Thatcher killed the UK’s superfast broadband before it even existed
webreturn.co.uk
webreturn.co.uk
https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe... (in German)
It’s by and large not, and to the degree it is, it’s open and not insidious. The kind of corruption that kills economies is the insidious type. (And the stealy variety.)
Nobody in government or industry has really been prosecuted for either (some Wirecard folks are on the run).
You will not find much local corruption though, which is what most people think of when they hear corrupt countries. Local corruption is paying of a cop, judge, that kind of stuff. I’m sure it also happens in Germany, but that is very very rare.
So to be corrupt in Germany, and places like it, is to do the "corrupt" thing "correctly" -- e.g. in some structural fashion tied to political parties, long term associations, business connections, etc. that have the appearance of being practical, official, and "right."
A friend of mine who came from Iran originally had a comment like this about western countries corruption vs "third world" or "second world" corruption:
In Iran or etc. corruption is almost more democratic, because it means as a regular layperson you can bribe some local official to make something go your way. It's not just, it's not fair, it's ugly, but it's "accessible" if you have some spare cash.
But in the west, corruption is for the super rich and the connected at a much higher level. e.g. you can't bribe a zoning official so you can build an addition or a shed, but if you're powerful enough you can control a political party and prevent it from investigating your company, have it enact some preferential laws, or stop it from some raising some tax.
I'd trust my next door neighbor to be President more than someone who actually wants to be President.
Politicians are becoming like a caste, much too similar to each other and with very little exposure to real life.
The chance of a government staying in government for a long time also means that governments have to think long-term because they might still be in government when the consequences come around. In the US system the optimal strategy is to do things that look good in the short term but backfire as soon as your term limit expires. That way you look good, and the next president (who's with near certainty from the opposition party) looks bad.
I'd be more in favor of passing an age limit, but I'm well aware that that has no chance of happening.
Singapore's consistent ranking near the top is always hilarious to me!
People elected them and their party, their party had chosen them for the position. It's not like they forced anyone to put them there.
Term limits in democracies make very little sense when they affect a President or other directly elected positions of great personal power
They make no sense for chancellors or prime ministers who in any case are going to mostly be controlled by the parliament
Democracies benefit from change. Indeed I would argue that cadre change is their kill app. But it must be happening.
The same top politician will employ the same ministers, consultants etc., thus slowly creating an ossifying structure that aggregates a lot of mistakes of the same type. It is a process that reminds me of inbreeding in biology. Small pathologies slowly become more pronounced.
As we live longer and longer, we run into a risk that our Senates etc. will turn into gerontocracies of 80+ year old people and that a typical intern will be fifty.
In fact this kind of conglomeration between the public and private sector is why they get things done, compared to the vetocratic nature of other countries.
In fact, one of the biggest domestic criticisms of the government right now is their terrible communication strategy.
English is the lingua franca and as such Anglo media has an incredible amount of power in shaping opinions in the West.
And frankly, the reporting, particularly from Anglo and Eastern European media, has had a heavy anti-German bias for weeks now. (Up from the usual moderate bias)
I'm not sure Germany isn't experiencing negative effects from this though. Like the Gazprom thing, for example, this broadband thing, maybe even the nuclear thing?
Schröder is SPD and he seems to be shoulders deep in Nord Stream controversy and Gazprom money. So it kind of looks like a German political class issue rather than a CDU issue.
There's another Wikipedia article listing known corruption affairs: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Korruptionsaffären_u...
A ton of costly, endless work when you can bypass all of that by laying some passive fiber...
That assertion is highly dependent on too many factors and even recent developments to be of much use.
That general assertion needs to be backed up with everything around the soil type, the copper diameter, labour costs, protocols and type of fibre, etc., etc.
And if you’re going down the route of having VDSL ISAMs in the field anyway then you’re certainly going to have the infrastructure there already anyway to support GPON over whatever fibre is in the ground anyway.
And are you sure that by “copper’s capabilities” you’re not actually referring to progressively closer deployment of infrastructure to the customer to overcome copper’s limitations? Because the move from dial any number to the local exchange to a node (FTTN) to now the curb (FTTC) certainly seems to reflect that more adequately.
