UK near bottom of broadband speed league

3. @tech89

umm, you're wrong. quite simply. just wrong.

internet demand is getting a lot higher, there are more and more services appearing which use a high amount of bandwidth, which is not illegal. for instance, you can rent movies over the internet, which will use a lot of bandwidth to get a good picture quality.

also, 2mb broadband? really? that is so slow!! you just have to look at the league table of how quick other countries are to see that. the internet is just a big network, and more and more people are using it for general networking etc like you would a LAN. if you think that a LAN runs at 100mbps or 1gbps for cat6, then the internet is a huge bottleneck in comparison.

it's about time we sort it out and get faster broadband. nobody likes to see the progress bar on a file download trickle by at a ridiculously slow rate.

2. @tech89

To be fair VM is the only company to offer 50mb speeds and they run off a different fibre network rather than the BT copper. Also they don't have any 'fair use' policy and you get the full 50mb no matter what time of day or how much you've downloaded.

It's also more of a 'build it and they will come' situation. By giving us faster and faster speeds the world will find new things to do. By your logic 56k was enough for emails and the world shouldn't moved further. But because it did we now have things like iPlayer and YouTube.

1. Doesn't really matter what speed they improve it to, it's their fair usage policies that slow the internet down at peak times.

People will be miffed to find that on a 2mb connection they can't watch iplayer without it stuttering at peak times because of "fair usage" policies of ISPs.

Why, If network traffic is bad as ISPs say it is, do ISPs sell packages of 50mb then? Why not share 48mb of that package with the whole society. You only need a 2mb connection really, 8mb tops.

It seems you sign up for 2mb you get 500kb - 750kb. You sign up to 8mb you get around 2mb. Sign up to 20mb, you get around 8mb to 10mb.

ISPs rarely give people the speed of the package. Hows about if we pay the extra £6, they give us the actual speed we signed up for.

I know about the "up to" in their ad's, but there's a difference between "up to" and "barely up to and if anything a mile off" the speed signed up for.

Somehow i don't foresee a penny of that proposed tax going towards better infrastructure of broadband. More likely the £175 million will slip into filling up a very very large government deficit.

Isn't it the job of BT and VM to use some of their profits to improve their networks.

We as people do not like tax, we despise tax, we hate tax, we disdain rising taxes, and we curse over new taxes. So this tax is only going to irritate millions of people.

I cannot wait for the election when this and other ridiculous schemes get chucked out by the the new tory government.

A faster network for what? Emails require tiny amounts of bandwidth. News websites require little bandwidth. Online games (not the ones you play other people with, on the net), require not much bandwidth.

Really a faster network is for video streaming and downloading videos and music. A faster network is for the benefit of online piracy really. And even that can get by on less than 10mb connection.

We don't need super fast internet as most people will barely notice any difference except if they download large amounts of files.

If one is to have a super fast internet package, does browsing, and watches a program from iplayer. One has used marginal amounts of the bandwidth he is entitled to. It only seems sensible to use the rest for p2p downloads.