From the slow side of the Digital Divide

Tuesday Jun 16, 2009

I would rather my co-worker who has 100M bit link to his home in the pipeline just shut up about it, you know who you are. Here on the slow side of the digital divide (at least we are digital, a few of the folks who live a little distance further from the exchange are still on dial up), this pledge from Gordon is as plausible as getting similar bandwidth on the moon(any comments on how easy 2MB to the moon would be for a laugh?).

I suggest the providers (BT in my case) put some effort into addressing the exchange side bottlenecks. I share a card in the exchange with a bunch of other people most of which are much closer to the exchange and typically will get around 4M/s. So when they come home of an evening and are downloading porn ( I am sure residents of Penrhyncoch have a wide range of interests and its just a guess anyway ) and playing interactive games at the same time, my peak download speed drops from 1.5M/s to less than 0.5 M/s.

I would like to know where Lord Cater lives, not in valley in a rural area for sure.

He said there would "certainly be 25-30 per cent of the country where there will be no economic case 
for building a next generation fixed network". 

Does he know people who have to make special provision for their children to get Internet access after school to do their Maths homework. I agree with the goal of 2MB to every household, but in terms of economic case his analysis looks to be focused on the economics of 1st order effects. Fixed line is the only option for many rural areas which are often rural because of the geography (mountains, valleys, etc) which does not make for easy transport of any kind (roads, phone lines, etc).

Rural areas don't need high speed fiber connections to all households today. They do need reliable, reasonable speed access with uncontended access exchange side.