Though, if they did hit a problem, just sensibly regulating shared national infrastructure of high industrial, cultural and economic importance seems like it would solve anything that came up better rather than shouting "free market" and "regulation bad" while you hand things over to American corporations in an act of brazen corruption.
You remembered me talks, about how enhanced was Hong Kong, so they in 1990s built very high-speed internet for all.
But than I read wikipedia, and seen, Hong Kong have 6800 people per square kilometer (Germany 200, France 300, Ukraine 80, Russia less then 30).
Sure, if you have more than tenfold number of clients, you have much more possibilities to pay for expensive new technology.
But even for not poor western Europe, fiber technologies was too expensive for wide usage until mid 2000s.
Sure, backbones built on fiber from early 1990s, but backbones is not all internet, in reality 90% of resources spent on last mile. And as I said before, until late 2000s, only copper last mile was economically effective without Asian density. Also was possible fiber backbone, and wireless last mile, but air speed also very limited (should read expensive :) ).
Hong kong is essentially a city. You'd have to compare it with Munich (5k/km^2) in Germany or Paris (20k/km^2) in France to get equivalent numbers
I'm not sure if OPAL deployment at a much larger scale would have created a sufficiently large market for optical networking equipment and bring down prices much earlier. Probably the number of impacted OPAL customers would simply have been larger.
(The copper cable mentioned in the article is actually TV broadband cable, and that had much less coverage than the copper phone lines eventually repurposed for DSL.)
Back in 1990 the internet wasn't significant, and the bandwidth requirements for it fairly meagre, even for those using it. The first release of an HTML spec was 3 years away. It was a novelty more than something fairly fundamental to modern life and businesses like it is now.
Fibre optic had a number of interesting advantages, but it wasn't a fundamental boost for Joe Average consumer. On top of the monopoly concerns, it was also going to take some significant amounts of disruption to daily life, digging up roads, replacing cables etc.
Before you could make phone calls, send faxes etc. After you could... make phone calls, send faxes. Maybe slightly higher fidelity.. but so what? Things were a little better and nicer in the distribution centres, but again, so what?
No doubt it would have have to be all ripped out at giant expense, and would have ensured that there was no normal DOCSIS cable competitors.
Single mode fiber installed decades ago (for sure the early 90s) can still trivially be used to drive 10G and even 100G over reasonable distances.
It's a question of how the fiber network is laid out and designed. If you're doing things with any kind of PON components in "the field" you're limiting yourself to a lifetime measured in a decade or two. If you're doing things with active components in the field you're limiting yourself to a lifetime of a decade at most.
If you do things with just fiber to each house to a central location with each run under the optical budget of a 40/80k optic that infrastructure will probably last for 100 years.
I do agree however that to decide to do this in the 1980s would have been an impossible leap in logic for any government and judging them for not doing it based on what we know now is entirely unfair. Technically however, it would have been very very possible.
Instead of ADSL in the early 2000s (which was "fine") you'd have had catastrophically expensive active fibre equipment which would have made broadband completely unaffordable for the masses. I can guarantee everyone would be saying what a complete mistake this white elephant fibre network was when ADSL would have been a fraction of the price.
If you'd had a PON network there is no way that they would have planned the network in the 80s like you do now for FTTH. The segments would have been enormous and completely overcontended in the 2000s bandwidth boom. It would have required extremely expensive network reconfiguration to split the PONs down - the fibres would be going to the wrong place.
My point is that how you'd plan a FTTH network in 1990 would be radically different to how you would do it even 10 years later. There is a chance that you could have planned it entirely wrong given the changes in technology which came about rapidly after that.
G.652 was developed in 1984 and is still in use today (with newer revisions improving performance):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.652
* https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-G.652
* https://community.fs.com/blog/single-mode-fiber-comparison-g...
There's no reason why the fibre couldn't continue to be used today with updated equipment on both ends.
Further even if it would be antiquated today, it would still have given many decades' worth of value, and we'd be replacing it with new fibre—as opposed to the lacklustre, half-hearted FTTN and other non-sense that seems to be going on today.
