Well we do have a greater population on a smaller island.

Well we do have a greater population on a smaller island.

true, but you need to look at the distribution of population density to see what's going on. You can drive for 2 hours in northern France and only see the odd war cemetery, then you hit a town with lots of blocks of flats. So the people may be in less area in France than they are in the UK.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

They tend to leave their countryside empty whereas we build on ours.

They make more out of the C.A.P. than we do

I would imagine this is traffic going outside of "western europe", measured at the border.

That would mean it wouldn't include services such as iplayer (hosted in uk) skyplayer, etc etc.

I should also imagine local mirrors for other sites such as youtube reduce the bandwidth used by europe even further.

I find that a satisfactory explanation for the discrepancy... thanks.

50% ie 32 Million people can get 50MG. I don't think so where did you dream that figure up from? It probably about 7% that can get 50Mb in theory

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

So already I have applications that exceed what a line is capable of. Ever tried playing a FPS while someone is watching video in the same house? Or uploading content?

To show you how things change, these days not unusual for a six year old to know how to make a video clip for sending in an email to family.

Spot on Mrsaffron!

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

So I am curious whats special about us.
As far as I am concerned now BT is just another one of those things that now weilds the social discrimination axe adding to the class war. As the price is barely different from VM's lowest offering I suspect there is other reasons possibly political behind this policy.

We do live in a class system, without doubt, to back this up just look at the N.Wales trial and 10 million broadband investment. From Pwllheli to Aberyswyth we have some of the poorest areas in the UK where average family incomes is around £10000 per year and around 60% of the population is supported by benefits. However you have large areas of these villages and towns barely lived in for more than 4 months of the year. Go into these villages in the summer months and it whose or who of the political and financial class.

the approx half of the population that have virgin cable
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/cmr-10/ENG-1.20.html

"The main alternative to DSL broadband available in the UK is cable broadband, which is available to 52% of homes in England (49% of homes in the UK as a whole)"

their 100M rollout list is at http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/dam/allyours/pdf...

In reply to a post by billford:

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The 10GB estimate was that, seems this research gives me a new figure of 14.9GB.

Taking some figures from the 2010 OFCom report:

p226:

...Western Europe (7.4PB per million)...

Assuming the UK is typical of Western Europe, has a population around 70 million and there are 20 million broadband lines (link), crunching the numbers around and adding some for mobile internet, the average comes out at around 3GB/month.

I don't think I've got the numbers wrong, but it's a heck of a discrepancy...


edit- add link for BB lines.

You will distort the average speed figure by including mobile so I suspect a reasanably true average speed is about 5Gb which is pretty slow by european figures.

The data also shows that Broadband takeup in the UK is very high at 20 Million out of a population of about 66 Million.

It is perhaps more meaningful to base it on Household rather than population. I think the average household size is about 2.5 so take up is in the region of 70% plus

Another factor with regard to average speeds is that at present there is a two class system in the UK. In the Cabled areas speeds of upto 50MB are available and the average speed in Cabled homes is probably over 15Gb. The small number of Invenity enabled areas will also have highers sppeds typically up to 30GB

If you take the average speeds in areas without cable & Invinity you tend to get a very different picture with an average of below 5Gb . So the UK is not actually doing very well at all