Horses and courses, I was once a proud customers of VM 20MB, when they first rolled it out, for the first 3 wks. Out of my whole year with VM. It once hit 14MB at 3am, averaged in-between 6MB & 8MB whenever testing was done and down to embarrising crawl at peak times, they cut me off every month for 5 days due to them not being able set up DD. Been with BT ever since with two problems. Also now out of the suburbs and in Mid Rural Wales at a distance of 41db from ( Mrkt 1 or 2 depending what site you use), exchange with a profile of 6500 and through put of 6.3 and at peak times down to 6. Very happy with my BT.

No ive gone from sports car to larda...

My complaint is the way they are holding this country back...

Yes but have you seen the size of the country... most major urban cities in the USA have better broaband speeds available! FTTP has been getting installed in many locations for many years in the states. So why are BT so behind???

I have a friend in the US and the most he can get is 7Mbit and it costs more than BT charge. He had a faster cheaper connection when he lived in the UK.

In reply to a post by worldofadsl:

My complaint is the way they are holding this country back...

i don't think they are holding the country back.they are restricted to what they can provide over the final copper length..yea FTTP would be great if we could all get it,but in reality that is not going to happen for a good few years yet....

as another poster said,you have a good connection where you are and diff locations provide diff services.you are still one of the lucky ones getting 19Mb.that is still well above the uk average
.
.
.

This link has a great excerpt from a program made in the US.

It compares US broadband to:
a) Dutch fibre, based on speed and the dutch rollout plans/investment
b) UK broadband, based on the price & competition, with a mere nod to starting fibre rollout.

And they very much think the UK is good from those perspectives.

Personally, I think VM have no real drive. They don't want to build their network out to cover the less dense areas (all cost-related), don't want to infill missing spots in places they *do* cover (I know from experience of our 16-year old estate, less than 100 yards from VM's network), and don't want to service some houses that they already go past.

VM had the chance to offer these speeds a decade ago, but didn't bother - they were too busy chasing "just" the TV market. They don't innovate, and don't drive the broadband market - they react, and go for the "cheap" broadband markets alongside TV (pretty much like Sky). And above all, they don't care about giving a quality operation that lives up to the headline speeds they have now banged out.

Frankly, we in the UK need to be paying more for broadband, and investing that in better technology that reaches out to (and beyond) the masses. Sweden has access to decent fibre... but standard broadband costs £30pm, and fast fibre costs £50pm. What does your standard Sky/VM consumer think about those prices when he just adds on top of his TV package, and pays trivial amounts, and puts up with poor speeds & services?

I'm no defender of BT (they're screwing up my fibre order as we speak), but I'm aware of what it takes to do a *proper* *quality* *national* rollout, of both the access network and the core network behind it. VM ain't it.

3 times the national average is not a bad deal.

The past has shown that you are a 'the world is woe of me' type person, so you aren't going to get much sympathy

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

This link has a great excerpt from a program made in the US.

Good vid!

It takes a long time, it is a lot of hassle, but once you have it you can rely on it for a very long time.

This touches the heart of many infrastructure woes that the UK has. On a local and national level, certain roads or rail systems are lacking in 21st century planning and capacity. This is very obvious up here. See this road from Perth to Inverness (A9). Now imagine if the road builders had the imagination to build a more direct route through the mountains, as the Americans did. Instead of a 133 mile, 2.5hr journey, it could be an 80 mile, 90 minute journey. This would mean that Inverness and the highlands would be less out of reach for the rest of the UK in a commercial sense, especially for couriers and hauliers. At present, deliveries to the highlands have their own rates.

Applying this sort of thinking to broadband to places where there are large rural or spread-out populations not only gives the people access to the same things as the city dwellers, but means that commerce can access a new market of previously untapped revenue and perhaps also skills and learning (not all the best minds migrate to the cities).

IMO the biggest problem with the UK infrastructure is not the cost or the work ethic or the difficulties. It's the way that those who make the decisions see only the cost and never the value. Only the difficulties and never the benefits. They think in the short-term gains financially or politically and avoid the long-term value as it is of no personal benefit.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A6rdal_Tunnel

L�rdal Tunnel

Work begun: 1995
Opened: 2000
Vehicles per day: 1,000
Length 24.51 km (15.23 mi)
Highest elevation 265 m (869 ft)
Lowest elevation 5 m (16 ft)
Width 9 m (30 ft)
Grade 2.5%


Now consider:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel#Construc...

Double the length, forty five times the cost, and arguably of no value to the economy. British planning versus Norwegian...UK Broadband versus Dutch.

In reply to a post by worldofadsl:

BT was handed the network from the GPO for relatively buttons

The BT shareholders purchased the network - the total cost of BT shares was well over £5billion - that is not buttons.

BT makes a profit and reinvests - the amount invested in the broadband network is a lot greater than the profits realised so far and will probably take another 10 years before any return is seen and in that time further investment will be made which will take another 15 year to recoup.

In reply to a post by worldofadsl:

Just look how far behind USA we are and look at the size of the country!!

Everyone in the UK can get a 'phone line and dial up - not so in the USA. I have contacts out there who have to drive 10 or 20 miles to get access to a landline for telephony. There are plenty of small towns in the USA that do not have broadband - ADSL or cable and rely on dial up.