Oxymoron of the day: Civil War
|
|
|
UK is rubbish for broadband
CLOUD OUTFIT Akamai Technologies says that England is falling behind the world plus dog when it comes to broadband penetration.
In its fourth quarter 2010 State of the Internet report of growth in global broadband speeds and mobile data consumption, Akamai Technologies said that us Brits only limped in with one city in its global top 100.
Did we at least hit the top ten? Surely we had a glimmer of hope for nestling in the top 50? Not a chance. In fact, we fell over the line exhausted in 99th place with only Athens, Georgia in the US behind us at 100.
There were 60 Japanese cities, 16 South Korean cities and 8 US cities in the top 100 and we got the wooden spoon with one. So surely it's fat bandwidth crunching Londoners who felt the weight of its collective broadband consumption registering on Akamai's global server network? Again, sadly no. But the UK winner was, er... Bradford.
Our colleagues at V3 picked up on this seeming anomaly but, apparently, Bradford punters registered highly because 60 per cent of them have individual IP addresses, which bumps the aggregate score up. Well done then, Bradford.
Bradford has an average broadband connection speed of 6.09Mbps while the citizens of South Korea's number one spot, Taegu, get an average of 18.36Mbps. The UK average is just 4.3Mbps, while London is even worse at 3.5Mbps and overall, Blighty is way down in 26th place on the global broadband ranking list.
The only saving grace was for mobile connectivity. The report found that one rogue UK mobile provider had the highest average peak connection speed at 21.2Mbps. Oh, and this time last quarter, the UK didn't even make Akamai's State of the Internet in the top 100 at all.
The good news, globally at least, is that there has been a jump of 4.2 per cent more broadband IP addresses this fourth quarter than there were in the third quarter of 2010. That's a 20 per cent increase in the rate of worldwide broadband adoption from this time last year.
That's all well and good, innit, but for the UK it's 'better luck next year'. µ
Tags: Hardware
Share this:
Share
Unfortunately this is the price we pay for employing incompetence, be it because of diversity laws or other red tape BT (and the people that work there) control the ADSL network and it is rubbish.
Most of the people that work at BT are barely able to complete the most basic of cognitive tasks meaning that it's impossible to complain, and even if you did manage to lodge a complaint, do you honestly believe a competent engineer would fix the problem?.... excatly.
What happens is most people try to spend a few days complaining and then just give up and thus millions of people are left with speeds a lot slower than 4mb.
The only saving grace is Virgin Media uses fibre optic broadband and it's a lot faster technology, so that does improve our average.
But, with regards to the UK becoming a leader in broadband technology, that will never happen, not so long as BT are in charge of the network and they keep employing staff who are quite frankly, stupid. The local loop unbundling has done nothing as other ISP's are bogged down by BT's heavy handed and deliberate sabortage tactics.
try wet tinfoil!
Aye good one, id jump at the chance and pay BT the early termination fee, shame the Fiber network has crap coverage.
"Average speed" doesn't say much.
It would be a lot more interesting to a) have some minimal speed requirement for what count as "broadband", and then b) see the penetration of households with broadband.
If 10% have gigabit connections and the rest have nought, then the average is still a fairly impressive 10Mbps.
:-)
"Akamai Technologies says that England is falling behind the world plus dog when it comes to broadband penetration."
When did we start "falling" behind? Haven't we always had the slowest broadband in the world?
The uk also has some of the fastest speeds in the world. Avoid bt because they use copper wire still. Go with a fibre optic company like virgin and you will get blistering fast speeds.
Over 20 meg on a mobile connection? Didn't know that was possible yet.
I used to live in Ludlow and my broadband with vispa.net (ex'lent service, no throttling, static IP) never had a problem but then I was only about 650M from the exchange according to samknows.com
Router always said 8Mbps downstream but now im in Shrewsbury (still with vispa), my router says 12Mbps (ADSL2) but i'm pretty sure it's slower in actual use than when I was in Ludlow. I'm now about 2000KM from the BT exchange. Distance does make a difference.
BT is just greedy, I live in Ludlow where even though we are a reasonably sized town we are still on ADSL1 YEAH you hear that BT STILL on ADSL1, oh and no plans ADSL2 never mind FTTC.
So why is BT installing FTTC in areas that are already serviced by Virgin Media's FTTH service and yet ignoring towns like Ludlow where there is no competition. Of course BT is a business and they're business is trying to win back customers that had the choice to tell them where to shove their copper wire service and go with Virgin, other customers are just mugs who have no choice because of where they live but to pay BT £30 per month fo a sub-standard 2mbps internet service. I also note there is no discount for having an ADSL1 service? Would I expect this in a shop? If I went in a shop and their bakery could only bake half a loaf of bread would the shop still expect me to pay full price for it? I don't think so, and if they did I'd go to some other shop, but why can BT do this? Because they know customers have no choice, in Ludlow it's either BT, or buy it from another firm that is selling BT Wholesale, or take a gamble with TalkTalk and hope they're "upto 24mbps" claim is accurate and not upto 24mbps but actually runs at 2mbps (note the "Upto" statement doesn't actually guarantee that speed!).
BT at the end of the day don't care about the end consumer 'cos you have to pay them regardless as they have a monopoly on most of the UK's phone system, a monopoly that it's about time is brought to an end, the government should control our phone system not a company that goes about it's business with one plan in mind - just to make 100% profit, deliberately price fix wholesale ADSL so they can get rid of competition and bring this country down because of it's sub-standard services and attitude.
you know its articles like this that really depress me, average UK speed is 4Mbps? right wouldnt mind that, in fact my neighbour gets that, as do most the folk on this street, but im lumped with 2Mbps and apparently because i actually get something above 56Kbps speeds its fast enough so wont even look in to it.
The UK is a joke, BT = wont help anyone unless its city users, Virgin wont lay new cables, any other cabled based company is squeezed out or is simple bought out by BT, and even if they were not they wouldnt get the support to dig up the roads. Compertition is whats needed
Never take seriously anyone who can't tell the difference between the UK and England.
On netindex.com (from speedtest.net) the UK is 30th and the US is 29th for download speed
And for upload the US is 38th and the UK 62th, with a fair chance of catching up to cambodia and uganda.
http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/