have no idea what the rest of the world is doing, probably cost a fortune to put together and after everyone involved has taken their healthy share of the landline tax it will leave sod all to do anything productive with.

No, it's because all our utilities are privatised! Why risk shareholders' dividends upgrading a system that (just about) works as it is...???

The one thing I would say is that superfast broadband only really makes sense if there is a wholesale shift from broadcast media to streaming media, because everything else works fine with a few Mb. To be honest, I can just about cope with the old-skool dial-up speeds I get connecting to the net on my phone in some of the more rural parts of the country, since I use the telly and radio to listen to and watch programmes... :ne_nau:

What flummoxes me is that he said Broadband is now an esseintial service as important to us as clean water, electricity and gas... What a load of B*****cks!

Guys,

Calm down, it's ok - it's not another tax. If you read the release, it's a levy.

Phew, i thought we were going to get shafted again.

:rotz:

BT setup their new 21CN system in village near Cardiff back about 2 years ago.

I know a guy who helped set it up for them, the day it went live they had all the top brass down for the day. When they flicked the switch it lasted about 20 mins and they had too switch back and have a re-think.

Looks like they fixed it now BT's 21st Century network - South Wales

When I see him I'll ask how its going.

I belive Korea is the world leader in this type of thing.

Edit......Whilst BT's effort is good and helps them catch up with the cable system, Cable companys just flick the switch and give you double BT's speed.

Digital Britain .........They got no hope without spending bucket loads to replace the crappy ADSL system

Edited 17 June, 200917 yr by fatty5000

He's thinking -

1) It's cheaper than providing proper public transport to these areas.

2) These people can work from home decreasing unemployment in more remote areas

3) He can keep petrol duty high because you don't need to commute any more.

4) You can close local council offices because all services are provided on line.

£200M a year to give the Bogey Muncher a soundbite :thumbdwn:

21CN is already out of date! Virgin media has just begun testing 200Mb, BT can only provide upto 40Mb on 21CN. Also, 21CN is Asymetric which means less upload more download when people are needing more and more upload, its a waste of time and money imo!

Virgin media should lease their network to bring in more capital to expand the cable network and do away with DSL entirely.

The biggest problem with this annoucement is that its a 50p tax on the phone lines, doesnt tax go to government coffers ? dont know about you but i can already see flaws in this government tax.

1) The telecoms industry is private, so why does this have to be a tax on the phoneline, why doesnt the cost of the line just go up by 50p, this is then invested to improve the service ( there is already work underway to upgrade the phone system so it can be added to the work currently underway).

2) If this tax is going to the goverment then the revenue will go into the general pot in the same way that all the road tax is not used to improve roads. The telecomms companies will see very little / if any of this revenue.

3) The UK government do not invest any money in the UK telecomms system, its all down to private industry to do, ( unlike Korea & Japan ). So does this mean that the government are now going to take shares in all the telecoms companies and inject money to assist it - I Think NOT.

I smell something very marine life like here.

P.S.- A quiz question - In what year did, Cars, Internet Access, Colour TVs, Games Consoles become a life neccessity ?

I dont know, do any of you ? I thought the neccessities for life are food, water, clothing and shelter. ( food and water in particular ).

Edited 17 June, 200917 yr by lfc958

I always thought that BT (a private company) owned and maintained all the data lines so it is them that should have updated it years ago when they were making all those millions of profit every year

having said that the government has no say in what BT do or don't do ...at the end of the day it's down to BT not Gordon Brown to sort out the mess

I'm all for improvements in service, speed, reliability and extending the network to include rural locations. But last time I checked the Telecoms sector was a privately-run entity. Why are we being asked to stump yet more in tax to pay for it?

Yes indeed, another case of **** Britain. Do they never embark on a 'lessons learnt' exercise? Looking at other countries, Japan is a great example, and look at how they've done it?!?

To me this policy will only result in annoying the British public even more with another stealth tax and the cash raised won't be nearly enough to do a proper job anyway. Excellent!

Steve

This is nothing more than another stealth tax.

BT wanted to do fibre to the home many years ago (MK being an example) but the regulator had a **** fit and said no it's not fair on the competition.

