Topic: BT Plan 8Mbps ADSL & ADSL2+ Trials

[Clive]

ISPReview
By: MarkJ @ 12:55 PM

BT has just confirmed its intention to begin April 2005 trials of broadband ADSL services up to 8Mbps (only on lines capable of 2Mbps). The operator also announced preliminary 18Mbps ADSL2+ plans!:

Trials are scheduled to begin in April 2005 with a view to launching higher speed services nationally from the autumn.

Firstly the company plans to trial upping the speeds on lines that will currently support existing 2Mbit/s ADSL services to deliver speeds between 2Mbit/s and 8Mbit/s dependant on line characteristics. In addition BT Wholesale plans to run initial trials of ADSL2+ technology to support higher speed services of up to 18Mbit/s. Further details of the timing, scope and location of the trials will be provided over the next few weeks.

From April 2005, BT Wholesale plans to reduce the wholesale cost to service providers of BT IPStream ADSL products by an average of about 8 per cent in areas where there is a combination of high customer demand, high take up and lower costs. The reduction will be delivered as a rebate to the service provider of £1.10 per BT IPstream Home end user and £1.40 per BT IPstream Office and S product end user.

The company announced it will also reduce the costs for BT Datastream ADSL service providers at the same time to ensure continued compliance with the regulatory margin rule. Given current market and regulatory conditions, BT said it does not expect to make any further significant price changes to the existing ADSL IP Stream rental charges over the next 12 months, other than potentially some changes to support the take up of higher bandwidth services.

BT Wholesale has also announced it plans further price cuts for Local Loop Unbundling operators. BT would hope to cut the monthly rental on the fully unbundled local loop product by a similar proportion to the BT IPstream reduction. This will be subject to the speedy and satisfactory conclusion of two related Ofcom consultations and the wider review as well as following normal regulatory processes.

BT goes on to state that the recently proposed changes (relaxation) to the Access Network Frequency Plan (ANFP) are the reason it's finally able to turn ADSL2+ into a reality.

Overall the proposals form an additional backbone response to both Ofcom's Telecoms Review and BT's own 21st Centaury Network (21CN) plans.

Unfortunately the advent of higher speed ADSL and ADSL2+ technology will not benefit everybody, only those living even closer to the exchange. Having said that, it?s still good news.

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/news/viewnews.cgi?id=EEpZuFVFVyryhEkxDF

[chorleydave]

Unfortunately the advent of higher speed ADSL and ADSL2+ technology will not benefit everybody, only those living even closer to the exchange. Having said that, it’s still good news.

Who on earth would need that speed?

Sometimes, I think that these advances are nothing more than gimmicks to keep sales up.  It's the same with processor speeds.  Following the death of my previous main machine, 1.8 processor, 256MB RAM, I began to use an old Optiplex GX110, Celeron 466, 128MB RAM, while I either bought or built something faster.  As yet, I haven't bothered, because as I do not do games or intense graphics work, I haven't noticed any difference at all in speed.  Office applications still open almost instantly, as do encyclopedias, web browsers, route planners etc.  The internet still connects at the same speed and pages open at the same speed as they did with the "faster" machine.

I know prices are crashing, but why anybody would want to spend several hundred pounds on a top of the range PC when all they do is type letters, create stationary, use email and browse the world wide web, when a ninety quid Duron machine from a computer fair will do the job just as well, is beyond me.

[Sandra]

Its a case of horses for courses Dave  
A couple of weeks back me and Lona happened to be converting the same Xvid film file to DVD format.
We both used WinAvi version 6.2
It was a 2.5 hour film which took my AMD Athlon XP 2100 + with 768 mb of 266 DDR ram 1.5 hours.
On Lonas Intel P4 3.4 ghz and 1 gig of 400 DDR ram it took her 33 minutes  

[chorleydave]

That's exactly my point, Sandra.  If you are into stuff like that, the faster the machine the better, but if you are only going to use a few office applications and go on the internet, a machine like Lona's is a waste of money.

I will definitely either buy or build something faster eventually, but because of the things I do on my machines, I won't see any benefit at all.