Price of new houses just went up
Are you suggesting that the cost of materials has any impact at all on the inflated price of a house in the UK?
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
#62Wonderful, let's make new homes even more expensive! And to those who are downvoting this, every building code requirement like this jacks up the price further. Not everyone is a SWE with a TC of $250k+ you over privileged ninnies.
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Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#63Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#64How i understand is is Gigabit is two parts: the first part is your home, router, etc supporting the connection speeds. The other is the infrastructure to deliver the gigabit to your home. I can see a regulation that mandates that you wire any new residences up so they can support gigabit, but how is this going to work if the municipality / ISP does not offer it? Not sure about what Gigabit rollout in the UK looks li…
Yeah, this fixes 1% of the problem (wiring up your house) while the other 99% (getting the service till your house) remains unaddressed. Still a good step, but not cause for too much celebration. And as the article notes 9 out of 10 new houses were already adding gigabit wiring even without this law.
Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#65I 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.
Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#66Price of new houses just went up
Not really. You still have to buy the internet package from the ISP which is gigabit speed enabled. This only ensures it is available. The law isn't that free gigabit internet is to be offered to all houses.
Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#67It should be noted that according to government estimates, 88% of new homes were already built with gigabit access prior to this law (which seems impressive as an American!). The new rule is expected to move that number to 98%.
Yeah my new build had gigabit installed. It has become more of a customer demand thing prior to the law, as long as it’s available. There have been a lot of developments finished in the past 5 years with 1mbps copper, hopefully the law will prevent that travesty happening!
Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#68I 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.
Internet infrastructure regulation varies quite dramatically across the developed world. Canada, Germany, Switzerland, etc., do not “treat the Internet like a utility” for the most part. Also, “treating Internet like a utility” actually means a “corporate monopoly” nearly everywhere. The situation in the UK is very similar to the situation in much of the northeast US. You have a former monopoly provider (there BT, he…
Not really the same though, we have many options that ride on top of the BT OpenReach network so most urban places get many cheap options for internet. If you want fibre to the home then Virgin Media is still your main option which is a little annoying.
Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#69Can 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 everyone's house with the tech back then, and that's the big monopoly Thatcher's government balked at. In the end they did end up using another version of the same tech in some areas which used shared optical terminals between multiple houses that was telephony only - and I mean literally telephony only. A bunch of people found out about their high tech fibre optic lines when they couldn't get anything faster than dialup internet whilst all the people with normal copper lines had ADSL.
Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes
#70I 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.
In what way does it cause waste?