I imagine a 1980s network would be much closer to a DOCSIS style RFoG layout, but with far less node density than cable because of the much better reach of fibre. You'd probably have (tens?) of thousands of homes connected to one segment - primarily for TV. This would have completely collapsed in the 2000s as bandwidth use exploded, and would have required enormous work to split it into smaller higher capacity networks (this is exactly what happened with coax cable internet).
Fortunately I went to college. So I got to play with http in 1993 at Cambridge.
Then myself, and every other nerd I know, fucked off to the USA. Not fiber, but at least we had internet at the office. I bought my first domain in '95 and put a stupid website on it.
>Back in 1990 the internet wasn't significant
Yeah, you're right. Best to wait until it is significant before paying any attention to it. Wouldn't want to go starting an online book store or search engine in the '90s. The fact is, the UK did know computers and networking were significant. But that evil psychopath Thatcher didn't care.
> Back in 1990 the internet wasn't significant
Sure the internet was nothing in the 90s but the telephone was huge, it was vital to business in the 80s and its popularity was only growing in the 90s.
With hindsight we know that investing in the telephone would have been a bad call as it turned out to not be that important, but at the time they didn't know that they thought the telephone and its network was vital to business. It was THE technology of its time, it was the future of technology, it was the most obvious technology to invest in at the time.
The issue is not that they didn't realise how vital the network was they knew exactly how vital it was at the time, but instead of investing in the future of said network Thatcher knowingly sacrificed that future to protect shareholders profits.
Lets not use hindsight to blind us from the truth of the time so we can excuse poor decisions.
No corroboration from other sources or evidence is presented... It all just seems extremely self-serving. It's basically, "I was right about everything in 1979! Here is an alternate history where everyone listened to me and today things would be great."
I'm not buying it. I mean, you can only blame what Thatcher did in 1990 for so long.
There was nothing magic about the year 1990 that you had to have the fiber then, or else you irrecoverably missed the boat.
Fortunately, there's a new separate, private operator FTTC network but it requires laying copper under our pavements and gardens for the last 10 or so meters. This also means absolutely no competition -- I either go with this company or I can forget about cable Internet.
There are many private FTTH networks, but they'd be laying fibre not copper.
Also if you are in a city, you surely will have many good 5G options. You can get unlimited 5G broadband for £20-60/month depending on operator. Speeds are generally very good.
In the middle of this rollout they got bought out by CenturyLink, one of the biggest telcos not descended from AT&T at the time. CenturyLink's management did not invest in rolling out fiber (I guess this is where they got the buyout money from) and basically froze the rollout of new fiber for 10 years after the merger. Fast forward to last year and CenturyLink announced they were selling off half their customers to a private equity firm. Coincidentally, the half of the customers they were selling off were primarily in the areas that CenturyLink owned before they merged with Qwest, and the areas they kept were mainly the ones where Qwest rolled out fiber. Apparently their customers on fiber were where all of their profits were coming from, while the customers stuck on their legacy copper network were extremely unprofitable to serve.
I'm lucky enough to be in an area where they offer gigabit fiber (from which I can get 800-900 Mbps down and pretty much exactly 940 up) but I feel very sorry for the customers on their legacy copper network as I can't imagine a private equity firm will be any more willing to invest in upgrading them to fiber than CenturyLink were, and many of those customers are in remote locations where their only non-satellite Internet option is CenturyLink DSL.
> IBM’s Watson, the learning super-computer that functions through the cloud and is able to give evidence-based medical diagnoses, will fail in the UK because a lack of bandwidth, according to Dr Cochrane.
Mmmmm, I don't think that's why it will fail.
"What is quite astonishing is that a very similar thing happened in the United States. The US, UK and Japan were leading the world. In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up AT&T. And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point, political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the rest of the countries just followed like sheep."
Some sort of fraud? I dunno.
If you're a big enough building or throw money at it, they can usually figure out a way to make it work - but it's unlikely to be something an individual wants to spend.
what NZ did well with their fibre roll out was connecting up all the smaller rural towns (in otago/southland anyway) :D
The article argues that BT and AT&T if they were allowed to keep their monopolies would have allowed the UK and US to have far greater internet speeds via massive fiber deployments.
I have always seen monopolies as harming consumers and more competition as being beneficial, but this is an interesting observation.
