How Long Will It Take For The UK To Install Enough Fibre Optic Cable To Allow Us To Have Semi Decent Broadband Speeds In Our Own Homes?
Can you remember when dial-up modems hooked up your pc to the World Wide Web? Torture wasn’t it! It was slow and it occupied the phone line at the same time. Picture trying to control an Internet Business with that technology. Well things have advanced a pace, but we are about to get to another barrier where we all have to throw away the technology that we are currently using. Broadband has replaced from dial-up and supposedly you the can get 24 Mb/s Broadband speeds. Fast enough to permit people to Work From Home, or for local government to transfer people from the office, and relocate their Online Jobs to the suburbs.
Nearly all broadband traffic moves down a pair of single twisted copper wires. These are capable of dealing with 6 telephone calls and supposedly up to 24 Mb/s Internet speeds. Compare this with a pair of fibre optic cables – 2.5 million phone calls and broadband speeds in excess of 50 Mb to start off with. Both Virgin and BT are offering fibre broadband in restricted areas of the country and that is the issue. If your Internet Business needs super fast speeds and massive download capacity then you are going toneed fibre broadband. Simple – just go and ask for it then.
And that is where the predicament starts. This is not a case of modifying how we use the existing infrastructure to increase the speed and volume of downloads. The twisted copper pair has achieved its maximum capability. The major ISP’s have to lay down miles and miles of fibre optic cable to make use of the new broadband technology. If you Work From Home that suggests they have to to lay cable up your street, through your garden and into your home. If your company’s business is based around Online Jobs then cable has to be distributed around the office or factory. The cost is enormous and even if you can use the underground water or existing telephone ducting, it will take years to roll out.
The other issue is that only major urban areas will get the hottest fibre cables because companies like BT and Virgin require to make profits and dividends for their shareholders. At this time the USA is about 16th in the world regarding broadband access, but this is with an average speed of 3.9 Mb/s. The UK still has 1 in 10 houses with less than 2Mb/s speeds. Unless the UK Government sets up a countrywide plan for fibre broadband, we will sadly lag behind countries like South Korea who aim to upgrade their national network to 1Gb/s by 2012.
Some people will say that it’s not required. Others don’t yearn for it at all. Nevertheless for those of you who do own a “state of the art” Internet Business , using faster internet is the only way to compete globally. Unless governments wants our knowledge centric industries to disappear the same way as our manufacturing, coal and steel industries, the country has to invest in the future. Sure a small venture where you Work From Home distributing consumer goods may not need super fast speeds, but if you are a web developer or your venture has advanced Online Jobs, then it could be a major competitive aspect on your future success. For myself I would settle for anything above 5 Mb/s, never mind 50 Mb/s from Virgin Media or that South Korean utopia of 1Gb/s!!
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