Crap weather, bad teeth and rubbish cooking - we can now proudly add slow broadband to the list of pejorative British stereotypes. Users in Sweden, France and the Netherlands regularly enjoy fast broadband internet access with download speeds of up to 100Mbps – significantly higher than the so-called ‘fast’ 8Mbps speeds available in the UK – net users in South Korea, where one of the world’s first fibre-optic cable networks was installed, have enjoyed fast internet services since the late Eighties.
BT are currently upgrading the existing phone network so that faster ADSL2+ services – currently available from Be Broadband – will become available to more UK homes, although critics have frequently stated that the so called 21st Century Network (21CN) will be obsolete as soon as its completed.
A Government e-petition, initiated by Iain McDonald entitled “Give BT government insentive [sic] to provide fibre to every UK home” reads thus:
“BT are about to upgrade the UK phone network in a project they are calling 21CN. Their internet serivce [sic] will be based around the ADSL2+ standard which provides up to 24mbps download speeds. Parts of the UK already have this and it is currently out of date technology. The rest of the world are replacing their copper phone lines with fibre to the home [FTTH] and have speeds of up to 100Mbps internet and some parts even have speeds of 1Gbps. The UK will lag behind in broadband speed if no fibre network isn’t put in place [sic]…”
The implications of not having a fully-rolled out FTTH network by the end of the next century are grave – copper lines are comparatively costly to maintain, and slower broadband speeds could drastically hurt the financial sector and become a real problem for the economy. We encourage readers to visit the e-petitions page and support the petition for a UK FTTH network.
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Brian Storm said on 28 Jun 2007 at 2:35 pm #
We badly need a full fibre network in this country for a number of reasons, especially if people like Tiscali and BT expect customers to sign up for their IPTV platforms.
To think that you can get 100MB speeds in France, what would Al Murray say?
I have Freeview, and dont want anything else, but I would lov enothing more than to see Sky get given a run for its money.