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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Many people would prefer a guaranteed 2Mbps that they can use all the time, rather than the advertising lies of "upto 30 Mb" - which is usually less than that, and which is then throttled if you use it for more than twenty minutes a day.

While 1 Gbps is a nice aim to have (and if you're putting fibre in you may as well put in extra, you don't have to light it right now) most people would be fine, now, with 5 Mbps.

2.5 Mbps is fine for YouTube (etc) and acceptable for BBC iPlayer tv.

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Your comment is interesting because it shows the lack of vision that the committee showed too.

Broadband internet isn't just about watching iPlayer. _If_ we had decent, reliable, two way 1 Gbps internet that would open up so many extra possibilities, including:

- many more people being able to work at home effectively (fast downloads, clear multi-way video conferencing etc)

- ubiquitous cloud computing

- processors in many more devices, all connected all the time (with rich video and audio feeds as well as mere telemetry)

- gaming -- playing, and enabling people to develop much richer interactive games

- home medical diagnostics

- all those things that we haven't invented yet

[Edit: It's a shame the lack of vision isn't just for the Lords. Judging by the replies it extends to HN too ...]

Well, you're asking people to dig up the roads and install a bunch of dark fibre in the hope that someone else will invent a use for it.

That's a tricky position in the UK: We're in a severe recession; no-one wants roads dug up; the last time we had a fibre glut it didn't end well for pretty much anyone involved.

Speed of connection isn't what's preventing most people from working from home - stupid PHBs do that.

Synchronous 1Gbps is unrealistic for the next 5 years. Maybe asynchronous 100 Mbps is possible. Not forgetting that the aim is for everyone - isolated villages in Wales and Scotland - not just the 4 big cities who can afford it and need it.

I'd agree that if people are putting fibre in (or building new housing (as someone else mentions)) or even just digging up the road that there should be a requirement to install extra fibre. the stuff itself isn't that expensive and putting lots in gives you economies of scale.

I'm just more realistic about finding the money to pay people to light it.

What 4 big cities are you on about? I'm sure there's fibre in a lot more than 4 cities in the UK. I'm 25 miles outside Glasgow, in a little village called Renton and I have fibre from Virgin Media - 100/5

Investing in infrastructure during a recession is what you're supposed to do. It creates jobs temporarily which increase consumer demand which drives the economy and increases revenue which reduces government debt AND you get the infrastructure you built. It's a clear win-win-win.

- People worked from home perfectly effectively on ISDN. Dual-bonded if you were fancy. Lack of bandwidth has never been the problem, not for decades, literally.

- What does that even mean? It means services off in a datacentre somewhere and no/minimal state maintained on the client. You can, and people did, do that with dial-up modems.

- For what?

- Bandwidth isn't the problem there either. It's the budget to pay huge teams to create the volume of detailed content required. Games are converging with movies in this respect.

- No-one will touch this with a bargepole, not until it is economic to deliver 5-9s reliability.

- If you build it they will come? I am reminded of Wayne's World II.

But in the cities these things are likely to come regardless - government mandates aren't needed. BT is covering about 10 million households with its fibre to the cabinet Infinity option, delivering 38 to 76Mbps, and is making rapid progress on fibre to the premises with its Infinity2 (or 3?) rollout, which brings us to 100Mbps. Virgin is also rolling out 100Mbps over its cable network.

BT is indicating it'll cover 2/3's of the country by 2014, but meantime there's evey reason to assume that speeds in their core network will continue to be increased - they've already doubled the speeds for Infinity once, have indicated 300Mbps for Infinity2 / 3 (fibre to the premises) "soon" and have been testing 1Gbps.

So if the government is going to get involved, where it makes sense to get it involved is in making sure people who don't happen to live near the exchanges that are most profitable to upgrade won't fall behind.

While I agree that it's possible to show a lack of vision, the possibilities you've outlined here baffle me. I'm already able to work from home effectively on my ~8Mbps connection and can very effectively video conference. There are very, very few technical reasons why people don't work from home, and far more cultural and political ones.

If you imagine we are dealing with a limited amount of money (which, let's face it, we are) there is far more benefit derived from providing everyone with a 2Mbps connection than providing people in inner cities with a 1Gbps connection.

I'm on 2 Mbps, work at home, and spend a sizable part of each day waiting for git repos, yum, apt etc downloads. In fact, I'm typing this comment while waiting for linux.git to update.

I usually ssh/remote desktop into a remote server sitting behind a fast connection. Much less waiting around.

Why not work on a machine in a datacentre that you have terminal(s) onto? Or remote desktop/Citrix if that's your bag. You can control a machine with a quad-10gigE connection from a terminal with a 9600 8N1 connection... OK so I'm exaggerating to make my point but this scenario is exactly what so-called "cloud computing" solves.

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