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Re: [LUG] Fwd: UK 'misled' on broadband speeds

 

 On 28/07/2010 14:10, tom wrote:
On 28/07/10 12:58, Julian Hall wrote:
 On 28/07/2010 12:47, Mark Evans wrote:
On 27/07/10 17:07, John Williams wrote:

Exactly, while it might be unreasonable to expect us to be in 1st place,
one has to wonder just how we end up behind so many poorer countries.
Some like Japan and South Korea you can expect to have better
infrastructure due to far denser population and smaller area.

Japan is actually larger than any country in the EU.
Interestingly a country of comparable size with the UK is Romania, which has been previously mentioned in this thread. Though with a
considerably smaller population.


I wonder how the figures would change if the study only compared capital cities? That might be a more level playing field as you'd expect capital cities to demonstrate the best available in each country.

Julian

This doesn't work either - do you compare New York - which is a modern grid based town to London - which was designed in 1667 by Wren.
You can't really use the fact London is over 400 years old to excuse lack of development in the intervening time surely?
Popping a few thousand connections under the road in NY probably costs 5% of the same in London.
The important question to answer therefore is 'Why is this the case?'
I used to work for BT - when they come up with privatisation we laughed at the prospectus info - the running costs were based on US prices and seriously underestimated - I sold my shares at £4.40 before the other investors caught on. Much as I hate BT you have to realise that its a lot more expensive here to dig up roads, pavements etc than it is in a less developed country. In Romania you can just [ut in the cable you want - here you have to make sure you dont accidentally dig up the old stuff while you put the new stuff in - and a lot less motivation to do so when you've got revenue streams already in place. Its a lot harder to improve a just past state of the art system than it is to start from scratch.
NY would have the same issues I would think so why are they so much cheaper?

Julian

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