Government Spells Out Plans For UK-Wide Full Fibre By 2033 (bbc.co.uk) 143
The UK government has set out a plan to roll out full fibre networks across all of the UK within 15 years by introducing laws to speed up the installation of fibre and subsidizing investment in very rural areas. From a report: The proposal comes as part of a new national telecoms strategy drawn up by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Under its targets, all of the UK will have full-fibre broadband coverage by 2033, replacing the copper wire network that currently delivers the service. It proposes legislation to encourage more private infrastructure investment. Earlier this month, research was published indicating that the UK has slipped from 31st to 35th place in the global broadband league tables, behind 25 other European countries. The data was collected by M-Lab, a partnership between Google Open Source Research and Princeton University's PlantLab, and the results compiled by UK broadband comparison site Cable.
US should have this, too (Score:1)
Re:US should have this, too (Score:4, Insightful)
There are more than 8 million reasons, if each reason is a square kilometer. By comparison, The UK is a mere 242 thousand, and it's going to take 15 years
That really doesn't make sense.......there are also more people in America, too. If you're going to make a comparison, you should talk about population density. But that isn't convincing either, because even with America's population density, most people are in regions that could be covered by fiber reasonably. We may have to compromise on remote places like Coulterville, California; but honestly I think we could even get fiber to them.
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In most places the limited roll out of fibre is due to incumbents. They have a network that is made of slow copper, and little incentive to upgrade it. No-one else is willing to install last mile infrastructure to compete with them.
There are ways to solve this. You can make the last mile much cheaper. In Japan you can get fibre that is attached to power distribution poles, for example. You can force the opening up of cable tunnels.
Another option is to force the upgrades to be done by the incumbent and for t
Re: US should have this, too (Score:2)
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We have success stories in America too, like Vermont...
Sorry, but that is exaggerated or just bullshit. I grew up in rural VT on a gravel road and my parents still live there. Standard cable TV/internet became available to them ~4 years ago. Fiber is pipedream. I know some areas got fiber, particularly if they were near larger cities/towns like Burlington, Stowe, Montpelier, Rutland, etc. but there's still vast swaths of rural land where thousands of people live and get internet connectivity via cable, Dish Network, cell phones, or dial-up (yup dial-up is stil
Re: US should have this, too (Score:2)
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FWIW, when you hear about a small rural town getting fiber, it's probably just a small fraction of the residents in the village center or narrow corridor along a main road. But, the vast majority of rural town residents will live spread out over many square miles of surrounding countryside out of reach of the fiber lines.
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Interesting, do we have some telecom industry shills moderating today or is it just someone stalking me? If it's the latter you wasted your mod point buddy, there is some SJW stuff you could have targeted later on.
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Alaska?
Re: US should have this, too (Score:2)
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Our Scandinavian friends continually remind us that they have extensive broadband with high speeds even in remote areas with low population density. Are they lying? I can't see any reason that they would.
My take on it is that the US on the whole has a short term ghetto mentality when it comes to future planning. Profit NOW! Invest in the future? No, that is socialism. Profit NOW!!! Meanwhile we pay plenty of tax that we see little 'benefit' from apart from the basic crumbling infrastructure, huge military (
Re: US should have this, too (Score:1)
Yes, 2033 reminded me of the UK's 2040 target to get rid of infernal combustion engines. "Kicking it into the long grass" as we say in this septic isle.
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Ah, this bullshit again. The only US state that has a valid reason to complain about area or population density, for the purposes of building out a fibre network, is Alaska. Every other state is easily manageable, there's only a lack of political will, and corporate bribes to ensure it doesn't happen.
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Re: US should have this, too (Score:1)
So far; your own arguments are "the government should" as well, to the point of specifically decrying government inaction in regards to corporate action.
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In this case, the government in the US, both on state level and federally, has in the majority of cases worked for the companies benefit. Having LESS government would make that situation worse, because it'd allow the large, established corporations to trample everyone else even harder.
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Protectionist legislation introduced thanks to the large corporations. And no, the mythical "market" won't solve the issue.
As for the fees, that's exactly how the municipal networks in Sweden work, companies frequently bid to manage the physical networks, and then various ISP's rent capacity and offer their services. But that's still a lack of political will on the US part, both among the politicians, and the people, who vote those people in.
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Re: US should have this, too (Score:2)
Yeah but the phone lines were installed by an advanced civilization and no-one quite knows how they managed it. Possibly aliens.
