The £27.35m deal will see 472,000 premises – around 97% of the region – receive the high-speed service. The councils involved are investing £7.44m, while £7.44m will come from the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) framework and £12.47m from BT. A Staffordshire county council member described the fibre infrastructure as being "as important as road or rail in providing the accessibility and opportunities for our residents and businesses." And this apparently means we're just past the halfway stage in the national fibre broadband rolling.]]>
I hope people abide by this law in all their thinking about and planning for broadband, fiber, gigabit networks, application ecosystems, devices, control layers, residential and commercial demand, etc…because it holds across all of those instances.]]>
The FTTH Council Europe's latest “panorama” report reveals that, despite the fact that the government has announced plans to have the “best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015”, the UK is clearly lagging and has no large-scale FTTH deployment plans.
Having previously announced an ambitious FTTH coverage objective in 2011 – 2.5m homes passed by the end of 2012 – the UK incumbent BT has changed its strategy, deciding to focus on upgrading its copper network to offer fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) instead… Europe as a whole is slightly behind the rest of the world in deploying FTTH, with 8.7% of homes expected to be connected by the end of 2016 compared to 10.5% globally.]]>
The vast majority of BT's fibre services are fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) services, which still use the old copper connection between the street cabinet and the premises and are therefore slower than fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP). BT's FTTC currently has a maximum speed of 80Mbps, while its somewhat-delayed FTTP can go up to 330Mbps. Unless you're anywhere outside a city centre, of course.]]>
Then, during a conversation with Ken Fallon on a radio podcast the idea of sponsorship was born. The plan so far, is that for a donation of £5 you can sponsor a metre of our fibre duct. In return we put your name on a metre of duct and take a photo of it. Your metre of the B4RN network with your name on it will be buried on a Lancashire upland farm for posterity, and your generosity will enable another metre to be laid in our community network. Getting high-speed internet to the rural north, literally a metre at a time. What's really needed is for Ed Vaizey to change the ludicrous charging tariff on fibre so it's economic to lay and light it.]]>
It has so far only been trialled in 350 homes in Woodmansey and the Great Thornton Street area of west Hull. The average top speed currently provided by KC's internet provider Karoo is ten megabits per second. But the new network offers speeds of up to 100 megabits per second.
This allows users to download a music album in just two seconds, an hour-long television show in 31 seconds and a high-definition film in one to two minutes.What we really want is a way to watch a film in two minutes. Now that would be an advance in technology.]]>