Can't have tax-payers money used to improve conditions for normal people - that would be socialism!.

This is a summary entirely tilted by a very questionable political perspective.

You'll find the same problems elsewhere in Europe dealing with population density and rolling out the infrastructure for this stuff. I know plenty of people in Sweden, France, Germany who struggle with exactly the same issues, despite better headline average speeds etc.

> "hollowing out"; services that get used by the small elite fraction of the country that lives in the right bits of London are good, everything else is quietly ignored.

Fundamentally wrong given that central London is in a large proportion (often > 50% by ward) social housing. Or are the millions of people who live there the "small elite" too? Or perhaps it is the case the high population density urban centres are naturally the easiest place to build infrastructure to benefit the most people.

> BT pay this money to shareholders and then fail to improve speeds. Both parties are apparently happy with this arrangement.

Clearly this isn't true. BT OR has for many years been separated and highly and transparently regulated. Perhaps you would like to explain more your implications of corruption that isn't visible to anyone else?

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/114814/...

As an American that is a familiar story, with telcos over the years taking money and not delivering the upgrades promised. We were supposed to have a lot more widespread fiber to the home for instance, and I think we still pay a little more than many other countries.

However by now in 2020, I believe the majority of the US has access to internet over cable tv lines/docsis instead of dsl with speeds more like 100mbps, with up to 1 or 2 gbps available in big metros for $70 a month. I know many rural areas are still underserved, and of course not every household is subscribed to internet service, but it seems to be available in most places.

I’m really surprised internet in the UK seems to be an order of magnitude or more slower for such a large percentage of the population.

London is actually one of the bad areas for broadband. Due to the density its not been deemed worthwhile to roll out fibre to home at all and fibre to the curb is often held up by a bunch of factors including there being no room in the local telecoms office for the hardware and difficulties placing the boxes on the street to contain the replacement dslams alongside the other road works. Many rollouts have been held up for many years due to very hard logistics problems.

It has proven much easier to roll out fibre into villages and smaller towns where DSL is no where near as obvious as the solution and there is room to place the equipment easily.

What irks me more than anything is the fact that builders are making big blocks of flats and running normal copper cabling into them. Ones that opened just 5 years ago genuinely had ADSL back to the local telecoms office and only recently got upgraded to DSLAMS in their basements to fibre. It really doesn't save a lot of money to put copper in instead of fibre at this point and to not have planned at the very least VDSL is just quite ridiculous. These types of builds have just made local issues with broadband that much worse.

Whilst competition has been pretty slow to improve speeds, there are an increasing number of altnets around the UK with small providers running their own FTTP networks. This is even happening in rural locations through organizations like B4RN. I wish it would move faster, but I'm glad that we have some competition - Corbynband would likely have nuked other providers, and I can only imagine the kind of filtering that would get applied to it. Hopefully good ISPs like Andrews & Arnold can stick around.

I don’t know why this comment is getting downvoted. I agree that the numbers in the article are not representative of the reality in the UK. Entry-level broadband for most people is around 30Mbps minimum.

To say that 4.5Mbps is typical is completely incorrect.

I don't know why the parent was downvoted. It's a reasonably accurate summary of the state of Internet access in much of the UK, and it correctly identifies the misleading emphasis on ADSL-based technologies in the article.

In practice, most UK premises now have at least FTTC available, which can give realistic download speeds of up to 80Mbps depending on how close to the cabinet you are. FTTP is the technology currently being worked on in a lot of areas but will obviously take a long time to become the norm if only because existing housing stock will need new cables to be physically installed. If you're willing to have that disruption and to pay the premium, there are also cable companies that will install dedicated lines for you with much higher speeds even if FTTP isn't yet available in your area using BT's network.

You appear to be using the term access to fibre a bit loosely. The vast majority[0] of the UK only has access to a product called "fibre to the cabinet" (FTTC), which is a poor substitute for what would pass for a fibre connection in most countries.

For those not from the UK, FTTC is a product where they run fibre connections to the local cabinet - however from there it runs over the end users phone line using VDSL2. For historical reasons this line may be aluminium instead of copper, and is often long with lots of splits and joins. As you can expect, this can degrade performance a great deal, and there's basically nothing an end user can do to get this upgraded. For PR reasons, these connections are named "Superfast broadband" and the regulator notes that 95% of the population can get one. However in practice due to old and badly maintained phone lines, real speeds are often much lower than the "minimum 30Mbps" they claim.

0: As per https://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/broadband-statistic... only 8% of the population has access to "real" fibre to their actual premises.

The article is correct and you say it yourself, the majority of the population does not have access to fiber.

Eventually you have to realize that as a person you either have good internet or you don't. The poor experience for the 40% who have no access to fiber and don't live right next to the DSL cabinet is very real. We could debate whether the proportion is closer to 30% or 40% or 50% but that doesn't help with the issue.

> but there are some very low end providers who will do ADSL/2+ for ~£10,

Where are you finding those please? I'm currently paying £18 for TalkTalk and I'm looking to switch to something cheaper.

Underground wires are the preferred choice for most of the EU as far as I know (at least in western Europe). There are also much smaller countries in the EU that provide far better internet than what's available in the UK, apparently. There must be some other reason.

Those entrenched cables are mostly DOCSIS 3 cables over which broadband speeds can be achieved. BT has traditionally provided telephony through overhead wires and those are where the problems usually lie.

> There seems to be a strong (legislative? legal? political?) aversion to easily replaceable overhead wires

I live in the UK with only overhead wires on my street (probably 60-80 years old copper wiring). Those wires are eyesores, and also break regularly since tree branches cut them in storms. Given Openreach's incentives, forget about these wires ever being replaced by fibre.

Around here at least, the fibre I've seen in new builds isn't OpenReach, it's OFNL.

But fellow city dweller here. I'm stuck on Virgin Media coax where I live, despite being about two streets and direct line of site from the BT exchange.

16mb ADSL2 is the best OpenReach can give me as a consumer.

> I live in the city centre and I don't even have fibre. Meanwhile all the new corrupt housing developments all get "fibre" as a perk for buying a house on land that floods.

In what fashion do you call this corruption?

I don’t know much about Spain or Italy, and I agree that Germany uses a lot of copper cables. But France and Poland? Esp. in Poland it most towns you have fiber, all new buildings have had fiber for ages. I currently pay 15–20€ / month for 1Gbps in a like 5th biggest city in Poland (not center, but not far either). In a couple of places in France I’ve stayed longer the internet was good as well (though I don’t recall the prices or exact speed details) — cities including Paris and towns. Granted this is all anecdotal and my bubble, etc.

Oh there is. The government.

Capitalism.