MSE News: More English counties to get ultrafast broadband upgrades - is your area on the list?

MSE_Petar

Over a million more homes and businesses in England are set to get ultrafast broadband connectivity as part of a £5 billion upgrade – though work on the project won't start until next year at the earliest.

Read the full story:
'More English counties to get ultrafast broadband upgrades – is your area on the list?'

If you haven’t already, join the forum to reply.

tallmansix

About time but really late and not rolling out fast enough, internet speed is embarrassingly slow in this country - can't believe we still call 30 Mbps "super fast".

Portugal has gigabit across 83% of the population, 69% in rural areas. Even Romania hits 68% of the population compared to the UK's current 42%.

Nearly all of our 100mbps+ services come from Virgin Media - I know everyone complains about them but at least they invest in infrastructure unlike BT Openreach.

onomatopoeia99

tallmansix said:

About time but really late and not rolling out fast enough, internet speed is embarrassingly slow in this country - can't believe we still call 30 Mbps "super fast".

Portugal has gigabit across 83% of the population, 69% in rural areas. Even Romania hits 68% of the population compared to the UK's current 42%.

What does the economic powerhouse of Europe, Germany, have?

tallmansix

onomatopoeia99 said:

tallmansix said:

About time but really late and not rolling out fast enough, internet speed is embarrassingly slow in this country - can't believe we still call 30 Mbps "super fast".

Portugal has gigabit across 83% of the population, 69% in rural areas. Even Romania hits 68% of the population compared to the UK's current 42%.

What does the economic powerhouse of Europe, Germany, have?

Not much better than the UK. 

I’m not sure what your point is, there is no justification for either the UK or Germany being so far behind with their internet speeds. 

The last 16 months have been a great example of how important this is, many workers struggling to work from home effectively and lost productivity. 

southsidergs

tallmansix said:

The last 16 months have been a great example of how important this is, many workers struggling to work from home effectively and lost productivity. 

I've heard the opposite that the networks have coped really well with the extra traffic

ciderboy2009

At the end of the day though, how many households really actually need more than 40-80mbps?

I'm one of the lucky ones who has fttp with the option of near-enough gigabit speeds.  However, even with 2 tvs streaming 4k and another 2 streaming HD I find I still have plenty of bandwidth available for other uses on my 80mbps down/20mbps up connection

nick74

ciderboy2009 said:

At the end of the day though, how many households really actually need more than 40-80mbps?

I'm one of the lucky ones who has fttp with the option of near-enough gigabit speeds.  However, even with 2 tvs streaming 4k and another 2 streaming HD I find I still have plenty of bandwidth available for other uses on my 80mbps down/20mbps up connection

Agreed, I run a business from home and find 40mbps down and 10mbps up absolutely fine even with two, and sometimes three of us working remotely on different systems. I briefly upgraded to a 80/20 package last year but found that in practice it didn't actually change anything other than cost more each month, so went back down to 40/10. 

tallmansix

southsidergs said:

tallmansix said:

The last 16 months have been a great example of how important this is, many workers struggling to work from home effectively and lost productivity. 

I've heard the opposite that the networks have coped really well with the extra traffic

The overall infrastructure has coped well but the bottle neck is in peoples homes. My company has about 800 employees in the UK that moved over to home working, at least 100 of them struggled with home working because they had 10-20 Mbps home internet which is fine for home working but the kids were at home watching YouTube / Netflix etc leaving very little of that bandwidth left. Things like VOIP / MS Teams calls / Zoom was really sensitive to lag on the connection leading to audio / video drop outs when the connection was getting saturated with other traffic.

nick74 said:

ciderboy2009 said:

At the end of the day though, how many households really actually need more than 40-80mbps?

I'm one of the lucky ones who has fttp with the option of near-enough gigabit speeds.  However, even with 2 tvs streaming 4k and another 2 streaming HD I find I still have plenty of bandwidth available for other uses on my 80mbps down/20mbps up connection

Agreed, I run a business from home and find 40mbps down and 10mbps up absolutely fine even with two, and sometimes three of us working remotely on different systems. I briefly upgraded to a 80/20 package last year but found that in practice it didn't actually change anything other than cost more each month, so went back down to 40/10. 

There will always be individual cases where people say they are happy with 40-80mbps but the point is that copper connections to the house haven't increased in speed much in the last decade and are pretty much capped at the current rates and won't be suitable for the next decade many people especially in rural areas are getting less than 10mbps until fibre to premises is rolled out.

It all depends on your use cases - eg you want to download a 50GB Xbox game - we are looking at nearly 4 hours on a so called "super fast" 30 mbps connection, assuming nobody else is using any bandwidth. Add a 4K stream at 20 mbps into that mix and we are looking at 12 hours for the download.

On gigabit you'd be looking at 10 minutes and still have plenty of spare bandwidth for streaming and other uses.

littleboo

tallmansix said:

About time but really late and not rolling out fast enough, internet speed is embarrassingly slow in this country - can't believe we still call 30 Mbps "super fast".

Portugal has gigabit across 83% of the population, 69% in rural areas. Even Romania hits 68% of the population compared to the UK's current 42%.

Nearly all of our 100mbps+ services come from Virgin Media - I know everyone complains about them but at least they invest in infrastructure unlike BT Openreach.

I'm pretty certain that the Openreach investment in FTTP is greater than VM's, one manifestation of that is homes passed which for VM is around 100K per quarter, while OR are closer to 400K per quarter which is a significant difference even allowing for OR's lower costs.

tallmansix

littleboo said:

tallmansix said:

About time but really late and not rolling out fast enough, internet speed is embarrassingly slow in this country - can't believe we still call 30 Mbps "super fast".

Portugal has gigabit across 83% of the population, 69% in rural areas. Even Romania hits 68% of the population compared to the UK's current 42%.

Nearly all of our 100mbps+ services come from Virgin Media - I know everyone complains about them but at least they invest in infrastructure unlike BT Openreach.

I'm pretty certain that the Openreach investment in FTTP is greater than VM's, one manifestation of that is homes passed which for VM is around 100K per quarter, while OR are closer to 400K per quarter which is a significant difference even allowing for OR's lower costs.

Still take them a long time to catch up with Virgin.

Virgin: 53% (15 million) of UK homes have a cable connection - all capable of faster internet than the antiquated Openreach copper cables - around 7.1 million of them capable of Gigabit.

Openreach: Fibre to 4.5 million premises.

Will take Openreach about 8 years to catch up with Virgin if the 100k/400k figures you quote continue as is.

Seriously pathetic that the giant and incumbent telecoms operator is so far behind the times.

Virgin had to dig up pavements and lay all those cables themselves, BT Openreach have already got a head start with the infrastructure place but still lag behind them. Cables laid by Virgin over 20 years ago when we were still on dial up broadband are now capable of Gigabit internet because they actually had some foresight instead of trying to squeeze the internet down 50+ year old copper cables.

ann_droid

""50+ year old copper cables""

Early 1970's and...

Line Quality

	Downstream	Upstream
Current Rate	79999 kbps	19999 kbps
Maximum Rate	104000 kbps	28156 kbps
Signal-to-Noise Ratio	9.1 dB	18.6 dB

That install was pre Aluminium wiring some had to suffer.