BT: we won't need Gigabit broadband for a long time

Genius - I bet this man was shocked to discover Colour TV exists!

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Hmm!

This 'Heath Robinson' infrastructure that BT have managed to persuade someone in Downing Street is worth wasting millions on couldn't get anywhere near 1GB if its life depended on it!

When the majority of your customers are struggling to get anywhere near 2MB (on a good day, with a following wind and the rest of the street on holiday!), talking about 1GB makes you look like something of a wally!

By the time they roll out the smoke and mirrors with their fibres and cabinets, those of us that haven't died of old age will probably suffer a stroke as we all point and laugh at the same time when BT announce..."actually, it doesn't work that well does it?"

By Lee_Grant on 2 Mar 2010

Sync speed is not everything

People need to stop getting hung up on there download speed and thinking that the faster it is means a richer internet connection. It is also dependant on the network devices and the ISPs equipment. That is why a corporate 10Mb leased line will knock spots off a 20Mb home user broadband connection.

By ChrisSnape on 2 Mar 2010

Translation. We can not afford to do this.

By Amnesia10 on 2 Mar 2010

Nothing to do with the BT Pensions Deficit...

Well, years of not adequately funding their Pension Scheme has left BT with a big deficit they have to fill from current money, so investment will take a back seat for a while as profits are used to fill up the Pension hole instead.

By SwissMac on 2 Mar 2010

Way back when...

Good job we don't need mobiles either.

By Planado on 2 Mar 2010

History...

640K of memory is all that anybody with a computer would ever need

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers

By Steve_Adey on 3 Mar 2010

Social Housing Providers and Digital Inclusion Strategy Group 2010 Action Plan

This docucment was published last week and shows how the 'digitally excluded', in this case those in Social housing, can be brought on the digital world we live in. Unfortunately it fails to relate to the reality that these people live in.

By RobertinHerts on 4 Mar 2010

Walk before we run please

As someone with a miserable 512kb connection not scheduled for improvement for at least 3 years I'd like to agree with him. BT have a long way to go to bring everyone up to a base standard of 2mb before we worry about 1gb broadband.

By jaibee3 on 4 Mar 2010

Too little too late

30 years ago I, amongst others, suggested to the government that we should start investing in fibre optics to the door. At that time BT was replacing it's long haul copper with fibre, so the technology was available even then.

But BT has always made a fat profit from it's antiquated copper buried in the ground and its monopoly position. There was no financial advantage to do so. Consequently we are still lumbered with with an unfit for purpose system. We've had 30 years of excuses from BT why they can't upgrade the local loop, but in reality it boils down to "why change when we can make a fat profit from what we've got?"

By pjajennings on 4 Mar 2010

It is obviously all about profits, but frankly the need for bandwidth still exists. If he thinks all people want to do is look at facebook and iplayer he's a muppet.

I download 150mb ISO files and large documents running to tens of mb and doing this over ADSL is an overnight job. A 10mb (please could they stop wittering about mbits?) synchronous connection would be a god send.

For one thing workable video conferencing would finally be possible.

But BT are just interested in protecting their leased line business. They'll cock something up deliberately.

By bubbles16 on 4 Mar 2010

Another Mess Created by Gordon Brown

Those of us with reasonable memories will recall that Gordon and his mate Tony, stiffed BT for £23 billion in the sale of 3G mobile licences. The Treasury backroom guys had expected around £2 billion. A Chancellor with a brain would have said " Thanks for the bid but give us £2 billion AND run a new high capacity line into every home and business in the UK. In a stroke, well after a lot of digging, we would have had a World class infrastructure, a lot of new employment and more internet capacity than anyone would need. But no we blew the money on Browns failed social experiments and now we have BT's useless network and owe the rest of the world some £1.4 trillion.

Couldn't make it up could you

By cliverhiggins1 on 4 Mar 2010

Broadband speeds

The speed of service would greatly improve if there was less spyware, adware and every other 'ware that companies using the internet encourage to help promote their business models and sell their advertising. Not to mention all the Spam. If you look at the cookies on your PC there must be 50 or more (conservative estimate) all loading up webpages to monitor my internet surfing on the odd chance their advertising will prompt me to spend more time making a purchase.
Years ago the phone company I used to work for used 750MHz machines. Internet access was faster then than now with my 3GHz machine with all the c**p that is carried by the network.

By G3REPComms on 4 Mar 2010

10mbit or 10Mbit & per second perhaps ;-)

Bubbles16 - What is 10mb? A hundreth of a bit. What would I do with such a thing even if it existed. A bit is surely either a single 1 or a single 0 so a hundredth thereof is meaningless.

Even if you meant to write 10Mb and even if b were the only 'standard' abbreviation for bit (and wikki does offer "bit" or "b" with the latter being recommended by the IEEE 1541 Standard (2002) but IEC 60027 specifies that the symbol for bit should be "bit", and this should be used in all multiples!) you can get that down a 512k bit per second connection in something like 30 secs. (Admittedly a 150Mbit file would take longer and it is probably overhead that is the main problem.)

Are you sure you weren't talking about 'mega bits per second'? (Mb/s)

If you are going to 'witter' then please be accurate!

By Stevenson_gy on 4 Mar 2010

10mbit or 10Mbit & per second perhaps ;-)

Bubbles16 - What is 10mb? A hundreth of a bit. What would I do with such a thing even if it existed. A bit is surely either a single 1 or a single 0 so a hundredth thereof is meaningless.

