England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by hgomersall » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 7:43 AM UTC

lhnz wrote: post #104

hgomersall wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK house prices in no way reflect the build cost. The developers do the least they can get away with, which generally means the shittiest fabric with some polish that lasts until the end of the warranty period, just about satisfying the building regs (which are not really checked properly), then they flog the result at whatever the market will bear and pocket the difference. What the market will bear is entirely dict…

Everything you say is correct apart from "house prices in no way reflect the build cost". The build cost is expensive as there aren't many skilled trades people nowadays and there is a market of lemons. The few high quality building contractors that are trusted can charge huge amounts of money -- all of the others charge as much as they can get away with and just hope that you don't check their work...

Maybe, but around me, house demand hugely outstrips supply, so everyone buys at the limit of what they can afford. For sure, proper dumps that need significant renovation go for less, but they are super rare. Everything else goes for a price set by the size of the home and increasingly, the size of garden. New builds command a slight premium, but that's mostly a marketing premium, which doesn't hold for resale. It's hugely complicated by the location aspect of course - older houses tend to be in better locations. Basically, my point is that trying to attribute regulatory costs to house prices is essentially impossible, and is very much in the noise.

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

#272

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 7:50 AM UTC

drstewart wrote: post #267

dang wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what's going on with your account, but you've unfortunately been posting a ton of flamewar comments lately, and breaking the site guidelines badly in other ways as well. If this keeps up, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and go back to using the site as intended?

[flagged]

> Maybe it'll spur you on to do something about the other low quality comments that are flooding HN.

He's doing just that. You could have engaged the counterparty, you could have ignored it or you could have just downvoted it and moved on, instead you chose to lower the level purposefully, that is the problem that you perceive as 'the quality of HN comments has gone down dramatically'. If you let yourself be provoked into reducing it even further then you are part of the problem.

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

#273

Post by ricardobayes » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 8:20 AM UTC

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…

Just circling back on the topic of "good enough work" from a few days ago. Spain rolled out 93% of fiber coverage in a relatively short period of time, but that meant tearing up sides of streets in most cases, and/or air cables. Yeah, the air cables are unsightly, and the roads have a different-colored "strip" on one side. But we have good internet. If they wanted to do it "perfect, and polished" then we would still have ISDN/satellite internet for many years to come.

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

#274

Post by kilotaras » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 8:51 AM UTC

alias_neo wrote: post #171

agilob wrote: post #119

Just more admin fees and paperwork to build a building, making them more expensive. Make 30cm insulation a requirement so we don't pay £2000 per year for electric heating. I asked my property management company if they would, eghm, _consider_ improving external insulation, they responded they have no such legal requirements, so they won't. We pay 4x more for heating and warm water than in 2018, and have it colder and…

Insulation is pretty good in new build flats. I bought a new build in London where I lived for 5 years, I used the heating all of about 10 days in 5 years, the gas bill was a rounding error; what they really need it cooling; that place was 38°C in my living room with all windows and doors open in the summer. To put that into perspective, I just moved to a 1930s house where I'm paying £600-800 a month for the heating…

> that place was 38°C in my living room with all windows and doors open in the summer.

If your window is open you will have the same air temperature as outside, potentially higher. I saw a lot of that in my apartment block this summer. People don't have experience dealing with high temperatures, and intuitions they have are wrong.

What you want to do is

1. Open windows at night to create draft and cool down your dwelling.

2. During the day close windows and block sunlight as much as possible. Blocking sunlight on the outside of window is better than blocking it inside. If blocking inside with something like thermal curtains you may need to leave window a crack open. Sunhouse-like conditions may cause temperature next to window increse by a lot (60+) which is not good for glass.

3. (1) and (2) can be supplemented with AirCon, but it's not that popular in UK.

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

#275

Post by zrobotics » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 8:54 AM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #212

vel0city wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comcast often isn't FTTP, its is usually coax to the home. There are some services they do with FTTP, such as their 2Gbit service, but most installs are coax.

Speaking of coax -- does anyone know if there's a way to hang multiple wireless access points off of coax run through the home, or would one have to get multiple modems to make this work? I've run into a couple of housing situations for myself and family where wifi does not covers the whole household well (combo of wall composition and local interference). In these conditions repeaters sometimes don't help as much as…

Honestly, the mesh wifi solutions are pretty decent; I've never had luck with the repeaters at all even without interference. MoCA can work, my last experience with it was 5 years ago but I found the connection to be flaky and unreliable. I actually had slightly better luck with powerline ethernet, but that was still flaky and both systems required fiddling with the hardware at least once a month.