The US still has a plethora of local cable monopolies and we haven't seen incredible internet offerings come out of those.
It's extremely rare to have more than one choice for cable or copper phone service in the US.
That is a lot competition than AT&T faced--which was literally none.
Basically, in order to take full advantage of this system every house would need their own ONT to convert the fibre optic into something useable. This would be very expensive with 1990s tech, and internet access wasn't a selling point back then (even the BBC didn't have a proper internet presence until like 1994) so the way they hoped to make that money back was by bundling in premium TV channels - leveraging their existing telecoms monopoly into becoming a US-style cable TV provider except over fibre. Like, I've found a paper from the BT Research Laboratories about it and it has a lot of stuff about "broadband signals", but what they mostly mean by that in the short term is analogue TV (which is indeed broadband by the 1990-era usage of the term). This was not popular with the government, who'd prefer to break that monopoly instead due to them doing such a poor job of basic things like actually connecting people to to the telephone network in a timely fashion.
All the wider-scale rollouts I'm aware of used the cheaper Street TPON option mentioned in the article, where the ONT is in the street and shared between multiple customers, who only get traditional copper POTS service from it - and I mean that's literally all it can support. Telecom-grade audio at presumably the usual 8-bits, 8ksps, u-law. No ADSL, no ISDN, no digital data on the customer end of any kind, just POTS only with no direct upgrade path to anything else. Some of these continued operating and being a millstone around the neck of their customers until well into the 21st century, in fact it's possible some are still in use now.
Fiber technology was prohibitively expensive in the 70's and was far from ready to be used in residential homes. You would have to wait until the mid-90's for the "killer app" (the world wide web).
> [T]he history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents. Monopolies drive progress because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate. Then monopolies can keep innovating because profits enable them to make the long-term plans and finance the ambitious research projects that firms locked in competition can't dream of.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...
One of those is extracting monopoly profits, and it's not the telecoms.
Jokes aside, I'm not going to take anything that man says on face value — even if I'm reading the article as I speak.
They mostly do, and infrastructure tends to converge to natural monopolies. The trick is to regulate the hell out of them. For instance in France the former government owned telephony monopoly was forced to provide access to competitors to their physical network, at regulated prices. And to follow up on that, today an ISP can create new lines to link a new city or neighborhood, and they have exclusivity for a fixed period of time - afterwards they're forced to provide regulated access to their competitors. As a result, we have a healthy competition with good prices (usually between 30-50 euros depending on package, max speed, TV options) and good speeds ( multi-hundred Mbit, up to 1Gbit is the norm in most places - there are even villages with hundreds of inhabitants with fiber deployed everywhere, and proud signs "Commune fibrée" on entering them).
> But, in 1990, then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that BT’s rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do.
> In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up AT&T. And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point, political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the rest of the countries just followed like sheep.
> This created a very stop-start roll-out which doesn’t work with fibre optic – it needs to be done en masse. You needed economy of scale. You could not roll out fibre to the home for 1% of Europe and make it economic, you had to go whole hog.
It probably didn't help that the companies in question all thought of the internet as a information medium (the next television or radio!) and not like a grid (a la a utility). So it wasn't clear that there is innately a natural monopoly.
They had a market for product, TV and they had a company that wanted to invest in that market BT.
The factories, including Europe’s largest cleanroom were ready to go.
The politicians killed that by passing a law stopping BT selling TV and instead gifting the market to two foreign firms instead for whatever reason.
That was a dodgy decision at the very least.
My suspicion is that Murdock had a hand in protecting his satellite TV business. As they say “it was the Sun what won it”.
:(
When people say such things, I always ask, Tetcher stays at BT with big gun and shoots investors?
Or how she could forbid investors to buy technologies and to create their own enterprise for this?
I understand, in exUSSR countries, like Ukraine, govt once just forbids private businesses to build abroad connections faster than 64k, so they all connected to bubble of state company (later govt created for this company 3G monopoly, this is very similar to history of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company ).
But after 2004 in Ukraine, govt just could not issue any really serious sanctions for violation of such forbids, so ~ 5 big companies built Gigabit+ abroad connections, and later they also built their own country wide fiber backbones, and once those forbids was just cancelled, because non-sence.
