Monday 9 November 2015

UK to get "Fast Broadband" as a "Right"

So, Mr Cameron has helpfully announced that the UK is to get 100% coverage of "Fast Broadband" by 2020. A lot of broadband bigmouths are engaged in useless chatter about what constitutes "fast", so I thought i'd lob in my £0.02. I mean, why not? Nobody reads this anyway :)

I know what slow broadband is. I get 5Meg. I live in an area where there's FTTC and cable broadband at speeds of 10 or 20 times that, but I happen to occupy a neat little "notspot". Would I be happy to double my speed to 10? Sure. But I'd give up the extra 5 in a heartbeat for another 1 upstream.

All this "superfast" is doing is making us superfast consumers! What about those of us who would like to work from home? Are you going to guarantee us reasonable connections to our co-workers? Backup is something most people do appallingly - but something like Backblaze is a massive win, you need never lose a byte again, but my 17megapixel camera takes huge images, so my backup lasts longer than my holiday.

If we're going to relegate ourselves to consumers - and don't get me wrong, I'd like to be able to binge watch box sets  of "House" in HD as much as the next man - we need to think a little about latency too. High latency can choke a video stream as effectively as crappy bandwidth.

"Mbit/sec" as a measure of "Internets" is about as good as "Mhz" as a measure of CPU performance. Why do I expect any better from politicians?