Earth: Mostly Harmless

UK Broadband - part 2

January 27, 2005 on 7:22 pm | No Comments
Categories: broadband, dsl, technology
Tags: adsl, broadband, cable, dsl, france, internet, japan, korea, slashdot, sweden, technology

A couple of days after posting my previous item about the various xDSL technologies which may or may not come into usage in the UK during this century, Slashdot posted a story announcing the UKonline 8Mbps service i mentioned. Which is all fine (though a little delayed by Slashdot standards) until people start posting the inevitable “8Mbps for £40? that’s rubbish! Here in [insert Scandanavian country or Japan here] we have a gazillion gigabit connections for which the telco pays us”. Well, not quite, but it does add insult to the ‘injury’ of the utterly shitty connections we have here. Furthermore, most of the services mentioned are symmetric (same upload and download rates), and have no transfer limits. Just a few tasters:

Expensive! (Score:5, Informative) by silverz (803241) on Wednesday January 26, @09:00PM (#11487672) That is very expensive. In Japan, for example ADSL connection from Yahoo Japan costs you about 4000 yen per month (less than 40 US dollar) for 50 Mbps ADSL. And also fibre optic connection has become very common and cheaper. For example Usen Networks (one of the provider in Japan) provides 100 Mbps fibre optic connection for only 2950 per month. I use the fibre optic that comes with 5 static IPs. And it costs me about 5000 yen per month. Download cap is totally never heard in here. As far as I know, all packages come with unlimited bandwidth.

Which isn’t too bad, as you expect that sort of thing from the Japanese. But then…

France has got UK Beat: 20Mbits/sec @ 30 Euros (Score:5, Interesting) by valmont (3573) on Wednesday January 26, @09:52PM (#11488047) (http://chrisholland.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Monday September 20, @06:11PM) thanks for playing [adsl.free.fr]. You read it well: 20Mbits/sec DOWN and 1Mbit/sec UP. No cap. and that’s for 30 Euros per month. The service comes with free telephony [adsl.free.fr] to any french landline (calls to mobile phones cost something), and very cheap international rate, like 3 eurocents to europe. Once you’ve got all that, you can pay an extra monthly fee to get hundreds of TV channels [adsl.free.fr]. With 20Mbits/sec … that should do it. All of this is given to you thru Free.fr triple-play box, the FreeBox. My Mom’s been with them for a couple of years and has the original, more clunky incarnation of today’s sleek freebox. Here’s a picture of it [flickr.com].

Well thanks for that. You expect that sort of thing from the Swedish but to be beaten in terms of broadband by the French? They were playing catch-up just two or three years ago, and it seems it’s now our turn…