This page might halp with your calcs:

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm

In fact looking here the UK has the highest penetration (% population).

Edited by camieabz (Tue 08-Feb-11 11:06:53)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

What the public is more worried about I suspect is peak versus off peak performance, i.e. does that video stream at 9pm, rather than having to wait till 1am to watch it without stuttering.

Which comes under the general heading stability. I would rather have a reliable 4Mb connection than a 14Mb connection that drops and/or slows sporadically.

Luckily I have a totally stable 14Mb/s but not everyone is so lucky.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

"PwC�s own research for the UK Champion for Digital Inclusion found that the total potential economic benefit from getting everyone in the United Kingdom online is more than £22 billion, far in excess of the scale of benefits from universal voice telephony."

Eh? So the phone isn't of £22 billion benefit?

I also found it a little difficult to see where those benefits would come from or why high speed broadband was needed. The government cost savings and public finding discounts are surely possible using ADSL. Surely you don't need a FTTx just to file a tax return.

I did see that one, but it only seems to give the number of users, not how much they use or how many lines are involved.

I'm pretty sure that when we say (eg) 10GB/month, that's per internet connection not per user, 'cos the first one is what we pay for!

£22 billion from getting everyone online at a speed that will make uploading stuff like tax returns easy enough.

Current target is 2Meg for everyone in 2015. Now does it make sense if spending money to meet a 2Meg limit to put that towards a solution that will not need further spending in three years time?

In which case access the mobile version of a site.

Now does it make sense if spending money to meet a 2Meg limit to put that towards a solution that will not need further spending in three years time

it depends. We have DCF analysis to answer questions like that. If the question is shall we give someone a £300 subsidy to get a satellite system at £25/month and maybe in three years we might want to look at spending more on something better, then I can see that the answer might be yes. The £300 = £100 a year over 3 years would be the interest cost on £1000 at BT's WACC or £2000 at government borrowing rates perhaps.

That's without taking account of deflation on costs.

You don't think that the default version of a national news page should be easily accessable by all national BB users? The mobile version is practically text only.

What I refer to is getting the balance right between bandwidth and content. I appreciate the need for layout, but not at the expense of excessive bandwidth. Many informational sites these days have automated videos on page load, whether I want to watch it or not.

I guess interpreting data has gone out of the window these days.

thinking has gone out of the window, let alone anything else. You just get media hypes from media types by and large.

So a return to the look of 2002 as the default

2002 look

To be honest don't see many people complaining that basic websites don't work, we do see the moans about video streaming, audio is a lot less moaned about. Even then the speed complaints are a lot less than even three years ago.