Surf’s up

After literally months of waiting, I’m now using a 1mbps broadband connection after BT finally completed the upgrade last night. Ruralville has been lagging behind a bit compared to other communities in the area, mainly due to our remoteness from the exchange. But BT have recently upgraded the cables to the village in order to get our tiny school connected.
Of course, 1mbps will seem very slow to those people who live in major city centres and are getting speeds that are five or twenty times faster thanks to cable networks. The truth is that many rural areas barely have broadband at all and we are usually a long way down the queue for technical upgrades. Perhaps we will see faster radio-based broadband systems introduced in the near future – they’d certainly be useful around here and probably an awful lot cheaper to install.

4 Replies to “Surf’s up”

  1. We were recently upgraded from 512K to 2Mbps by BT and I have to say I haven’t really noticed the difference. Until it becomes normal to download full-screen video via broadband, I don’t think the extra bandwidth is going to make much of a difference to day-to-day browsing (unless, of course, you frequently download +100MB files).

  2. There are plans to put Broadband equipment in street cabs to increase the reach and give higher speeds to customers on long lines.

  3. Brian – I think that was pretty much what took place here. A new BT cab has been installed by the pub. In the case of Ruralville, we were told that we’d get the upgrade in the spring, but then it became clear that it didn’t work up here. Over the summer, contractors have installed new cables and the cab, and yesterday it was all switched on.
    If it wasn’t for the presence of the school, I suspect that we might have waited a while longer.

    Steve – no, it doesn’t make a vast difference. It’s funny – I’ve gone from 512K to 1Mbps – a doubling of speed. I remember the excitement of going from 28.8K to 56K – that was also a doubling, but it seemed a bigger step change.

  4. Have to admit the 4MB isn’t that noticeable either, until you download something big. Harvey Danger’s new album is free to download on BitTorrent (the band released it themselves) and I swear I downloaded it twice because the first time it happened so fast I didn’t believe it!!

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