UK broadband among worst in Europe.

[radiofloyd]

UK internet speeds are among the slowest in Europe, says a new report by IT company Akamai.

As reported by The Guardian, the UK currently sits in 16th place with an average connection speed of just 4.9 Mbps. In comparison, The Netherlands were top with 8.2, followed by Switzerland at 7.3.

The only countries below the UK were Portugal (4.8), Luxembourg (4.4), Poland (4.1), Italy (3.9), Spain (3.8), Greece (3.8) and France (3.7).

Globally, South Korea has the fastest internet, with average speeds of 17.5 Mbps. The USA sits at 5.8 and Japan at 9.1.

"Britain is being frozen out of the next industrial revolution," judged former BT chief technology officer Peter Cochrane.

"In terms of broadband, the UK is at the back of the pack. We're beaten by almost every other European country and Asia leaves us for dust."

And prospects for the future aren't too bright either. Whereas most European countries are replacing old copper networks with fibre optic cables piped straight to users' doorsteps, BT plans to lay fibre optics along streets but then connect to

homes via the same sluggish copper cable.

That will limit speeds in the future to 80 Mbps, compared to 1000Mbps on full fibre optic networks.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-05-08-uk-broadband-is-among-the-slowest-in-europe-report

What do you think? No mention of Ireland but i can guarantee we are at least as bad as the UK...

[DANGERMAN]

it's going to be a problem outside cities for a long time, and it doesnt help how old our infrastructure is (like roads and layouts of towns). But then we're not the only old country in europe, and we're not the only one with a towns and villages set aside from cities.

I'm not sure you'll really need more than 50mb any time soon, there's very few places you could get those speeds from even if you were technically fast enough (steam, psn, xbla, itunes, amazon, play, rapidshare etc all restrict speeds at some point). That said we'll be getting our speed doubled soon from Virgin, and might go up to the 50mbs package when we move (which will then go to 100mbs soon)

[Sly Reflex]

My internet is terrible in the UK. I pull 2meg. Once they did some maintenance work and I was pulling speeds of 19meg, but then it went back down to 2meg, which is completely terrible. The connection drops constantly, sometimes multiple times an hour, yet the BT says there is nothing wrong with either the line or my equipment. If I had an option not to use BT, I wouldn't. They don't give a fuck, they basically have a captive audience. The lady across the road has sky broadband and it's the same deal there, same crappy quality because it's all done on BT's infrastructure.

On the other hand you have my mate who lives 1 postcode away, his provider is Virgin. Like Ben, he gets 50meg and it is absolutely flawless. I never drops, it never goes below what they have advertised. This is a 5 minute walk away.

BT launched BT Infinity aound parts of Leeds. Despite being a BT customer since 2006 (actually I've used BT for telecoms since 2001), BT contacted me and said I could have Infinity for £xx. I told them to go fuck themselves. As a family I'm pretty sure we've put more money in BT's pockets since the 80's. All the line rental and calls. Every time we were out and needed to use a phonebox. It all went into their coffers. BT made more than enough profits to make sure this didn't happen back in the 90's. They knew that things were changing and that the internet was going to be the next big telecoms movement, yet they decided to pay out shareholders instead of putting back into their business and looking after customers future needs. Instead they had the cheek to ask me to put more money in for a premium service, when it should have just been updated as an infrastucture update.

When the water pipes outside my house become outdated, the water board replace them. A few years ago the gas board replaced all the gas infrastructure within my postcode and surrounding areas. The council took out the insufficient street lamps and replaced them with better ones. This didn't cost me anything other than the usual rates and bills. None of these come directly to me and asked for more cash for these things, they were just done. I wasn't sold them. They needed doing, the companies saw that the needed doing and so they were taken care of. This is what BT should have done. Telecoms have gone from being a luxury to being an amenity. BT should realise this and start to act on it instead of trying top fleece people even more.

I'm currently using a whichever broadband service the missus has in which includes fucking everything. We get 'Dish TV', Blockbuster rentals (like netflix, but free and unlimited), a phone line, a mobile (unlimited calls, text and data) and a 70meg connection. This costs about £40pm. It shits all over whatever I would get offered in the UK. That's what competition does.

[DANGERMAN]

I think BT are the worst company I've ever had to deal with. Awful customer service and when there was a problem on their end they'd blame your filters

I'm sure we're only paying for 40mbs, but I know some lads that work for Virgin, I asked them to set us up, so they might have bumped us up to the next package