hnd

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...broadband.html

Carrier pigeons have won a race against rural broad band after delivering USB keys more quickly than a computer using rural broadband

Maybe it ain't so bad here in Dubai after all

haunted

figures..

zoukla

Just not having to call bt or any other utility is a joy here.
Thing is people want to have modernisation without modernity. Try adapting an old stone structure (listed building)to put in modern services..you might have a coronary by the time the villagers and bus pass owners finish with you.
Sometimes it makes you wonder how advanced things are in the UK when you go to other parts of the world.

hnd

We had an old stone structure (listed building) but the village was much the same - electricity and phone wires were (and still are) overhead. Husband had to work from home from 5am every day before getting the train to London and we had the first ISDN line into the village which was in the middle of the commuter heartland of mid Sussex. And that was as recently as 2000 and still all we had when we left in 2005.

There was still a certain kind of charm to the old-fashion style though - the power cuts and loss of phone during bad weather were kind of fun

Norm_uk

I think comparing rural broadband to major cities like Dubai or Abu Dhabi is unfair...just as comparing rural roads with the M1 would be a bit silly.

If you live in any sizable town in the UK and have broadband it will be faster and cheaper than the same line in the UAE. So they haven't sorted out broadband in most villages - so what? It's amazing how quickly we begin to depend on technology that wasn't even around 15-20 years ago.

N.

Millhouse

One of the fastest ways to move data is via a transit van. Fill it up with DVDs and put it on the M1, no broadband or current technology could transfer data that quickly.

I'm not really sure what the experiment proves. USB keys hold a lot of data maybe. It would have been even more impressive if they put those new 256Gb keys on the pigeon.

AppleMac

Certainly cheaper - quicker is debatable. My old house in Sussex had a maximum speed of 5Mb and my fathers in London has the same.

In Dubai I get 15Mb.

Brains1983

we stayed in a small rural town in NE scotland, maximum available speed was 8mb, and we were lucky to get 4. Here, I pay for 16mb (30mb is available), and most of the time I get around 14mb. it's a bit pricey at 350dhs a month, but we use the interweb heavily and don't grudge paying for it. touch wood, apart from the hassle of getting it installed, it's been fine ever since...

Millhouse

what's the ping time like? that's more important...

Brains1983

I have no idea what ping is but;

Millhouse

the ping time is essentially the time it takes to send a little bit of data to the other place and for it to be returned. i.e, it's the 'echo delay'

In the carrier pigeon example, that would be hours (despite the transfer rate being high). computers talk in a two way direction hence ping times are often more important than absolute speed.

example, my vpn used to give me 2mb to London with a ping time of 6-700ms. Totally unacceptable and impossible to stream TV. I changed a few settings, ping time dropped to 100ms and I can watch TV. Transfer rate is the same.

Brains1983

So it's dictated by the line its self? Ie if I upgrade to 30mb, the ping is unlikely to differ as it's the same line? In 2 minds on whether to upgrade or not, the download speed is fine for me, but if I upgrade the upload speed should be 3mb instead of 1 (or 0.9 as I get) which is of use to me for my xbox gaming.

Millhouse

correct. You can buy higher bandwidth but ping times won't necessarily improve. In that situation you are almost wasting your money.

Hence through a VPN to watch iplayer you probably only need to buy a 2MB connection (we did and it was fine for ages), 8MB or 16MB probably won't help you as the bottleneck is the ping time.

Ping times here are crap as it all gets routed through the Emirates censorship servers, you can't avoid it (which just adds to the delay).