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The bigger issue is that BT claimed that large areas of the country where commercially unviable to upgrade to FTTC because uptake would be too low. There are places where the FTTC cabinet that BT claimed where commercially unviable where are full, have had a second one added which is now also full. There was a large amount of clawback in the subsidy scheme to break that deadlock (which has laid bare BT's utter inability to predict demand) that kicked in when uptake reached a certain percentage on a cabinet.
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Re: US should have this, too (Score:2)
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They aren't broke until the creditors stop giving them money
Wow, you do know who the "creditors" are in this case right? I'll give you a clue, they have publicly stated that they want to be the dominant economic super power of the world by 2025. They are not members of the United Nations. They really don't like the United States very much. They especially don't like us because we started a trade war with them.
I love how you use the term "creditors" as if there are these magical creditor fairies that have an infinite amount of money to lend out. If that's what y
Re: US should have this, too (Score:3)
So California's pensions are all paid up? The schools are adequately funded? Police and fire have all the resources they need?
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The complaints in 2018 about pensions from Republicans is that they are more lavish than dirty government workers deserve. So, I'm guessing they cannot attack the long term viability of the pension system.
They seem to be. Since local taxes pay for schools too, I'd guess there are underfunded schools in the state. But the typical one seems fine.
No program ever has "all the resources
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Police and fire have all the resources they need?
Bike trails galore, check. Aesthetically pleasing landscaping galore, check. Save the whales, check. LGBT legislation, check. All sorts of other excessive tax spending, check. Police and fire resources? Ah well, you respond apathetically:
No program ever has "all the resources it needs"
No problems with this logic at all...
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I didn't respond apathetically. I dismissed your "No True Scotsman" argument before it started. Or, if that wasn't your intent, then I misread it. But the verbiage led me to think this point was dishonestly made and I treated it as such.
The point is, California is running surpluses, and seems to have adequately funded their government obligations. So, you know, that works as an example.
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I certainly don't see how I contradicted myself. My guess is that you have some secret assumption. But go on, feel free to take "vague accusation" to "actual argument" by explaining how I did.
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We gave the ISPs the money to do this once before, they didn't
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There's no reason the US shouldn't have this, too. Or at least your local state, if you prefer things at the state level.
Maybe 10-15 years ago, but I'm not convinced nationwide fiber is a smart investment now. Next generation mobile networks (e.g. "5G") and low-orbit satellites could provide the nationwide broadband coverage more efficiently than laying and maintaining* physical wires along every rural public road. Those technologies are being tested right now and could use a boost of investment.
* - I don't think most people realize how expensive it is to maintain fiber cables. If a fiber cable is damaged by a storm or an ine
Re: US should have this, too (Score:1)
How do you think your 5G cell towers connect to the net?
Smoke signals?
Cell towers are connected to the net by fiber.
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I'm currently developing an entirely new communication system that will revolutionize life as we know it. It consists of an intricate web of wires and pulleys, and most important of all, smoke and hidden mirrors. It will be free to all. The only thing necessary will be the continual working of the bellows and operation of the treadmill. For an extra fee, if you are fortunate enough to dwell close to running water, my company will install a water wheel. State taxes may apply.
Pat. Pending
You were close, but I
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How do you think your 5G cell towers connect to the net?
Smoke signals?
Cell towers are connected to the net by fiber.
You answered your own question.... Connect one fat fiber to a tower that covers many square miles instead running fiber down every little rural podunk road to every cabin or farmer's doorstep. I didn't mean to say no fiber at all in rural areas, just that it's not cost-effective to run fiber to every doorstep, when wireless technology can bridge that gap.
FWIW, I grew up in a very rural area on gravel road where my parents still live. They had dial-up until about 2006, when a regional Wi-Fi ISP opened, whic
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Electricity, water, waste water, phone lines, how difficult would it be to bury glass fiber alongside those?
But it's not done. The ethernet standard for fiber optic cable is intentionally incompatible with all previous standards. Routers and network cards for it are incredibly expensive.
But glass fiber is literally made from sand. The cable itself is cheaper than copper wires, and connectors are much more robust. You don't have to worry about RF interference either.
You have a point: Radio can cover a wider
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You have a point: Radio can cover a wider area without having to bury anything, which is an advantage in rural areas where little to no infrastructure is built anymore, or where no infrastructure other than roads have been built yet.
Thank you. Exactly my point.