Instead she passed a regulatory law that blocked the incumbent phone company, BT, from selling TV to consumers.
That was reserved for 2 US firms Telewest and NTL.
For example, in Ukraine was state monopoly Ukrtelecom, and government constantly conducted policy, to prohibit private companies use technologies newer than in Ukrtelecom.
Because of this, before revolution in 2004, Ukraine has very slow internet (private companies allowed only 64k private channel abroad - more only from Ukrtelecom); than 3G was slowed, because only Ukrtelecom got licence. Also there was many smaller law limitations in favor of UT.
The Thatcher government issued laws specifically to stop BT having a monopoly in anything.
BT was even prevented from entering new markets which were reserved for foreign competition.
If laws in Ukraine worked as in UK, it would be impossible for me to write this text.
I think, in such case I would not be still alive, because Ukraine withstand Russian invasion with much help of self-organization.
BTW now Ukraine have very big troubles, because corrupted officials sabotaged implementation of NATO standards, and now, on 8th year of war, our army still using old soviet tanks/artillery/planes/etc and allies constantly repeat "we cannot give you modern tech, because you need much time, to learn how to use it".
I worked in telecom near y2k, and even that time, fiber equipment was prohibitively expensive for wide usage.
Yes, it was totally ready to adopt in large enterprise environments, or at large backbones, but internet is not just backbones.
As example, in 1999 i participated in building fiber ring across Kiev (Ukraine), but at my own apartment, I used dialup; in 2003 i bought subscription to wireless network (yes, from backbone to my home); in 2005 i switched to Docsis copper network; in 2011 homenet, in which links to buildings where optic single mode, and inhouse connections 100% copper; and in 2013 manager said me "we will never sell gigabit to apartment", but in 2014 I have seen ads about fiber gigabit.
Yes, I understand that Britain is rich empire, but even Britain could not spend so much money without real demand.
That is in London though - probably not where the problems are on a national scale
But yes, if an area is in a "not spot" you're stuffed - which is why things like B4RN took off.
Luckily there are a few new ISPs popping up now.
The house we stayed in is now in the starlink queue.
I've just stuck an external antenna up and we're getting a decent 4G signal from EE so that will have to do for the time being. It's peaking at 50mbs with a bit higher latency, but the upload is 25x faster than the landline which does make for far more responsive usage.
Annoyingly, there's a full Fibrus fibre rollout about 10 miles south, but apparently there's no money in running a line up the main trunk road between the two major population centres for this area.
I switched over to their FTTP offering recently and, while it’s not super fast compared to what others are claiming, having a router with a weird intermittent hardware issue reminded me of how good it is to be able to immediately jump on a call with technical people who actually care.
They have symmetric gigabit fibre in all of the villages, for €20 a month.
In my apartment in the U.K., in a city of 300,000, the best I can get is 0.25/15Mbps - for £80 a month. It craps out completely every evening, down to 200kbps or so, as everyone streams netflix at potato quality.
I often wonder at observations like this whether it's the result of massive subsidies or massive over-subscription of the infrastructure. How is actual bandwidth/jitter on that line? Romania also has bold claims about infrastructure penetration, it's a fair example of somewhere I'd have good reason to doubt their credibility.
A stable loss/jitter-free FTTP connection at 50 GBP/mo. is very much value for money compared to an equivalent line featuring loss/latency/jitter at even a tenth of that price and with 10x the claimed line rate.
Separately, I have put off gigabit installation numerous times over 6 years simply because I can't really benefit from it on contemporary WiFi.
(Also yes, on re-reading my comment I realize I am a bit jealous of your setup in Portugal ;)
I think the key thing here is that probably yes, however it is essentially once off. Not that expensive to keep shooting photons down the fibre once its in the ground.
So from a country perspective that's a pretty grand deal compared to say farming subsidies that you need to do annually.
And for telecommunications, which are definitely in the "utility" category now, subsidies for the up-front capital costs are warranted IMHO, especially as it can act as an economic accelerator.