Even if you meant to write 10Mb and even if b were the only 'standard' abbreviation for bit (and wikki does offer "bit" or "b" with the latter being recommended by the IEEE 1541 Standard (2002) but IEC 60027 specifies that the symbol for bit should be "bit", and this should be used in all multiples!) you can get that down a 512k bit per second connection in something like 30 secs. (Admittedly a 150Mbit file would take longer and it is probably overhead that is the main problem.)

Are you sure you weren't talking about 'mega bits per second'? (Mb/s)

If you are going to 'witter' then please be accurate!

By Stevenson_gy on 4 Mar 2010

Social Housing Providers and Digital Inclusion Strategy Group 2010 Action Plan

This docucment was published last week and shows how the 'digitally excluded', in this case those in Social housing, can be brought on the digital world we live in. Unfortunately it fails to relate to the reality that these people live in.

By RobertinHerts on 4 Mar 2010

Milking the curve

BT are not interested in giving you what you think you need. Oh no, what they give you is the most meandering pathway imaginable such that each incremental service step can be used to milk everyone dry en-route.

It all started out this way with ISDN and they just keep on fobbing everyone off.

Only a government decision to "retake control of the pipes" would ever circumvent this mess.

By Gindylow on 4 Mar 2010

What a load of Guff!

Crikey! That BT bloke is a marketing dream - all the usual buzz-words, not a single clue about reality. Like so many, he thinks people only do 1 thing at a time, and there's only one person in each house! We have 4 pc's, and if the kids stay that can become 6+their friends, all messaging, watching Youtube/films, downloading, browsing etc. - ALL AT THE SAME TIME! AMAZING! Quite why these people have no clue whatsoever is STUNNING! Yes, BT should be running fibre to every roadside cabinet NOW, and into every home SOON, and each day they sit on their collective fat-arses spewing the tripe this guy does (for a super-fat salary I bet), puts the UK further towards a future 'Dark Ages Of The Internet'. The Government shoud sever all ties with BT, and offer Virgin (who already have fibre cable to MOST homes btw) a slice of pie to make that EVERY home in the UK. This could be done very quickly, in fact the sooner the better. Goodbye BT, now please.

By Wilbert3 on 4 Mar 2010

Money in the bank

just think what a stash of cash there is buried in our streets. When the Gov. finally can afford to subsidise the fibre network there will be billions of pounds worth of copper being recovered. This should cover the pension deficit many times over.

By anthonywilliam on 4 Mar 2010

Wilbert3

With what you have going why do you need anymore?
I'm sure your setup is not par for most homes. On the otherhand I have 4 PC's 2 PSPs 1PS2 & 1PS3 running off a BT copper landline @up to 8Meg (usually 4-6) and have no problems when the boys friends are round. All this call for massive speed is a nonsense, what we need is just a stable low level available to everybody.

By anthonywilliam on 4 Mar 2010

Some of the comments here just show that not everyone understands how the connection from the home to the target internet source works..
just because you have a 100mb connection does not mean you will be able to download at anywhere near that speed.. Your target site may have a similar size pipe and at that time you are downloading it could be in use by a number of users doing the same as you. so you will not be able to use the full potential of you connection.
Remember also your connection whether the ISP is BT, LLU or any of the others there the back-end of the DSLAM you connect to is shared by up to 50 users, who may or may not be on as the same time as you.. So please guys understand the technology and network connectivity before you criticize the response to the question in the review

By machan52 on 4 Mar 2010

Electricity Bills

Wilbert3 wrote:

"We have 4 pc's, and if the kids stay that can become 6+their friends, all messaging, watching Youtube/films, downloading, browsing etc. - ALL AT THE SAME TIME!"

In this case I'd be more worried about the electricity bill than the broadband speed.

By FrancisKing on 4 Mar 2010

He's got a point

I'm one of the lucky ones with a 7Mb broadband connection, but I still find that many, many sites are often slow. I don't need a motorway if it just leads into a B-road when I go anywhere. The real question then is who's going to pay for fatter pipes into our favourite sites?

By paulkilkelly on 4 Mar 2010

Up please

@paulkilkelly As a user of a 50 Mbit broadband connection I can tell you servers that can match or exceed this demand are very rare. In fact even some gaming content servers cannot which is disgraceful. Well at least the broadband doesn't choke when multiple users are online.

What we need is a higher upload rate, I always find it appealing when companies advertise their services as being ideal for gaming online when they're insufficient for hosting matches.

By urmaster on 4 Mar 2010

@machan52

I would imagine most people on this site understand contention ratios perfectly well.

The fact that the service provision is limited at a number of different choke points, be they commercially invoked through bandwidth throttling, or physical limitations W.R.T the service head matters not.

The outcome is the same, a service provision which hobbles along.

If I sit on a T1 or T3 line there are plenty of sites and services offering full capacity downloads.

Each part of the service and the netwrok must be improved over time such that demand and offering are matched.

BT have been THE culprits of hindering Broadband provision since year dot.

Eircom are exactly the same in Ireland.

Its not that it can't be done, or shoudlnt be done, its just that by not doing it they can drag more subscriptions out of people for longer.

By Gindylow on 6 Mar 2010