Electricity, water, waste water, phone lines, how difficult would it be to bury glass fiber alongside those?
This is an example of how urban/suburban folk don't fully understand rural infrastructure challenges (that's not meant as an insult, so please don't take it that way). In rural areas [and even some lower density suburban developments] water and sewer is typically onsite wells and septic tanks, respectively. Electric, phone, and cable lines are typically above ground on poles.* Now, you could run fiber on poles, but it will be damaged more often in storms, so long-term maintenance
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Phone and cable could be replaced with fiber.
I have no doubt that it will be done eventually, but if not even the phone lines are buried, then the temporary solution of bridging the gap with radio seems to be more permanent than I would have expected.
Thank you for the insight.
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What wireless telecom is paying you to post that drivel, Ranbot?
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I don't need ad-hominem attacks when there's actual information.
Recent 5G news:
https://mobile.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
https://mobile.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]
Recent Satellite Internet news:
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
5G will be commonplace in about two years and LEO satellite broadband will be longer, but no longer than it would take to lay fiber lines down every single rural road in America at great expense.
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The issue is not that 5G and satellite is being introduced, it's the drivel you posted about it being less maintenance and more reliable than fibre:
First of all, 5G depends on fibre. But in addition to possible fibre breaks, you also have to deal with the following:
Atmospheric conditions including, but not limited to, dust, rain, snow, hail.
Wildlife nesting/hoarding in antennas( see https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com])
Traffic degradation not just in bandwidth but also latency-wise, as with all wireless.
And fo
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Area (Score:2)
I think you'll find the UK is substantially larger than your city, probably by a factor of 100.
Re:Area (Score:5, Informative)
It was planned by BT in the 80's to roll out fibre, but Margaret Thatcher bowed under pressure from the incoming American cable companies that it would be unfair and uncompetitive. So it's was withdrawn and the American cable companies arrived then backed down on their promises to roll out their fibre country wide and just did a few cherry picked cities.
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It was planned by BT in the 80's to roll out fibre, but Margaret Thatcher bowed under pressure from the incoming American cable companies that it would be unfair and uncompetitive. So it's was withdrawn and the American cable companies arrived then backed down on their promises to roll out their fibre country wide and just did a few cherry picked cities.
In most cases, that promised fibre turned out to be co-ax cable.
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At least, when I lived in Portsmouth (UK), we were on Nynex cable. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYNEX)
Dunno how widespread in the UK they were, but they were there. (Proof: http://www.m2.com/m2/web/story... [m2.com], https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]).
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Re: Half the UK providers already advertise "fibre (Score:5, Informative)
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FTTC, which one day suddenly dropped to 1 Mbit/s, and the ISP said the line tests were fine and there’s no obligation to deliver faster. Then another *wonderful* ISP tech said he could relabel the query and thus cause a BT engineer to actually come out and run tests. Which he did. And the on-site tests are more thorough than whatever the ISP people have access to. He found a couple of red flags to do with insulation. So he, the *wonderful* man, traced the fault to a copper section between two cabinets
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oh :-(
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As Charter advertises it in the US, "Fibre-Rich broadband". That's so much made-up bullshit that it's amazing that it's not illegal. But it's apparently true enough that it's OK to trick everyone without a technical understanding of networking.
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I'll believe it when I see it... (Score:1)
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I live in central London. The best I can get in my building? ADSL, 15Mbps up / 1Mbps down. No cable, no fiber.
Sounds legit. I was on 4mbit until about a year ago when they finally got round to instaling fiber. Also a London dweller (Zone 2).
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You almost got me there!
Of course, I now assume that you meant London, Ontario, Canada.
SkyMuster in Oz (Score:2)
I've got the Skymuster satellite internet. It is about the same cost as a fixed broadband line (50 bucks a month) and faster than the ADSL2 i got in town. It is volume limited (40 Gb peak, 60 Gb offpeak) and it is somewhat flaky, particularly at weekends (they claim the latest router upgrade cures that). The other alternative is broadband via 3G or 4G wireless. That costs a straight $5 /Gb over the Telstra network, less over the flaky networks, but those don't work out in the bush.
I'm sure it'll be fine (Score:1)
After all, the government has been so competent at negotiating Brexit with the EU that a nationwide fibre broadband network will be a simple walk in the park.
Bandwidth Joneses (Score:4, Interesting)
Earlier this month, research was published indicating that the UK has slipped from 31st to 35th place in the global broadband league tables, behind 25 other European countries.
