Just in time for wired internet to be obsolete. Especially for apartment buildings, makes much more sense to provide WiFi throughout private and common area than running cables to each unit. Even for individual homes, neighborhood 5g cells can do the trick for most people's needs. Also locking in current technology when constructing a building that could last a century is really dumb. Better to have access panels in…
England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
51–60 of 340 posts
Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#52Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#53Can we maybe edit the title to say "UK" instead of "England"? Also, we nearly had gigabit fibre to the home 40 years ago (before anything even needed to run at 1Gbit, or you could afford the transceivers, admittedly) because BT's vision for the future of telephony was to rip out all the copper and run fibre to every single house. Then the right-wing extremist Thatcher government got wind of the idea and decided that…
Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#54I think this comes across as shocking to Americans but the thing is the rest of the world treats internet as a utility so most governments try to get cheap and fast internet for as large a portion of the population as possible. Where as US cities and towns are stuck under its isp corporate monopolies.
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Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#55Instead of what? Everything comes instead of something else. Whatever effort and resources are spent adding gigabit to new homes will mean fewer homes, less food, shoes, medicine, natural gas, cars or whatever. Many people will be celebrating faster internet speeds for those who purchase these new homes, but it's hard to see what goes missing when it's a little here and there from across the economy.
I'm honestly surprised to see this kind of narrow thinking on HN.
Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#56Is this symmetric gigabit or just download? I pay for gigabit down, 35 megabit up. My only other options are starlink or a $10k fiber install.
Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#57Just in time for wired internet to be obsolete. Especially for apartment buildings, makes much more sense to provide WiFi throughout private and common area than running cables to each unit. Even for individual homes, neighborhood 5g cells can do the trick for most people's needs. Also locking in current technology when constructing a building that could last a century is really dumb. Better to have access panels in…
Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#58And along with that, more tax dollars flowing to ISPs in the form of subsidies.
Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#59I think this comes across as shocking to Americans but the thing is the rest of the world treats internet as a utility so most governments try to get cheap and fast internet for as large a portion of the population as possible. Where as US cities and towns are stuck under its isp corporate monopolies.
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Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#60It’s extremely challenging advocating for this in the USA because most people have no idea the difference between upload and download, and how data caps play into it. You can get gigabit 5G in many areas but it’s manifestly a different animal than symmetrical gigabit fiber internet without caps.