UK Going For Technology Golds

The UK Government appear to be determined to raise the internet bar to win gold medals for the UK. Culture minister, Jeremy Hunt, claimed that the UK will have the "fastest broadband of any major European country by 2015. Like the Olympics the government is obsessed with speed and records and have released a further £300 million of funding. He claims some golden Olympic moments:

·         700GB/s were delivered from the BBC website delivered 700GB/s when Bradley Wiggins won gold.

·         On a peak day, 2.8PB (petabytes, over 2.9 million gigabytes) were downloaded.

·         Nearly a million people watched Andy Murray win gold online, with nine million following coverage on their mobiles.

·         London2012.com received over 20 billion views.

Mr Hunt has also stated intent to break the one gigabit speed barrier by supporting private firms in delivering fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) from 2016.

The mobile market is also to get faster. From October Orange and T-Mobile, which is the UK’s biggest mobile operator, with some 27% market share, will rebrand under the name Everything Everywhere (EE) in October. From the end of the first quarter 2013 the Orange and T-Mobile brands will be dropped and all existing customers will be migrated to EE. More importantly it will also launch 4G superfast mobile internet this year ahead of its rival UK operators.

4G is seen by many as vital for the further development of video, gaming and downloading and EE has been allowed to use its existing 1800 MHz spectrum to enable them to deliver first to the market. Its rivals have to enter into a 4G at the end of this year, which will then enable virtually everyone with the appropriate devices to be able to access to the faster network.

Connected at Supersonic Speed

BT is set to launch a fibre optic service that is capable of delivering up to 300Mbps (megabits per second).

It may sound like a case for UK trading standards but it isn’t for everyone and will only be able to reach some UK homes by 2^nd quarter next year but other are now being promised up to 80Mbps.

BT is to begin trialing the super-fast Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology later this month but estimates that only a quarter of the fibre network will benefit. However its Fibre-to-the-Cabinet technology (FTTC), which uses copper wire to connect the street cabinet to users' homes and currently delivers up to 40Mbps is to double to around 80Mbps next year.

BT's Infinity FTTC service has however only around 200,000 users (including ourselves) so although demand exists it’s more of laying the network for tomorrow when users and media usage will demand faster speeds.

Currently Lithuania leads the European FTTP ranking with 26.6% of households subscribing to the technology, followed by Norway, Sweden, Slovenia, Russia, Slovakia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Estonia and Denmark. Staggeringly each of the top ten FTTP nations has a penetration rate of at least 6%.

Alternatives to BT in the UK are restricted by the its resistance and charges to open up its ducts and overhead poles to rivals, but if this were to be addressed there are some big players such as Fujitsu who want to move in with speed to fill the gap.

Just think 10 years ago we had a dirt track and tomorrow we will be ditching the super highway for a supersonic highway and with changing how we consume media and communicate.