DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:
Also, I think it'd be cruelly ironic if broadband TV became successful
by being the first to deliver HDTV.

I'd pay for that :-)
It wouldn't surprise me. Broadcasters have no plans for HDTV, HD-DVD is
years away, nobody has a true HD television set at the moment, yet you
can already go out and buy Terminator 2 extreme edition (or whatever its
called) and watch it in high definition on your PC.

DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:
I guess if they can get away with 4Mbps MPEG-2 on freeview, then with
something like VC-9 or H.264 the same sort of quality should be
possible over 2 or even 1 Mbps ADSL



They mention DVD-quality, and so using one of the newer codecs I assume
that'll be about 3 Mbps?

Or maybe they mean DVD quality in the same sense that DAB is CD quality?

Robin Smith wrote:

My background in comms goes back to 87, so you can do further maths on these
commonly used data rates if you like:

1987 - 1200bps
1990 - 2400bps
1992 - 9600bps
1993 - 14400bps
1994 - 28800bps
.
2003 - 2048kbps on regularly available urban broadband
2004 - 4096kbps on city metro broadband

Expect to see 8Meg this year possibly and potentially much greater. Korea
SP's now offer a 100meg service in the metro FYI

2Mbit services generally of a dubious quality are available in some
exchanges for less than the £60+VAT or more that is to be paid for
IPStream 2000 services.

4Mbit services are available *only* on 35 Central London exchanges, or
on approximately 100 exchanges for business rates, around £200 per month
+ VAT I believe.

8Mbit has been available on the same 100-ish exchanges for £300 per
month + VAT for a while now, and is being tested on the 35 Central
London exchanges, however the price for that will be well outside the
£50 or so range I mentioned.

Being in comms since 87 you'll know that the only way to go over 8Mbit
is with ADSL2+ and/or line bonding, or with vDSL, and neither of these
services will come anywhere near a viable residential price point,
Considering that a 4Mbit service on those 35 Central London exchanges is
£75 a month + VAT. BT have no intentions of releasing ADSL2+ services
(and Ofcom have effectively banned the use of ADSL2+ frequencies) or
vDSL any time soon.

Korean SPs received government funding, Japanese companies offer 26,
51.2 Mbit DSL And 100Mbit fibre to premises in some places. This is as
much to do with acceptance of contention and relatively low
international traffic I believe.

*please* stop with the maths it doesn't apply in this case as there is
no technical reason why 8Mbit products can't be made available to those
whose lines are good enough to support it right now. Just a question of
finance, politics, a little innovation, and willing. :(

Ignition wrote:
DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:

Ignition wrote:


Speaking from my own usage I've moved home twice in this time -
here's my stats:

I had 56k in 98, 64/128k in 99, 600k in 2000 (cable), 1Mbit in
2002(cable), 512k in 2003, 1Mbit in 2004 (gaydsl). At no time did I
pay more than £50 a month, which I consider to be absolute maximum.



1 Mbps / 56 kbps = 17.86

2004 - 1998 = 6 years

Moore's Law predicts a doubling of speed every 2 years, so in 6 years
you get:

56kbps x 2 x 2 x 2 = 448 kbps

So you're more than twice ahead of Moore's Law. I don't really see
what you're complaining about given that some areas can't even get
512kbps, let alone 1Mbps.

I fail to see the relevance of Moore's Law to this. CPU enhancement
comes from improvements in technology.


Moore's Law says that the number of transistors you can fit onto a given
area of silicon doubles every 18 months, and because the clock speed of
a CPU is dominated by the duration it takes for transistors to switch
from one state to another, and that doubling the number of transistors
in a given space implies a halving of the size of the transistors, and
that it is the time it takes electrons to move from through the
transistor that determines switching speed, then making the transistors
half the size implies that the switching speed doubles.

Conclusion: CPU speed is directly related to Moore's Laws predictions
about transistor size.


With ADSL the same technology
that gave 512kbit 6 years ago will give 8 now.


Yeah, it's going up extremely quickly, so what are you complaining
about?


18 times faster in 6 years is not any sort of progress?? I suggest
you look in the dictionary for the word 'progress'.

