Readers ought to remember that though people seem to get all misty eyed when they think of Tokyo and Seoul and their 100Mbps speeds, the reality of the situation is that your average Japanese or Korean user enjoys downstream speeds of 40Mbps, which is what we should sensibly hope to expect when BT begin pumping fibre to the homes of 10 million UK residents over the next three and a half years.
Bearing this in mind, BT’s fibre plan has, somewhat predictably, been criticised for being obsolete out of the box. It is believed that by 2012, when rollout of the £1.5bn network is due to be completed, Tokyo, Seoul and Paris will each have ploughed more cash into their broadband infrastructures, suggesting that us in the UK will carry on playing catch-up with the rest of the world in terms of download speeds.
“This announcement will not take us ahead of Korea or Japan,” a BT spokesman conceded today, but “over the next few years, it will enable some very high speeds, as high as anywhere else.” In an open letter to the Financial Times, IT researchers at TNS Technology said that “the UK will remain a second-tier country when it comes to internet speeds.”
That said, it’s worth considering that BT have whispered that once laid, their cable network will be able to pump out even faster speeds provided the requisite upgrades in the future are made. Consider that the comparatively old cable networks of NTL and Telewest inherited by Virgin Media will soon be kicking out top download speeds approaching 50Mbps, and that Virgin are apparently planning on introducing 300Mbps downstream speeds in the not too distant future.
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