As for contemporary wifi, that's why I had my house wired for Cat 6 a few months back - I've got 3 Wifi 6 access points as well (PoE powered, ceiling mounted) and can saturate my 500/70 FTTP connection.
very much. In early 2000 I consulted for small defense contractor trying to win bids providing internet to rural Spain. They made me cobble together an absolute garbage solution of slow early Sat (the ~1 second latency kind) internet with Wifi last mile. It barely worked for anything other than mail, browsing web was pure suffering, gaming was out of the question. Thankfully this venture went nowhere, but even with very expensive Satellite uplink finances still made some sense considering the remoteness of locations.
But this is on "home-network" technologies - they have their equipment distributed over buildings and have not central core, so this is cheaper, but lacks some things which seem normal for telecoms.
It is very reliable, easy achieve less than 5 hours of downtime per month. Most downtime because somebody steal equipment from attic, or somebody tried to steal fiber cables, thinking it is copper.
Example trace (skipped not necessary info):
traceroute -q 2 -w 1 --resolve-hostnames www.amazon.com
traceroute to d3ag4hukkh62yn.cloudfront.net (52.84.115.95), 64 hops max
2 94.244.0.210 (rusanovka-uaix.elan-ua.net) 0.519ms 0.432ms
3 193.239.72.201 (ae2-166-gw0.g50.kv.dataline.ua) 0.556ms 0.550ms
4 10.204.215.47 (10.204.215.47) 45.048ms 8.404ms
5 193.239.74.62 (amazon.dataline.ua) 27.452ms 27.259ms
6 * *
7 * *
8 150.222.27.44 (150.222.27.44) 41.083ms 41.283ms
9 150.222.27.197 (150.222.27.197) 40.665ms 40.495ms
BTW could somebody give link, on what template engine uses HN, so I will post structured text. Thanks in advance!
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter
==============================================================================
ua.pool.ntp.org .POOL. 16 p - 64 0 0.000 0.000 0.000
*62.149.0.30 .GPS. 1 u 353 1024 377 0.702 0.063 0.105
+91.236.251.13 105.240.56.33 2 u 40 1024 377 3.825 -0.068 0.466
-195.78.244.50 91.198.10.4 3 u 171 1024 377 17.445 3.617 0.251
-162.159.200.1 10.132.8.165 3 u 615 1024 377 0.460 2.218 0.115
-162.159.200.123 10.132.8.165 3 u 806 1024 377 0.489 2.212 0.104
-91.236.251.12 105.240.56.33 2 u 46 1024 377 3.879 -0.522 1.551
-91.236.251.129 118.188.39.164 2 u 58 1024 377 5.025 -0.056 0.293
-193.106.144.7 31.28.161.68 2 u 368 1024 377 6.991 1.203 0.120
+31.28.161.68 .GPS. 1 u 961 1024 377 0.543 0.152 0.134Must admit, your suggestion is very close to reality.
In reality, need complex - good basic education + accessible from early school computers + low level of income in country, so smart people must figure out, how to flee out of poor.
For example, in Brasilia, all people play football (soccer) at least once per week (many play every day), and they have best football team in world.
Another example, China was so poor, they have not seen home computers before late 2000s, so now they have not hackers culture at all, and so their startup system looks weird.
Another example, I grow in Ukraine, with access to ZX Spectrum, and now I'm here :)
Would take a 24 month contract though so practically I'm just going to sit tight on my 1gig
- I now see, 100mbit for one person is enough, I very rare see it is limiting factor (few times per month I doubt), but I can't imagine how I will utilize gigabit :)
* Usenet - easily maxes out 1g
* I've got a hypervisor here so lots of ISO templates, docker images, package pulls
* I host various things from home. Seeding (actual) linux images, sheep-it render server, crypto node
* Game file downloads - steam etc.
So definitely a luxury, but not entirely pointless
Ah, yes, I'm now limited by small drives (I have 256G SSD and 1000G HDD) :)
Before, when paid per mb, I created accounting system, and seen very clear, after my hdd seem full, bandwidth usage dropped.
But something broken in dependencies, and I moved from FreeBSD to Ubuntu, and on current unlimited channel it was not need to account, so I just don't bother, but I see difference when need to download ISO :)
Now I just for curiosity thinking about create accounting, make smart reports, etc, but on Ubuntu for this have to do much more work and much less art than on BSD.
