In reply to a post by AndyHCZ:

No need to get personal.

If what you're saying is correct on how internet speeds should be compared between countries, then why does no one do this?

You can pick and chose which states/areas you want to compare - you have to look at countries as a whole. Some states in the US have more invested than others for faster internet, as do some counties in the UK.

Where are these US states that have invested all this money in broadband? As far as I know it tends to be, if anything, individual cities that have invested in municipal networks, not states.

Franchise agreements are done at the town/city level. These have a bearing on speeds - they come with conditions that may cause an operator to walk away - Verizon have walked away from deploying FTTP due to franchise conditions in places they wanted to do triple play.

Individual states have very, very different rules governing pole access, and very different owners of the poles.

The USA is a very different proposition from the UK depending which state you are in, however it's not because individual states have been running some BDUSA system at all, it's largely due to private sector investment and conditions governing that investment.

Trying to equate BDUK / Superfast Cornwall with the differences between US states is crazy. The most remote areas of mainland UK are downright local compared with parts of the USA.

In areas where franchise agreements have been struck and Verizon are the telco FTTP extends a long way into the urban sprawl, way out into the suburbs. For those of us used to Openreach-like a PCP or two in an entire 100+ PCP exchange area in one exchange out of 6 serving a city deployments the extent to which FTTP covers some areas is absolutely stunning.

It would be a very interesting exercise indeed to find a state with a comparable population density to the UK and see how things fair. Taking some states and comparing them to the UK is like comparing rural Wales or Scotland to an urban conurbation in England and pointing out that the urban conurbation has a higher average.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Also, you do in your opening post compare a small selection of states with the whole of the UK. That is just as invalid a comparison.

Bob,

The usual 'criteria' trotted out for these comparisons is population density. This was the usual excuse people came up with in days of old when comparing the UK to places like Japan, South Korea, et al.

You are aware that in the whole of the USA there are only 4 states out of the 50 that are more densely populated than the UK as a whole, and only 1 that's more densely populated than England?

Comparing the UK to somewhere like Wyoming or Montana on pretty much any metric is nuts. Comparing the UK to the USA as a whole on any population-density affected metric is nuts, they have a population density 1/8th ours.

Widely deployed in New England? No it isn't!

FTTP is delivered using poles in the UK by BT also. They use poles and underground depending on how the network is currently delivered.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

At a retail level Virgin win comfortably in their served areas. Infrastructure wise versus Openreach it's 40:60-ish.

Shame that until recently they've never made any money off it then

I am fed from a pole and its never fell down.

It does seem people here (uk) are been petty about poles.

My view from where I live isnt great but its nothing to do with the pole. The pole is just like an extra lamppost of which there is many off.

Of course money talks, I wonder how these people would react if BT said ok we will rollout FTTP if its done via poles its £30 month £150 setup, if its underground £50 month £2000 setup, I wonder what they would say then.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

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

I was referring to the States.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

It does seem people here (uk) are been petty about poles.

Since when was expressing an opinion about aesthetics 'petty' or even 'snobbery'? What next - am I going to be called petty because I like to keep my garden tidy? Or perhaps I'm a snob because of the colour curtains I have?

I just prefer an uncluttered sky and having lived on estates where poles are not used (quite possibly the majority of houses in the UK by now) I find wires crossing the street to be a bit distracting. It wouldn't be a deal breaker but it is a preference. If choosing to think differently to you makes me seem petty in your eyes then I don't think that's my fault.

I suspect that the origins of the UK running most services underground, probably goes back to the earliest utility generally, the disposal of sewerage.

Given the greater relative quantities of built-up areas and their intense nature (compared to much of USA, Canada etc), the early communal sewers were installed underground.

* Yes, I omitted Water!

Along came Town gas and probably partly for the protection and routeing of the pipes, again underground.

Electricity followed the same route generally.

Early phones and their predecessors did use a relatively high number of poles, much lighter weights etc involved than the earlier utilities; and that was the case up to about the 1950s.

Post Office Telephones had a major pole stack yard near my childhood home, with a garage and its own petrol/gas pumps to supply the green "glasshouse" vans and trucks, used for installation and maintenance.

The "greenhouse" effect was due to a special window above the normal windscreen to make it easier to track cables from pole-to-pole.

During the 1950s and 1960s when demands for phones increased, many more underground and building-wall routes began to prevail, leading to the closure of that pole yard; and also a significant reduction in the use of the Pole Training School, elsewhere in the city.

I recollect in the early 1950s, my father signing a way-leave for phone cables to be attached to the back of our house, to allow our various neighbours to have phones installed.

It was also then that many pole routes were changed to under-ground. For example, the Great North Road near where I now live was lined with poles, each with about 6 cross-bars, each of those in turn fitted with porcelain insulators and the many wires for each line.

The overhead wires were bare, so could often make intermittent contact, giving rise to false rings , tingles etc. The insulators could break etc.

I actually encountered those problems in the 1970s, when our early company dial-up facilities would all-too-frequently, make contact over 300 miles with Greater Manchester Police HQ; and separately with an "ex-directory" subscriber further south in Birmingham.

With the advent of plastics, multi-way cables were much more readily produced, compared with the earlier U/G cables, where the wires were insulated by oilo-impregnated, helically-wound paper.

Thus generally today, OPENREACH/BT has a huge inherited investment in those underground cables, ducts et.


Even the then brand-new installation of Cable TV etc, went underground from its start in the 1980s.


Also, think of the outcry if our ancient cities, towns, villages etc, were to be garlanded with replacement, pole-mounted FIOS/FTTP.

Edited by deleted (Tue 26-Aug-14 15:35:41)

A use of Federal Funding $15m to cover 5,400 properties (FTTH/C) most are in the 'city' of Broken Bow but once you get outside city limit rural means a 6 mile drive on a fast road between two homes, hence some will be used for wireless.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/andrew-ferguson/fibr...

The way that cities, suburbs and rural areas are laid out in the US is so different to the UK that it would be hard to compare areas e.g. the suburbs and communities around urban Dallas are akin to Milton Keynes, but once you get rural rather than a compact hamlet/village they tend to sprawl out as property lots are much larger.

Another issue is the size of the verge on US roads is such that you can get fibre ducting in the ground easily and in plenty of areas people are used to over head delivery of electricity and telephone.

The legislator for the United States is very different to the UK, with states able to pass laws and control a lot more about what goes in the state. This trickles down to the City level (and in US parlance a City can be just 2,000 properties if they want).

The way most people understand it is look at the variation in liquor/beer/alcohol laws between the various states and the counties/cities within them.