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Comment by hogFeast | Hacker News Reader

It is also funny to look at a map of network speeds in the UK. Everywhere is slow apart from Hull (a relatively gritty fishing town in the North East). This is the only place where the local telephone company wasn't taken over by BT, and was the first city to have full fibre.

I understand that it is hard to provide fast internet to some parts of the UK...but most of England, where most people live, is fairly densely populated...this shouldn't be hard. The solution isn't for people to do this themselves, that reverses common sense (how can it be cheaper for some guy to just dig a cable themselves? it makes no sense). It is for the people who should be doing this to just do their job properly (BT have done pretty much everything to make themselves look bad, it is unreal...for some reason people still think Gavin Patterson is a legend rather than a gaffe-prone moron).

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> "Everywhere is slow apart from Hull"

Maybe that's true in areas that only have the incumbent Openreach (BT) fibre, but there are now several alternative fibre networks.

Virgin Media, of course, has their own extensive national broadband network (hybrid fibre/coaxial). And smaller fibre-only ISPs such as Hyperoptic, Cityfibre, and Gigaclear have their own physical infrastructure. These guys typically offer gigabit speeds or more.

Personally, not having fibre in my building, I've ditched the wires in favour of 5G home broadband, and enjoy ~400 Mbps for £30/month (30 day contract). Even better, I can take the battery-powered router with me when I need mobile WiFi, even roaming around Europe!

96% of households in the UK can get 30 Mbps.

Now, some people do lots of hand waving at this point. Surely, they argue, if everybody had gigabit networking instead of just 30 Mbps we'd find some exciting new application to justify it? Nope. Some communities do have this and they don't invent new applications it mostly sits idle.

The other fun thing that people say here is "Well but they don't". That's true, they can get 30 Mbps but they choose slightly cheaper offerings that are much lower speed. So why are you desperate to deploy higher bandwidth offerings? If your company finds that take-up of new 30 litre per second water supplies isn't what you hoped for, do you conclude people must need 30 cubic metres per second of water instead and deploy bigger high pressure pipes? Or do you say "Wait a minute, maybe people actually have enough water?"

> 96% of households in the UK can get 30 Mbps.

96% may have 30Mbps advertised to them, but I would venture the question: do they actually get that?

When I lived in London, I lived in Lewisham, Bromley-by-Bow and Whitechapel; I had shockingly bad internet in each of these places.

I very commonly got less than 0.5Mbps ( for example: https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/757179610 )

That didn't stop BT from selling me 16Mb/s.

They don't get it because they aren't buying it. But yes, 30Mbps is what you'd expect to get at those 96% of households if you bought whichever of the mainstream services offers >30Mbps

That might be a VDSL product from any of the popular ISPs (if you live with a few hundred metres of a "green box"), a cable product if you live in one of the cities or larger towns that have cable, or dedicated fibre link.

Some people see significantly worse performance because of their own suboptimal choices (e.g. maybe the blinking lights on the supplied VDSL modem annoy you so you run a telephone extension to a different room and lose 4Mbps of bandwidth because crappy telephone extensions don't do high bandwidth networking very well) and over a population of millions some will see physical network problems, that may need repair before they see the intended performance. But on the whole this 30Mbps coverage figure is based on extrapolating measurements from real users over data about available service.

I'm not aware of any 16MB/s products (16MB/s = 128Mbps or maybe you just meant 16Mbps) but Lewisham, which you gave as an example, has VDSL available at all the consumer nodes, so unless you lived in the £5M penthouse of some mixed use building in Docklands you could have bought faster networking you just didn't.

It can seem like surely if they could offer 30Mbps VDSL, why is my ADSL only 1Mbps? But that's misunderstanding the technology. ADSL was deployed in the UK to exchanges, so the signal needs to get from your home to an actual telephone exchange, there's probably one in your borough but it might be well over a mile away. However VDSL is in street cabinets, so your signal only travels to the cabinet which might be only a few hundred metres away. This makes it somewhat more expensive but also a lot faster. Unless (in both cases) you don't buy it.

