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JohnnyBoy
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Post by JohnnyBoy »

DaddyHoggy wrote:
I think possibly as one of the few people who has actually read the digital britain report I can safely say that 2Mbit/s minimum that Gordon has set out as the bare minimum is never going to happen, not by any method laid out in the report anyway.
When I was living in Guisborough, I helped my neighbour connect his computer to the 'net using dial-up. After a few weeks, I asked him how he was getting on. He said "Fine", so I asked him if he'd thought about getting broadband installed. He paused for a second and then said "No, I really don't need it. I e-mail my son in Texas and browse some model railway websites, and that's about it."

I thought about Terry, my former neighbour, as Ben Bradshaw unveiled the Digital Britain report and announced that everyone was going to have £6/year added to their phone bill to go to a fund that would pay for remote areas to get online. Terry didn't want to pay for his own broadband, but the government were going to make him pay for someone else's.

One other interesting fact that amazed me... I'd assumed that when a new housing development is built in the UK, all of the properties would be connected to the local exchange using fibre optic, so I asked the telephone engineer who visited me if this was the case. "No" he said, "nobody wants to pay to have that kind of gear installed". "So brand new houses are connected to the exchange using copper wire?" I asked with some amazement. "Yep".

By comparison, new properties that are built near to an exchange in France come with a 24Mbit broadband connection.
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DaddyHoggy
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Post by DaddyHoggy »

It's not a fair comparison but one of my part-time students is from Singapore - all their new public networks are 1Gb/s fibre and if you live near the university or hospital or other Government/Military establishments you might get a share of 10Gb/s!

We had 56K PAYG dialup until my wife worked at home for just five days and the cost of dial-up was twice the cost of the equivalent broadband available at the time (£17.99/month for 300Kb/s with Vermin)!
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JohnnyBoy
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Post by JohnnyBoy »

They don't call this country "Rip-off Britain" for nothing... :evil:
"That's no vicious Treeoid. That's my wife."
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