UK Lags Behind in Broadband Race
The Days of the of 56k modem are long behind us, now replaced by the mighty broadband and the days of web pages taking forever to load are gone forever – or are they? It seems that more and more people are starting to complain about the terrible infrastructure that the broadband network sits upon and more providers are promising better service and increased speeds but how can they when most users never get the speeds that are promised?
I pay for a 2mb connection with O2 (£17.99 a month – a joke) I’m meant to average at least 1.5 mb but I rarely even reach 512k. Last night I was loading pages with a 25kb connection.
With more and more websites needing higher speed connections to load the mass of high quality video streams, apps and images, how is our infrastructure expected to survive? Couple this with a ‘fair usage policy’ – a byword for connection throttling and download capping – and you have a joke of modern internet connection.
With Europe and other countries storming ahead with their modern approach, such as fibre optic connections being built into all modern houses as standard and having a higher quality average connection anyway, it seems that Britain is trailing behind its counterparts.
Broadband Expert reported that 18,558 tests were run in January 2009, and found the average speed in the UK to be a woeful 2.95Mbps. This begs the question of when we will see improvements and when all these stupid hidden terms and conditions will be removed. The sooner they are, the sooner we can enjoy the internet without constantly spending hours of time on the phone to technical support that don’t have a clue what you are talking about or have no idea of how to fix your problem.
