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England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

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Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#201

Post by lowbloodsugar »

habosa wrote: post #90

Some color about buying home internet in London vs San Francisco (in my experience). I recently moved back from London to San Francisco. In my 3 years in central London (N1) I had to use a 5g hotspot (thank you, Vodafone unlimited) to get anything close to fast internet in my flat. If I went with a wired "broadband" connection I could not get more than 10Mbps down. The street next to mine had gigabit fiber though. Th…

I don’t know why techies move into residences without first checking the communications options.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#202

Post by Gordonjcp »

makomk wrote: post #69
Gordonjcp wrote: post #34

Can 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…

No, we didn't. I looked up the specs when the topic came up and I think the data part was something like 2Mbps shared by everyone. The big "broadband" content that BT were hoping would fund the whole thing was analog pay TV, basically leveraging their telephone monopoly into a cable TV monopoly as well. Without that extra shared pay TV money it wasn't feasible to install an individual optical network terminal in ever…

We'd still be using that fibre now with faster transceivers. That was the whole point.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#203

Post by Gordonjcp »

OJFord wrote: post #50
Gordonjcp wrote: post #34

Can 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…

> Can we maybe edit the title to say "UK" instead of "England"? I think it's correct actually, housing is devolved. 'The Building etc. (Amendment) ( England ) (No. 2) Regulations 2022' - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/984/contents/made - my emphasis.

Fair point, okay.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#204

Post by Gordonjcp »

coob wrote: post #47
Gordonjcp wrote: post #34

Can 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…

> Can we maybe edit the title to say "UK" instead of "England"? No, because the law only affects England - Building Regs a devolved matter in Wales and Scotland. There is a separate law mentioned in the article which is telecoms related and not devolved in Wales - but that is about landlords not needing to grant access to engineers.

Ah, fair enough then.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#205

Post by IanCal »

mhb wrote: post #31
IanCal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not particularly, there's very little justification for running copper to new houses given we're in a nationwide rollout of fibre and there's a big cost saving to moving entirely to fibre.

So no need for a law then...

Developers will often do the cheapest thing they can, that doesn't necessarily lead to big differences in the end cost to buy but putting in copper to save a little on construction would be pointless overall given the changes that are happening.

More importantly I think this law forces right of access for installing fibre in various situations, which has been a stumbling block for doing the work in other cases. Just from a quick scan of the coverage though.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#206

Post by IanCal »

mhb wrote: post #48
izzydata wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it seems like a way to really consider internet to be a public utility such as water and electricity. I'm sure there is a law that says any new construction requires it to be connected to the electricity grid, even though it would be pretty unreasonable to not connect it to the grid. Does that mean there is no need for it to be a law? At least this way you can have a good expectation of a new buildings utilitie…

When you set a minimum standard, something that could have been bought for less that didn't meet that standard will no longer be an alternative. So some people will have something better and others will not have an option that they once did.

It can make a maximum difference in cost of about 1% of the final sale price, probably less given the cap and average prices of new build properties. I don't think it'll have a big impact on whether the houses sell, we have a huge undersupply of new housing.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#207

Post by PragmaticPulp »

habosa wrote: post #90

Some color about buying home internet in London vs San Francisco (in my experience). I recently moved back from London to San Francisco. In my 3 years in central London (N1) I had to use a 5g hotspot (thank you, Vodafone unlimited) to get anything close to fast internet in my flat. If I went with a wired "broadband" connection I could not get more than 10Mbps down. The street next to mine had gigabit fiber though. Th…

> So basically internet is a disaster in both countries

Country-level generalizations about internet speeds are basically useless in 2023.

A lot of us have easy access to 1G up and down and multiple providers to choose from.

I have friends who live less than 15 minutes away who only have DSL or Starlink as options.

Extrapolating city-level anecdotes to entire countries doesn't make any sense. We don't upgrade the whole country's infrastructure in lock step.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#208

Post by lern_too_spel »

rayiner wrote: post #173
Xcelerate wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved from the Bay Area to a rural place in the southeast. It is a mystery how I am able to get 10Gbps fiber here from not only AT&T but also the local utility company, whereas in Redwood City my option was basically only Comcast with a slow upload cap.

It’s not a “mystery.” California makes it expensive and difficult to build infrastructure. That’s why Google Fiber started out in places like Kansas City. I live in a historically red county in the Verizon footprint. I have two fiber lines into my house, one from Verizon and one from Comcast. I get 6 gbps service from Comcast. It’s expensive ($300/month, compared to 10 gig for $300 in Chattanooga). But it’s not even…

Is that all over your state? There are places in California, including parts of Silicon Valley, where you can get 10 Gbps fiber Internet service for $40/month.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#209

Post by dylan604 »

rayiner wrote: post #170
dylan604 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Comcast now offers vastly higher upload speeds (10mbps -> 100mbps) I mean, yeah, I guess normally a 10x increase is deemed a good thing and could be considered "vastly higher". Who wouldn't be impressed with a 10x bump in pay? However, 100mbps is still tragically low. Having anything less than full bandwidth up/down on a fiber line is just cheating the user artificially. Being fiber, I could see offering a cheaper m…

It’s not “cheating the user artificially.” Comcast delivers service over shared-medium coaxial cable that was originally designed for one-way service. The available frequencies are split into upload and download portions, and increasing the upload speed decreases the download speed.

which just goes to show that they are not truly using fiber. which is my point. if you're using fiber, it is designed to be bi-directional full duplex or whatever to call it technically. if you are offering a true fiber connection with asymmetric speeds, then you are doing something artificial to it.

if you are actually using coax cable, then it's 100% artificial since it's supposed to be fiber.

so what are you implying is the lie?

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#210

Post by uconnectlol »

dahfizz wrote: post #65
thedaly wrote: post #52

I wish that countries would mandate symmetrical connections as well. This would open up so much more opportunity for self hosting web apps and allow for decentralized sites, such as peertube, to function better.

I disagree. The vast majority of people are never going to need or care about hosting a decentralized hoozywhatsit. Mandating technical decisions that cause waste is suboptimal. You get symmetrical speeds with fiber, but if ISPs could use the existing fiber infrastructure and allocate 75% of the bandwidth as download instead of 50%, that would be a win.

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