In reply to a post by Stevenage_Neil:

Er, our infrastructure, water, drainage etc., was built many decades before the US.

Which has what to do with broadband?

In reply to a post by Stevenage_Neil:

a) Poles are ugly

This. It's basically snobbery. Poles in the UK are apparently indicative of the third world, which I'm sure is a shock to the USA, Japan, et al.

We don't really have that much extreme weather to knock poles over, though plenty to flood underground chambers and require Openreach to declare MBORC repeatedly.

Councillor Brian Gurden, Liberal Democrat member for Basingstoke South East at Hampshire County Council said: �The Camrose estate has some old-style telephone poles that we would rather get rid of because, as someone said, it makes it look like a third-world country.

In reply to a post by Stevenage_Neil:

.........with NSA watching.. Heard of Snowden?

Guess you completely ignored Snowden's revelations regarding GCHQ, both in terms of their complicity with the NSA and their own independent operations. Give it a read before throwing the stone in the glass house over the NSA.

You could argue though, that by failing to upgrade their interconnects, the large US ISPs are in effect traffic shaping anyway. I've not seen too many posts on here about people complaining about traffic shaping/management/prioritisation.

I have a relative who was with Verizon and he doesn't have nice words to say about them.

True, I would definitely agree that this argument could be made.

Before I left the UK, I was stuck with Virgin Media (couldn't cancel and take out a new contract with a FTTC ISP as I knew I would be leaving the country within the year) and their traffic shaping was god awful. The upload speeds are so slow (that hasn't changed I see) and the restrictions on how much you can upload in a certain time period are incredibly draconian.

I don't see the FTTC providers being quite so determined to traffic shape as they previously were, thankfully. YMMV, of course.

Was your relative using their FIOS offering, or something else?

I have lived in the US for quite a few years, (9 to be exact).

Poles are ugly as the Japanese will tell you, after the US re-building effort.

Where poles are used, nearly every utiliity/supplier will use those poles.

How many people in the US have died as a result of an ice storm removing their poles/services for weeks at a time? (I lived through one in Dallas)

I guess poles don't bother me massively. The cabling above the trams in San Fran bothers me (that's a horrific mess), but the poles outside my road? Genuinely doesn't bother me. *shrug*

No idea re the number of deaths caused by poles / ice storms. I've never experienced or heard of this happening since I've lived here, but admittedly that's hardly a qualitative study.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

In reply to a post by Stevenage_Neil:

a) Poles are ugly

This. It's basically snobbery.

No, it isn't. Poles are ugly. I like the clean relatively uncluttered appearance of a modern estate where everything is underground.

In reply to a post by toph3r:

a) Poles are ugly

Yet BT also uses poles to deliver phone lines. So, er...

Only if the council allows them to and I think most councils have been stipulating that there should be no overhead cables for a long time. My first house was built in the late 70s and everything was underground. My current house was built in the mid 80s and there are no overhead cables.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Also worth noting we only have <50% cable coverage, and the incumbent has zero interest in competing with the cable company on performance. They have a captive audience in about half the country so there's absolutely no drive to spend a penny more on network than they have to. Football rights are expensive, after all.

Last I heard they didn't have market dominance even in cable areas so even less reason to be worried. If VM can't win the fight on its home ground BT have little to fear.

Edited: Typed 'had' instead of 'didn't have'.

Edited by Andrue (Mon 25-Aug-14 20:09:31)

In reply to a post by toph3r:

Interesting maps. I'm lucky enough to live in one of the areas covered by FTTP. Ironic that Silicon Valley has hardly any FTTP connections available. That must suck. I don't believe Google Fibre is even available there either.

In fact a recent The Register article suggested that California has a lower average speed than the UK.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/08/virginia_is_...

Edited by Andrue (Mon 25-Aug-14 18:47:56)

You can go even further - I think you'll find the average speed in the whole of the US is now lower than that of the UK.