It is still surprisingly thin...I set the limit at 5% of my pipe...and I don't think it has ever been hit. Not sure why but nobody is pulling down even close to what I could push
Sheep-it on the other hand...(think crowdsource blender renders) does actually push gear hard.
>But something broken in dependencies, and I moved from FreeBSD to Ubuntu
Do have a look at proxmox if you can.
Proxmox + ansible was a paradigm shift for me. (Proxmox has a CLI so you don't need any funky third party module anything...you can just deploy VMs/LXC via straight CLI)
Sure, I use virtualization when possible, but I prefer Docker.
But for me now problem, that some vendors prohibit usage of their devices in virtual environment, so I have to stay semi-desktop. For example, nvidia official drivers for desktop (game) cards, don't work in virtual env, and server cards are slow in games and have worse performance/$ rate.
In some distant future, I believe, will buy dedicated server machine, but now using desktop, to save money and space.
- things change, on small scale change is cheaper&faster in mean respect of large scale, witch means that a small country with few people inside surely spent far less in developing and regularly upgrading it's own infra respect of a large one;
- private investments on scale NEVER work for the public.
With the above statements, seen in the countries I know, TLCs can't be a private business. Nothing against private networks BUT the State must own a nationwide network, so create and maintain it, for the sake of the nation, not following direct profits. In that case copper or fiber does not count: at a certain point in time a planned civil design started to take into account the need of a signaling network for any household and more, so a national plan to create a physical infra for accommodating such network start. After a decade there is enough to see widespread results. A new network start to operate. Then new tech emerge witch can be accommodated with some modifications on the old physical infra (duct etc) and so the State start making changes and upgrade.
The overall results are less top performance in certain area compared to pure-market private TLCs development, but overall far superior performance. I does not count much if initial plans was better or not, because they are constantly watched and evolved so there is no such thing "due to the past decision on a certain kind of tech the new one can't arrive much early", it's just "due to a past decision new tech will cost the State much more and we will have a bit of delay".
Here's one of the first-level splitters in its box, before everything was hooked up. Note all the (capped) spare conduits.
https://wandel.ca/pic.cgi?c1bd8b14
So no shovels needed in the foreseeable future. Of course a direct burial of a no-future fiber such as multimode plastic would now be useless.
Unfortunately here, the entire installation is funded by Bell Canada, and it is theirs alone with no last mile sharing, and the price is punitive (on the order of CAD$135 for full bidirectional gigabit after the initial discounts expire, and nothing practical cheaper than CAD$85).
It was rated as 'up to' 24Mbit/s down and I got sustained download rates of 17Mbit/s.
Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) was great for broadband options.
Moved away in '13, hope things have improved.
1. The copper from your home to the exchange.
2. Everything from the exchange to the rest of the internet.
LLU meant that we had options for #2. Not all providers were the same. Some had better networks, better peering with other networks etc. than others. Or they had more infrastructure per customer.
However, #1 was also a bottleneck. Where I live (in San Francisco) all the available copper pairs are in such a state that ADSL will only get me something like 3MBit/s at the best of times. And there's no way to get that copper upgraded. So whether I order ADSL from AT&T or Sonic, the connection will be bad.*
Perhaps your situation was similar?
* Thankfully both Monkey Brains and Xfinity have good service at the same address.
> 2. Everything from the exchange to the rest of the internet.
Also, 1A - the equipment at each end of the copper. The CLEC owned the CPE and the DSLAM, the only thing which is the same for any provider would be the copper itself.
Source: Worked at a CLEC for more than a decade.
You have "pack em in and sell it cheap" providers like PlusNet, super techy focussed providers like AAISP (and to a lesser extend Zen) and those in the middle.
I used Andrew & Arnold for a while when they offered bonded ADSL, i.e. a single virtual internet connection carried over two pairs of copper. It was plenty for our office of 10-15 people.
ISTR having to use a PC as a router, with a special ADSL whose chipset was supported by some special 'bonded adsl' linux or *bsd distribution.
Those are not always straight forward things to consider when put all together and forward planning is also needed.