Fibre is cheaper to lay, cheaper to route and cheaper to maintain than copper.

That plus once off a sealed reel it has zero value so there is no point in nicking them for the copper.

Considering how much I paid in the UK for connectivity as compared to Holland, the inefficiency of anything government related in the UK, and the constant messing about with the industry, I hope things get taken out of control of the government asap.

I've not had too much trouble with the individual companies, Virgin, Zen, BT and Pipex amongst them.

21CN is already out of date! Virgin media has just begun testing 200Mb, BT can only provide upto 40Mb on 21CN. Also, 21CN is Asymetric which means less upload more download when people are needing more and more upload, its a waste of time and money imo!

Virgin media should lease their network to bring in more capital to expand the cable network and do away with DSL entirely.

21cn isn't just data (well it actually is ), there are lots more voice benefits to the upgrade.

Also 21cn only gives you ADSL2 which is 24mb download and as you say is asymmetric, 40mb download will be available once BT manage to get Fibre to the Cabinet, this again is asymmetric with upload speeds of 2-2.5mb.

People always compare BT to Virgin but (and i've looked but can't find it) how much of the country can Virgin actually supply it's 200mb service too?

how much of the country can Virgin actually supply it's 200mb service too?

None.. they have only just starting testing. Supposidly they cover 50% of the country but are starting to expand that where there is existing infrastructure to run cable without new civil engineering work. They have almost finished rolling out thier 50Mb across their entire network.

IF it works then fine.

But we know it wont, and in 10 years time the rest of the world will still be ahead of us.

don't know if this tax is the answer but believe me poor (or no broadband) is a major problem for many.

I live in a modern village (1st house only built 10 years ago) and 3 mls from the nearest major town, yet get only 1/2 meg and frequent drop outs

on the social side - music downloads are a pain, video downloads are a total waste of time, TV on demand or such things as iPlayer are totally out of the question and Cloud computing - whats that.........

But here is a more important side - it is totally impossible to work from home. There is very little local employment with most people traveling to Edinburgh 25 mls away. many folk, myself included, could easily work from home, at least on the odd day - saving a fortune in cash, valuable natural resource (fuel) and producing much less emissions.

yes it's my choice where I live and I am not going to get into the argument of who should pay for a decent digital network, but there is very definitely a need.

My understanding is that the 2Mbit is the minimum that you MUST provide to anyone, no matter where, in the UK.

That is far better than the current you must provide a phone line and support a 28.8 modem on the line.

The average is to be around the 200Mbit mark, which means that many people will be above this to counter the 2Mbit connections.

Hang-on, I don't think this revolution needs any finacial assiatnce from us. The telecom companies will make it self-financing, as they have already done in urban areas. Two exchanges close to me have over the last two years be sold-off and re-developed s blocks of flats at £150,000 - £300,00 a pop.

Most cables in country districts are flown - so easy to replace. The replacement ratio will be one fibre optic cable for several tens of copper/aluminium cables. So I would have thought that if this is done at the right time, when precious metal prices are really on the up (Less than3 years time) this may be self financing. They will be able to rationalise exchanges again, as has already been done in urban areas and sell the sites for residential re-development

Any way, I wouldn't have thought they would have needed much fibre optic as most of the existing copper links from exchange to village, could be replaced with any number of cheaper alterantives i.e. mini microwave, long-distance wi-f or, for the really remote locations satellite dishes, as done in the states in the '70s.

Trouble is, everything over here is done on the technological trailing edge and with a view to employing the maximum labour possible for each tiny step foward. For the money BT have spent on that South Wales installation they could have probably issued everyone with iridium type satelite phones and still of hada substantial amount of change out of the budget.

Nick

Edited 19 June, 200917 yr by Clunkclick

Virgin media should lease their network to bring in more capital to expand the cable network and do away with DSL entirely.

Well said

I live in an area where I get virgin broadband and pay for it.

I also live in an area where we have huge water bills to cover the cost of keeping the coast clean. Only the people in this area pay for it, it isnt subsidised by the rest of the country. So why should I subsidise other peoples broadband when no-one subsidises my water?