>I'm not aware of any 16MB/s products (16MB/s = 128Mbps or maybe you just meant 16Mbps) but Lewisham, which you gave as an example, has VDSL available at all the consumer nodes, so unless you lived in the £5M penthouse of some mixed use building in Docklands you could have bought faster networking you just didn't.

Incorrect, BT could charge me more but by their own admission they would not be able to deliver the speed.

- FWIW this was eventually resolved in Bromley-by-Bow because the fibre laid by telecity for the olympics was sold to Hyperoptic.

> Lewisham

I live in Lewisham, Brockley and we only have a 10Mbit line available (and the real speed is lower than that) because we have a so-called “exchange only line” and we’re over a mile away from the exchange. The whole street can’t be connected to anything better than shit BT service.

So no, you can’t always have this in London.

> "Whitechapel; I had shockingly bad internet in each of these places."

I get up to 400 Mbps in Whitechapel (Vodafone 5G). Very fast and reliable.

(Edit: speed test just now: https://www.speedtest.net/result/9708635870 )

Well, 5G is something else entirely.

My experience was from nearly 6 years ago; on BT's books I was a 16Mbps customer but I was very much not getting that.

I am merely questioning the link between 'on the books 96% of people in britain can get x speed' with my own experience of _not_ getting advertised, quoted, and paid for speeds.

(also my apartment in Bromley-by-Bow didn't get 4G (or even more than 1 bar of 3G) anywhere inside, my prior apartments were lived in before there was any 4G in London)

Have moved around several places in the UK. Big cities, countryside, etc. The only place where I got the speed I paid for was a small town in the middle of nowhere (and I got 70Mbps, I don't use a lot of bandwidth and I would say it was still too slow...and the connection was down/slow constantly).

The take up is good - look at Virgin Media, literally the worst reputation in the world, it is difficult to build a customer service operation that bad, and they still get good coverage over their network. Equally, you have a ton of local fibre operations that have done very well (CityFibre as an example). Why have other countries done this? So many obvious problems (do you actually work for BT?). Also, the fibre offerings of larger companies are generally not competitive on price (have you thought about the incentives of this? BT's strategy was: run down infrastructure, buy rights to the Premier League...if they created a competitive fibre product, that would involve risk).

Also, no-one expected the current applications we have today. Like great, you are obviously clever but the point is that some things are unknowable...the future is generally one of them.

EDIT: you do work for BT...fml.

It's all well and good that 96% of the country has 30 Mbps coverage but for most people that's just about all they're going to get as 40% have no coverage for >100 Mbps, i.e., BT (or BT reseller) customers limited to a maximum of 76 Mbps with no Cable availability.

As a metric average speed has issues as it can translate to how much people are willing to pay as opposed to what's available but it's still useful to look at here - 46 Mbps for the country, but that's driven mostly by Cable which has an average speed of 92 Mbps while Openreach sits at 30 Mbps, it's easy to speculate that BT are more interested in hitting government targets while Virgin are providing some competition that is so desperately needed.

As far as new and exciting applications for gigabit or at least fibre goes it needs to be wide spread and cheap enough for those opportunities to come to fruition and neither of those are really true, it's no good asking an average member of the public to pay £62 a month for a 500/35 Virgin broadband only plan or £58 and £68 respectively for a 500/75 or 900/110 BT broadband plan and expecting much to come of it when less than 20% of the population has such coverage. For a price comparison hyperoptic is £60 for 900/1000 and B4rn £30 for 1000/1000 - you should note both of these providers offer gigabit upload as well which goes a long way towards providing opportunities. The average upload of the country has only just inched to 10 Mbps after it was a mere 5 Mbps 3 years ago with many Virgin customers on the less expensive plans being stuck on 2/3 Mbps.

The UK has incredibly good coverage and the minimum service is relatively decent all things considered but the average service is still behind other European countries, with countries like Sweden and Switzerland being better on price while being substantially faster and more comparable countries like France and Spain still being cheaper while being slightly faster.

The reason why it’s cheaper for some guy to just dig a cable themselves is simple: 80% of network construction costs are labor costs.

If your spare time is “free”, of course you are going to be able to compete on costs with a paid professional.

And if you're willing to take the risks yourself, you can skimp on health & safety

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