UK's booby prize in broadband 'cold war'

[gem]

From From Media Guardian

UK's booby prize in broadband 'cold war'. By Richard Wray
Britain risks being left behind in the race for super-fast broadband, unless regulators and telcos agree on upgrades
A dire warning was given by the UK's minister for competitiveness, Stephen Timms, late last year that the UK risks being left behind in the 21st century's equivalent of the great arms race of the cold war - the race to deploy next-generation, super-fast broadband networks.In a meeting in November Timms threw down the gauntlet to companies, consumer groups and government officials to look at other countries such as Japan, South Korea, the US and, closer to home, Germany and France. All have plans for using broadband at eye-watering speeds in the next two to four years, so why not the UK, he asked.
Timms is due to present his first thoughts on the issue this month, and Ofcom will continue discussions begun in December with private-sector companies about who will pay the estimated £7bn- £15bn cost of upgrading networks. But if you take a closer look, some of the countries Timms named as being ahead of the UK show they may not be such a perfect blueprint.Korea and Japan are held up as gliding along in the fast lane of the information super-highway, with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development saying the average advertised download speed in Japan is over 90MB per second and in Korea 43MB. In the UK it is 10MB, although Ofcom's figures show the actual average speed in the UK, as of last summer (2007), was 4.6MB per second.
Broadband take-up in the UK is only just behind Japan, with 51.6% of British households using broadband compared with 54% in Japan; 50.6% in the US; and just 37.8% in Germany. But Korea leads the pack, with telecoms research site Budde- Comm putting broadband access as high as 90% of households.
The high speeds attainable in Japan and Korea owe much to their relatively dense populations. In those countries, for instance, fibre has been connected to apartment blocks, using the building's existing phone lines as a final connection.
But move outside the major conurbations and the picture is very different, according to Screen Digest analyst Dan Cryan. "It's great if you're in Seoul, for instance, but when you get into more rural areas it really starts to go wrong."
Aesthetics and cultural norms have a part to play as well. In Japan, extensive use of overhead cabling has kept costs low. Verizon has done something similar in New York. Consumers in Britain, however, are unlikely to accept overhead wires and, while Paris's huge sewer system has 1,800km of optical fibre with plans for 10,000km by 2010, squeezing anything like that amount into London's Victorian sewers is considered untenable.
The regulatory framework has also been distorted in some markets to spur investment. Japan's telco, NTT, has been given free rein over what it charges rivals to use its new fibre to the home or building network, offering the company a virtual monopoly should it hit its target of 95% of households with broadband by 2010.
In the US, meanwhile, Verizon's $23bn investment in fibre to the home - to reach 18m households by 2010 - has been "derisked" by the US Federal Communications Commission's decision to effectively halt regulation altogether.
No single technology
Even if Ofcom wanted to grant BT a regulatory holiday, it is unlikely that Brussels and, specifically, the EU commissioner for information, society and media, Viviane Reding, would allow it. When the German regulator proposed giving Deutsche Telekom an exemption from regulation to recoup its investment in next-generation access, the European Commission announced it was taking Germany to the European Court of Justice for breaking EU law.
Anthony Walker, chief executive of the Broadband Stakeholders Group, admits: "I don't think it is going to be a single technology or market solution in the UK. We are going to see a multiplicity of ways of getting to the consumer, depending on many different factors."
Virgin Media, for instance, is running 50MB per second in some parts of Kent but its network only reaches about 50% of homes. BT, meanwhile, has pledged to put fibre into new homes from this year and is looking to roll out 24MB per second; however, potential users will be limited to those closest to BT phone exchanges. Ofcom is also considering reducing the price controls it has on the broadband market to induce further investment.
Wi-fi and its more powerful cousin, WiMax (wireless broadband) will fill in some of the gaps. The recent decision by T-Mobile and 3 to merge their efforts in broadband wireless could give the UK a near-nationwide service at 7.2 MB per second, twice current UK broadband speeds, within two years. Meanwhile, new spectrum is to be auctioned off by the regulator in 2009 which could be used for even faster access. The solution to the growing demand for broadband may be overlapping networks of fixed and wireless.

[Olozzj]

Bonding connections has been the answer to faster speeds for years. Not only does this give you (up to) double the speed of a single line / connection, it can also give 100% uptime (if two different providers are used). However I don't think most providers will be happy with having their customers contracted to them and rivals.

[Austin_KW]

I know you can use a routing solution with 2 providers
But can you pair bond from different ISPs? W

[Olozzj]

But can you pair bond from different ISPs?

Originally Posted by Austin_KW

Unfortunately not. Bonding isn't the way to go, because of the way it works. If you're gonna get multiple links to the Internet, your best bet is to buy a dual-WAN port router and simply load-balance them. Therefore you would get greater reliability and faster speeds. Yeah you'll have to take the fact that any application will only be able to use one connection's worth of connectivity, but this is great if you have multiple users online at the same time.