web analytics

Month: October 2007

Party Evening with Friends from Minyara

It is not often the case that we have the chance to meet friends from abroad but the evening featured in the photos here is one of these occasions. The visitor are two girls and a boy from our local church’s partner church in Minyara – Lebanon. The following photo shows the three of then on their last Sunday in Kemnay before they set off home the following morning. It was great to meet then and share our culture with us as we reciprocated.

What Ofcom have to say about UK Broadband

Further to my last post and in the interests of clarity fairness, see here what Ofcom have to say about UK Broadband as of 26/09/07

Click here

Here are the highlights

In general the picture for broadband take-up in the UK is good:

  • over ninety-nine per cent of the UK is connected to a broadband enabled exchange;
  • over half of UK households have taken up broadband;
  • almost three quarters have a choice of at least two broadband (ADSL and/or cable) network providers;
  • the average headline speed has doubled in a year to reach 4.6mb/s and
  • broadband prices have fallen by 9% in the last twelve months.

Of course I would have to be sceptical about this against the back drop of my own experience.
I need to discover how these statistics were arrived at. Does the term ‘average headline speed’ mean the average of the best performance achievable?????

I was also interested to read the following in the same report

Bandwidth demands are rising

Operators of the current copper-based networks and technologies have already upgraded their technology to deliver faster broadband speeds.

Consumer demand continues for the applications and services supported by these upgrades. To date, the networks have been able to meet this demand and offer sustained improvements.

However, the development and consumption of high speed services means that current generation networks will at some point be unable to deliver the very high speed broadband service that may be demanded by customers.

In the UK operators are considering how best to respond to the continuing growth in demand for bandwidth and the commercial case for significant investment in these new technologies. Ofcom’s consultation highlights how the market and infrastructure conditions in the UK are very different to those countries where investment in fibre has already been strong. The reasons include the relatively mature pay TV market in the UK, the high speeds of current broadband enabled by shorter distances from exchanges and the comparatively high population densities in countries where fibre is advancing fastest.

While the exact nature and timing of demand for very high speed broadband is uncertain, as is the nature of the services that will drive this demand, there is growing agreement that these networks could have profound effects for UK citizens and consumers and the economy.

Seems to confirm my own view that the current generation infrastructure does need to be upgraded to facilitate the delivery of future broadband technology and services.

Broadband really does crawl in the UK

Thanks to Jack Davidson my colleague at Learning and Teaching Scotland for pointing out the following article which refers to the performance of Broadband Services compared to the rest of Europe.

To read the article click here.

The report to which the article refers is to be found here

The article does state that the average speed of Broadband in Finland is 21.7Mb/s whilst in the United Kingdom the average speed is 2.6Mbps. Also the report states that the average Subscribers per Household in the two are countries are .57 and .50 respectively so it would seem that in penetration terms the two countries are similar. Leaving Europe aside, Korea and Japan actually top the table on 45.6Mbps and 61Mbps with penetration figures of .9 and .52 SpH respectively.

The report by Robert D. Atkinson is actually concerned with “The Case for a National Broadband Policy” in an American context. But it does seems to raise some interesting issues in relation to the real drivers for further investment advanced broadband technologies. At the core of these policies should “focus on stimulating both the supply and the demand for high-speed broadband”. Robert then sets out a number of supply and demand side policies which are both needed to ensure that broadband provision can develop.

I attended a BT technology briefing event recently when I heard about BT’s plans for its 21st Century Network which features the deliver of a wide range of services over the Internet Protocol including voice and video. The interesting thing is that alongside this objective there was no indication of any plan to upgrade the basic network infrastructure over which this will be deliver. Seems to me that before the UK can move up the broadband ladder it needs to get some new policies in place which will stimulate both the Industry and Consumer to exploit the possibilities.

All of this of course is sat against the reality that I still regularly measure broadband download speeds of between 150 and 300 kbps when staying at my daughters house in Bishopbrigs in Glasgow. This is very frustrating performance and seems to be very consistent and is also made more so because of the fact that at 7am each day I can easily and consistently clock 6.5Mbps – clearly this is the effects of network contention.