Spending money to surpass others is pointless if there's no benefit to doing so. Eventually rural consumers will have 100Mbps or higher. Sure, faster downloads and peak usage throughput are great, but the benefits for consumers fall off pretty quick. Can 'accessing online educational resources' justify more bandwidth than this? Even assuming hi-def video chat with tutors/business associates, with modern codecs (AV1) do you really need much more than that? Sure, VR video will use even more bandwidth, but does that really open any qualitatively different educational experiences, or businesses even? I have a feeling that today's video companies will be primarily responsible for VR videos in the future, so it won't necessarily enable many new jobs that weren't already being done with 2d cameras. Businesses already have access to fiber, in the places they want to put data centers, so do consumers really need faster speeds at home once they have ~100Mbps? Sure, a few power-users who download VM containers/linux beta ISOs daily would make use of it, but does that justify $billions in government subsidies?
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but the benefits for consumers fall off pretty quick. Can 'accessing online educational resources' justify more bandwidth than this? Even assuming hi-def video chat with tutors/business associates, with modern codecs (AV1) do you really need much more than that?
Applying today's thinking for a project 15 years in the future, what a visionary you are.
Re:Bandwidth Joneses (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but the "few power users" thing doesn't cut it anymore when it comes to downloading. That was 15 years ago before the industry actually caught up with legitimate download sources.
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Mobile devices mostly stream video, rather than download. Aside from offline viewing, downloading doesn't need to be faster than streaming speed. Downloading videos faster for offline viewing and downloading games faster are great, but don't enable new businesses or experiences that wouldn't exist with slower download speeds. I.e. what new things does the upgrade enable, that wouldn't exist with 100Mbps internet? Internet video existed long before Netflix streaming, so it should be predictable today, what t
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How about multiple people watching 4K60 video on multiple devices concurrently? Meanwhile somebody starts uploading hundreds of MB or even GBs of photos and videos and because most ISPs are cheap on upload bandwidth, everybody else's video stream stalls or drops to a lower bandwidth rendition. Families sitting around one TV are a dying breed.
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Families sitting around one TV are a dying breed.
Dying? It's dead Jim. The people age 20-30 have radically different ideas about adulthood than you and I grew up with. A lot of people aren't even planning to get married or have kids. Society is transforming into something else and very quickly. There is nothing that can be done to stop it. The only question for each person is: will you adapt or not? Not adapting has consequences.
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Multiple users. If you have the UK average speed (16mbps) then downloading some patches will probably make Netflix drop to 240p and buffer like crazy. Video calls will lag and stutter.
It's not just about raw download speed, it's about having enough bandwidth to keep interactive and streaming services working properly.
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It's the latency, stupid (Score:3)
It's not the bandwidth.. it's the low latency.
Communities without fiber connectivity are not long-term viable. Slowly people are realizing this.
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Fiber has higher latency than copper cable, over short distances at least. Factoring in repeaters for cable, it may end up slower. 'Full fiber' means last-mile, right?
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The faster DSL and cable standards actually have higher latency because they used interleaving for error control. When I went from SDSL which was basically the DSL version of a T1 or ISDN to must faster ADSL, latency went from 5 milliseconds to 30 milliseconds on the hop to the gateway.
For the faster standards you used to be able to select whether interleaving was used giving the option between lower latency or higher bandwidth but at some point, that decision was made for you by marketing; higher peak ban
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Gigabit available in rural areas allow for running a greater amount of business from home, it allows for multiple household members to run bandwidth intensive tasks without affecting latency.
In Sweden, rural broadband has helped slow down or even reverse rural depopulation. And before you start yapping in a simpleton way about "oh, so small" etc, keep in mind that Sweden is larger than California, and we have municipalities larger than Connecticut, and larger than New Jersey if you only look at land area.
As
Why bother with the big announcement? (Score:2)
....cynical....
Good news I guess. (Score:1)
It is at times like these that I am reminded of the dark fiber that has been laying dormant in east Berlin since the mid 1980s.
Not in much of a hurry then? (Score:1)
Question to all the Brits (Score:2)
I'm not familiar with UK government efficiency. How likely is it for this goal to be achieved in the given timeframe?
1) 100% achievable
2) overall achievable but some area will not be connected in that timeframe
3) it's going to be late by 1-5 years
4) it's going to be late but it will eventually get there
5) next Ice Age
6) Jesus coming back