I have the previous gen Eero (with 2x ethernet jacks per station) and have had excellent luck, my desktop is connected to the farthest station from the modem and I have little trouble saturating my crappy residential cable connection. My only main gripe is the hardware is only configurable via phone app and I assume Amazon is spying on me. However, in 3 years I have only had to mess with the system once after one of the stations didn't rejoin automatically after a power loss. Plus, it provides absolutely fantastic coverage to a oddly shaped property that is very long and narrow with a metal sided garage workshop on the end. But the limited options available are seriously annoying, you can basically only set dns and basic filtering/port forwarding.

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

#276

Post by ChrisRR » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 9:53 AM UTC

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #78

dahfizz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As the quality of the centralized hoozywhatsits continues to decline, I expect demand for decentralized hoozywhatsits will increase, given that they're harder to parasitize. I agree that it shouldn't be a mandate though. It would be enough to mandate that the Up/down speeds both appear on the promotional material in the same font size.

How much of the country is truly technical enough to install (and want to install) self-hosted solutions though.

I'm an engineer by day, and even I can't be bothered when google does practically everything I want it to

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

#277

Post by ChrisRR » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 9:55 AM UTC

FredPret wrote: post #113

dahfizz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe John Q Public doesn’t want to host his own hoozywhatsit, but what if he starts making VR calls that require uploading massive amounts of data? Or some mesh technology takes off? Or he takes up vlogging? I don’t like the command-and-control mentality behind traditional one-way media (not saying that’s your mentality). The further we get from that, the better

Then that would be more of an issue at the exchange end. The current issue is that homes are running copper cable and so the cable needs to be changed for fibre to every street.

At least if you start with fibre to the street/house, you can update the backend infrastructure without the customers' involvement

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

#278

Post by fennecfoxy » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 9:59 AM UTC

Used to live in NZ where I believe we had one of the world's most organised, fairest fiber rollouts. I moved from 1Gbps to 5Mbps connection (in central London!!) when I first got here.

This is just gonna be one more thing to tack onto the artificial price of new houses (and old ones). The property market here is so incredibly boned, houses often aren't properly modernised, construction methods used are from the 60's a lot of the time bc rather than knock down & rebuilt to modern standards, they just keep repairing the old - plus a lot of "new builds" are built super cheaply/crappily as well.

And all of these problems for the low, low price of half a million £ for a three bedroom terraced house, not even detached.

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

#279

Post by fennecfoxy » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 10:05 AM UTC

uxcolumbo wrote: post #263

alias_neo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insulation is pretty good in new build flats. I bought a new build in London where I lived for 5 years, I used the heating all of about 10 days in 5 years, the gas bill was a rounding error; what they really need it cooling; that place was 38°C in my living room with all windows and doors open in the summer. To put that into perspective, I just moved to a 1930s house where I'm paying £600-800 a month for the heating…

£800 per month? That seems a lot for a family home, even during these times. And that’s only for gas, electricity excluded? How big is the house and is there zero insulation, eg single pane windows?

Electric heating, man. 800£ is still a lot but I think my 2-person 60m^2 flat is doing about 200£/month in electric with only 3/5 heaters turned on (our bedrooms + lounge). With just these three heaters on it's about 40kWh a day mostly in heating (everything else uses almost nothing).

I can imagine a family with kids where you want the house to be heated all over + much more cooking/washing machine use and you could get to the £500-700 range, but 800 is still definitely a lot.

It's such a cool place here. I just wish Brits would fix their political/cultural problems. They like doing things "the good old way" too much hence political parties cater to those people. Gov should have been looking at this energy crisis thing 20 years ago; it was obvious as all hell. They went all in on gas like the scumbags they are, yeah it'll never run out. Sure.

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

#280

Post by djhn » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 10:12 AM UTC

cameronh90 wrote: post #155

thomseddon wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For clarity - whilst most connectivity infrastructure in London is underground, it's almost always within a primary duct, so running new infrastructure is usually a case of pulling in a new cable as opposed to "ripping up the street". In fact, anyone approved can use BTs own ducts and poles via their PIA product[1], which has created a resurgent and incredibly active market of "alternative" network providers ("alt ne…

It may be in a duct, but occasionally the manholes are in really awkward locations - like in the middle of an extremely busy road. I've been waiting for symmetric fibre for a year, and they're trying to install it, but getting the permission to close the road to lift up the manhole is proving to be a challenge.

But my impression of London (from living there for a few years in the 2010s) was that it is very much a 6am-11pm city and everything is shut at night. Surely infrastructure work can take place during night shifts?

I found the experience of working in the city and living in Westminster frustrating, because shops, public transport and even pubs(!) would effectively have closed by the time you finished work.