This nonsense about foolish governments definition of ‘superfast’ which isn’t even a word has no need to exist because it’s just shorthand for a completely arbitrary number, which is made up, time-varying anyway and already laughably out-of-date. It’s like defining a new ‘government word’, for us all from the ministry of newspeak, and this week’s offering is ‘supertall’ which means 2.156 m tall. There’s no need for such a thing, and I just made that particular number up. Coming back to the linguistic poverty of ‘superfast’: which direction? What moron forgot about upstream, thinking only about the domestic voters downloading from Netflix et al and forgetting all the business users? And now suddenly also the millions of home workers using FaceTime, Zoom, the NHS (web?) app, Skype et al.
It’s supposed to be 30, no 24 no 30 Mbps downstream / <don’t-know> upstream (so let’s all agree to give ourselves a break and make it a symmetric requirement then
). But just now, many more clued up domestic users will be wanting 0.9 / <not-sure> Gbps or even a genuine 1 Gbps depending on what they’ve heard advertised. So already the government speak is between 30 × too slow nowadays - after all, remember this is supposed to be ‘super’ not just ‘broad’, no? Something really special - FTTC users in fact
moan about 30Mbps - over ten times faster than one of my ADSL2 lines? Do we need another useless term like ‘ultra’ now? - for the ‘requirement’ for either crap upstream or symmetric ~1Gbps.
Way back when, we jumped from 50 k / 33 kbps dialup with V.90, possibly with very very good textual data compression on top, to 0.5 / 0.5 Mbps, so what roughly 10 × in the most favourable case, for downstream. So then after two years, I suddenly got a × 3.5 downstream speed jump overnight when BT’s new variable DLM came in. And I didn’t even know. A bit like Santa dropping in unexpectedly. What was that excellent ADSL system called ? - let’s see:
https://kitz.co.uk/adsl/maxdsl.htm That was up to 7 or 8 Mbps sync rate downstream and 448k upstream or 768k [?] if you bought the BT Premium traffic option for £10, which I immediately did to get slightly better upstream as my line wasn’t good enough to see the upstream benefit.
So then we had ADSL2+, and Annex M, got us up to what 20 Mbps / upstream I forget - with or without Annex M. And then this nonsense about 30 Mbps comes round because everyone absolutely has to have 4k IPTV. And we forget all the businesses in the country as their requirements matter to no one. So in total, from dialup to the silly 30 Mbps ‘super duper fast ’ is a downstream expansion of × 600 in terms of expectations. Then there’s the amazing jump from 30 Mbps to the new step at 900 Mbps which is another × 30, so now x 18000 [!] in total. I hope got the arithmetic right.
Grrrr. I feel much better now.
Things will surely stick at 900 Mbps download speeds from while. Hopefully it will be symmetric gigabit before two long for business users without costing the earth. But since
- there aren’t any applications much for > 1Gbps FTTP and
- there’s the massive problem of having to get rid of all the slower routers, the smaller problems of
- getting rid of 1Gbps switches,
- losing the gigabit ethernet over copper, and
- WLANs becoming a real pain and
- PCs own NICs, and
- internal i/o becoming inadequate,
then it’s going to be a long time before it’s even possible to deploy 10Gbps all the way from LA to your RAM or CPU. Tablets and phones and laptops will need to be swapped out and that will not be popular with the users, so another drag on progress to 10G. I am indeed sure that 1G FTTP will have a long reign. What will happen is that some people will buy into 10G without understanding that they won’t be able to realise it in a complete, bottleneck-free path.
Isn’t it incredible though that we’ll soon be
expecting comms 18000 times faster than we used to happily manage with (not so good for YouTube/Netflix) in the V.90 days? Hopefully we’ll be coming out of the comms dark ages into the new happy days of fibre and serious i/o capability.