This kind of goes into it: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/04/openreach-upda...
before the installation date I watched the guy push the fibre through the duct, popping out outside my external termination box
then on the day the guy laid the internal fibre and spliced them together
https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
- She won three general elections, the last two of which were landslides
- She was the longest serving prime minister of the 20th century
- In 2008 a BBC poll for favourite post WW2 prime minister put her at number 1
That these victories were landslides says more about the vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral system than it does about the popularity of the Conservative party from 1979-1987.
Openreach have limited upload speeds even on their FTTP offering, I’m guessing because of the limitations of GPON and their commitments to minimum speeds.
There are some networks that are popping up using XGS-PON now which is quite exciting as it can deliver up to 10Gbps!
That’s some pretty amazing power that Thatcher had that she was able to make irreversible decisions that bound all future governments until the end of time.
AFAIK the Government nowadays is doing something to rollout full fibre in the country, which means people in a couple decades will enjoy great Internet.
Virgin's coverage has never really been close to "nation wide" either. Even today, Virgin Media's DOCIS network only reaches about half the premises in the country. It was far less in the early 2000s! Virgin also only acquired the Telewest cable network in 2006 and didn't rebrand it Virgin Media till 2007.
> IBM’s Watson, the learning super-computer that functions through the cloud and is able to give evidence-based medical diagnoses, will fail in the UK because a lack of bandwidth
Not actually very useful? Few commercial applications? Massively over-hyped? No, the problem was, according to this article, "lack of bandwidth". Huh.
> It’s going to change everything, from investment banking to the legal industry. That sort of service, being able to get remote diagnostics, can only occur if you’ve got bandwidth.
This sounds like something where you'd really be missing out. Maybe some Korean readers can chime in about the amazing remote diagnostics they have there now thanks to the universal free symmetric Internet access and IBM Watson?
> The UK will be frozen out of cloud computing because we don’t have bandwidth
The biggest cloud providers are US companies, but they have UK data centres as you'd expect. Most people I know use some cloud services (especially cloud data storage) and "we don't have bandwidth" doesn't tend to show up as a problem beyond, as in this article, people who just won't pay to go any faster...
... and that's the important twist in this.
Providers will charge you more for the better service, and some people expected that to be free even though providing it costs more. The vast majority of the UK (more than 97% of UK households) could get >30Mbps Internet. But that would cost money, and many of them would rather not. This wasn't done by Margaret Thatcher (unless you have it in your head that a famous Capitalist suddenly wanted to give away a valuable service free) it's our friend the Free Market.
You can buy 1Gbps symmetric in my street (and most of the city). Few people do, most of the people I know who've bought that service did so because the 40Mbps or 80Mbps vDSL they were used to isn't available at a new property they bought. Obviously Internet is a must-have, so the 1Gbps symmetric fixes that, but if the offer had been 100Mbps symmetric they'd have cheerfully paid the same price, which gets to my main thrust in all these discussions:
Always On is what matters. The most important quality of life change for me was getting Always On, not getting broadband Internet. For most people who experienced the upgrade they were simultaneous but I lived with Always On at 56kbps for many years so I know what mattered. From about 1996 I lived in a house with shared 56kbps Always On. Obviously we didn't video conference at that bandwidth, but most of daily life was the same as now. Got a question? Web search. After not very long that means Google. Downloads take a little longer, you watch TV still instead of Youtube or Netflix, but mostly it's the same. I would check my work in after a day or evening writing C, to a CVS server because even Subversion didn't exist yet.
In about 2000 we got DSL at 512kbps and that was nicer, but the basic shape of life did not change. Whereas in households where DSL was their first taste of Always On it made a huge difference and too many of them mistook that for a difference caused by bandwidth which it isn't.
Comparing that to the fiber offerings starting at 80€ and up i do not see the use case right now.
Does it make sense to deploy fiber in new construction and when upgrades are due anyway... Of course! But blaming governments to not magically forseeing which standard of technology would have great utility in a technology coming to life later is ludicrous.
most people don't realize that there is dead fiber all over San Jose CA (it literally stubbed up out of the ground near the utility box of a house I used to own there, so its not up for debate)...part of a failed pilot project from the cable provider. probably severed or degraded in twenty different mystery places by now so no one will ever bother trying to do anything with it