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Tuesday 3 February 2009

How hard can it be? Broadband is....

There were so many arguments in the BSG all those years ago about the definition of broadband. Is it 1Mbps, 2Mbps+, can asymmetrical count? etc etc. I sat through many of the discussions.....

It's really bloody truly simple. It is not about numbers. I speak as a consumer who is utterly fed up with no-one getting it right for me, my kids, my family, my neighbours, my community, or my country.

If you want a USO that works, try going back to what every telco and Ofcom should be held up against a wall and shot for failing to deliver to pretty much the whole of the UK civilian and small business population to date:

Broadband should be able to simultaneously transmit and receive voice, video and data.

If it can't do those basics, it ain't. Simple as.

3 comments:

chris said...

I had this conversation with a man in a suit today. We were discussing the digital britain report, and he said that a 2meg connection to a user would deliver Iplayer, using around half a meg, leaving 1.5 meg free for other apps. Excuse me, I said, what about the other 70 people the ISPs shove on the same line trying to do the same thing?
Or is the 2meg available gonna be a leased line to every user LOL.
Don't think the men in suits understand contention.

PhilT said...

If there was a 2 Mbits/s USO it would be on the end user link speed, as that is where the technology falls short in various locations. The actual user throughput experienced is more of a commercial issue as contention is universally used (including in FTTx) to make the service affordable.

chris said...

Contention with a good ISP means managing your network so that what you have promised to your customer is delivered. What actually happens is that that most milk an obsolete system to make as much profit as they can. In the same way that the govt believe everyone has a connection now, the govt in 2012 will believe everyone has a 2meg connection. In actual fact the ones who haven't got it now probably won't have it then. So what you are saying is that a line will be tested, assuming it checks out at 2 meg it will pass the USO, and then thereafter no further checks will be made because it has ticked a box, and the poor consumer struggles along with all the other people on that line with a substandard connection, and the govt will proudly proclaim everyone has broadband at up to 2 meg? what a waste of an opportunity, with all the unemployed at the moment they could be paid to dig the fibre instead of paid to stay home being miserable.