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Fibre to the home in Amsterdam

After reading John Connells comment on my last post I decided to explore the situation in the Netherlands. I very quickly found the following site which provides information about the Citynet Amsterdam project. This project aims to deliver fibre connections to 40,000 homes. read more about it here.

Citynet Amsterdam

Much of the site is written in Dutch but I could get enough information from it to appreciate this is an approach this has the potential to deliver serious amounts of bandwidth to the home.

I just wonder what the authorities here in the UK cannot see the longterm benefit to move towards this sort of infrastructure. In the UK we always seem to have the infrastructure lagging the needs of the media which are in demand.

I believe that this was true when the first digital services were introduced ( ISDN ) and continues to be the case now when in most cases the best we can get is ADSL – which is ofter heavily contended making performance almost as poor as and analogue modem connection! I have my self collected quite a bit of data that bears this out!

As I write this post a quick check on speedtest.net shows that my current link ( which is an up to 8Mbps service) is providing a 2341 kbps downlink this is actually very good for 8pm when it is not uncommon to experience download speeds of just a few hundred kbps