People act so entitled when they live in cities; I happen not to like cities which makes me a minority, but there are plenty of wealthy business people crying every day about their connection south of London (and probably in more places; most places around Exeter aren't great either).
I live in Lithuania now and it really shocks me how bad the UK is for these things. Here I have 600/600 FTTH for €20/month and LTE is basically universal, even in remote parts of the country.
Whereas in the UK, BT was/is obsessed with squeezing every last drop of bandwidth from POTS connections - because the cost of upgrading everyone's last-mile connections from copper (or even aluminium in some cases) to fibre is very cost-prohibitive: look at the sheer cost the cablecos shouldered during the mass roll-out of coax in the early-1990s (and even then, it was only to boxes in the street, not houses) - I understand their near-bankruptcy from this move lead to them all coming together under NTL and Telewest, and then Virgin Media.
(The only thing that is inexplicable is how even modern, brand-new housing developments still have unshielded copper last-mile connections instead of FTTH: they don't even lay conduits to make it easier for possible future FTTH... idiocy)
Give the UK a few more years and there should be a mandate from above requiring FTTH and we'll see progress: maybe even 10Gig FTTH as standard, then the tables will turn and people in Lithuania will be stuck with their 1Gbps service until their next round of major infrastructure investment, potentially decades away.
(I'm aware that Fibre is generally more future-proof than copper, and a high-quality fibre line that handles 1Gbps today can easily handle 10Gbps, and potentially 40Gbps or even 100Gbps in the future - so my entire argument may be moot)
This is especially frustrating if you have a line that's directly connected to an exchange - you don't even benefit from the FTTC upgrades. Download-wise I can't complain too much - ~20Mbps is fine most of the time (though with family members that tend to leaving streaming video running constantly and various game consoles that auto-update almost constantly it's not ideal), but the sub-1Mbps upload speed is terrible. If I've anything large to upload, it's usually faster to take it to my grandparents' house - connected to the same exchange, but get a order of magnitude greater upload speeds because they are connected via a cabinet.
> (The only thing that is inexplicable is how even modern, brand-new housing developments still have unshielded copper last-mile connections instead of FTTH: they don't even lay conduits to make it easier for possible future FTTH... idiocy)
Reminds me a story my granddad told me from the 60s/70s (not sure exactly when it was). They'd just finished constructing a new road, laid all the conduits under the road for the various utilities, left them plainly labelled (IIRC it was also pre-planned with the companies, but not certain).... then came back two weeks later to find multiple utility companies had dug up parts of the road to lay their own and done a rough job of patching it back up. He was (understandably) less than impressed!
BT were preparing to do FTTH when I joined them in 1994 (I left in 2001). This was as you say going to be eye-wateringly expensive because BT have a universal provision requirement - they couldn't upgrade the network in the cities and not do it in the countryside. The idea was to pay for this by providing television services, but OfTel (now OfCom) said this would be unfair competition with the cable providers - who were cherry picking cities to make rollout cheaper. They would also have been in competition with Sky, which meant the Murdoch press lobbying against BT (among others; the media market is always a tangle of interests)
Additionally, local-loop unbundling (ie ADSL) was being proposed; BT were required to allow access to the last-mile network from in-exchange equipment, and do this at line rental prices that undercut themselves, in order to break their monopoly. OfTel were very likely to make the same requirement for FTTH/FTTC.
Of course, you pays your money you makes your choice - if BT had been allowed to go ahead with their TV services back then, we might've had FTTH way sooner, but BT probably still would have had a monopoly.
Source: I met the engineers doing FTTH on my first visit to Ipswich, I was part of the team working on the local-loop unbundling ordering systems (where other providers booked engineering time at exchanges) and gave presentations to them at OfTel's offices.
Edit: Looks like Ofcom wants to do something similar: http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2016/02/a-closer-look-a...
I have the feeling that Sky has slightly better peering (more stable speed to US & Asia during peak hours), but the higher speed on VM is more important here, and ping times are generally very low.
What do you mean with IPv6-free zone? Have ipv6 disabled on my PC (for different reasons) but haven't experienced any connectivity problems on either Computers or other devices (which should be able to use IPv6). IF you mean missing availability of ipv6, I don't think that there are any pages you can't see on ipv4?
And there won't be while ISPs are lagging in their adoption, meaning nobody can set up a IPv6-only site if they expect to be accessible by everyone.
Also, there's more than sites: an IPv4-only client can't connecting directly (P2P) to other clients behind carrier-grade IPv4 NAT, which leads to more centralized systems (and which give an advantage to large companies over more independent developers and open source groups).
These ISPs are holding everyone back, hence the site submitted in this thread.
It's unfortunate for people with more technical knowledge, but most people don't have that, and there is point protecting them from attacks (even if it's their fault that they didn't update).
I've read that the last mile in India is not yet liberalised and that's a huge growth factor in Internet usage.
Once this barrier falls, invesment in network equipment (IPv6-enabled) will follow.
Older, aka "mature" markets like Europe need some kind on incentive to switch to IPv6. Usually goverment subsidies...