OK and since 2000 when I left the narrowband technologies? Even had to
take a step back due to no cable...


You are just ONE consumer, and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.


And just to point out that the original form of Moore's Law was that
the number of transistors you can fit into a given area of silicon
doubles every 2 years (IIRC) (and because the electrons have a
shorter distance to travel they can switch faster), so PC CPUs are
not the only CPUs, and the dedicated network processors will also
have smaller transistors that switch faster, just like your 2.x GHz
Athlon XP in your PC can.

The internet's backbones in the UK sit mostly idle due to the extreme
bottleneck
close to the customers.


Extreme bottleneck close to the consumers? The bottleneck close to the
consumers is controlled by the multiplex contention ratio, isn't it?
It's usually 50:1 isn't it? So clearly if they lowered the contention
ratio then bandwidths could go up.


Speaking from my own *experience* having
worked for ISPs in the past.
The original form of Moore's Law doesn't apply in any way to this.
Juniper's higher end kit switches and routes better because it has
multiple switching modules working in parallel. As I said anyway well
run backbones aren't even stressed, due to extreme bottlenecks over
the 'last mile'.


Parallelization will of course allow higher capacity.


My increase in 2 years has been nil, in 4 less than double.



An increase by a factor of 18 in 6 years, that's excellent. What do
you need this bandwidth for anyway?

The same reasons you don't have a 486 in you PC probably. Do people
ask you why you aren't using a 500MHz CPU, does most things a 2GHz
does, just *slower* What is it to do with you why I want better
services for myself anyway?


Just asking. I've had broadband for about 6 months now and although I've
not gone scouring the net for such things, I've not heard much about
decent high-bandwidth content that's available, and I've assumed that
we're just going to have to wait for broadband market penetration to
grow before we start seeing useful wide bandwidth services, that's all
really. Also, most of the delays when general surfing I've experienced
seem to be due to delays within the internet, and not at my end, because
if a website is slow, if I try a random different website in my
Favourites folder it isn't slow, which proves to me that the broadband
connection isn't the problem.


Should I be happy paying the same as
places traditionally more expensive to live in, for less?
Personification of 'rip-off Britain'
bend over and take it, and stop complaining.


It's not even close to being a prime example of rip-off Britain. If you
want a good example of rip-off Britain then just look at the state of
the audio quality on DAB in the UK due to the low bit rates being
provided by the broadcasters:

http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/worldwide_dab.htm


At the end of the day the only DSL progress has been Datastream, and
1Mbit IPStream, even that took nearly 4 years to be released. BT
Wholesale have no intention of breaking the 2Mbit barrier, while
ntl: are testing 3Mbit burst speeds in Guildford BT's new burst
product
will not break this psychological 2Mbit barrier.

Anyway I have spoken extensively about this on adslguide's forums,



Why doesn't that surprise me?

You tell me, again getting moaned out for wanting a lazy telco to do
more. Want me to pass the vaseline there?


No, you keep it.


proposing a PAYG as fast as your phone line will tolerate package,
however people seem more concerned about remote areas getting DSL
than any sort of progress towards real broadband so....



You have to put yourself in the shoes of those without broadband at
all, and then you might just have the humility to realise that
you're not doing at all badly IMO.

I'd rather not, I live in a not small city, and have access to the
same services as a village with a population of 500 enabled by the
local Government throwing BT a few quid. Madness.


It's not madness at all. I think it's the right thing to do to give
rural areas access to broadband ahead of you getting your multi-megabit
broadband connection. And for the record, I live in a not small city
either, and am looking forward to higher bandwidth broadband, but I'm
not so selfish that I demand multi-megabit broadband while those that
live in the countryside can't get it at all.


If you're happy
with the current situation I'd suggest you look elsewhere and see we
are at the bottom of the pile of the G8 as far as connection speeds
available go,
but at the top for availability.


Can you provide a URL to back up your claim?


Although of course by the time the
nationwide rollout is done 512k will be a laughable connection speed,
but hey at least we'll all be shafted together, and BT make more
profit either way.

You have no idea about why the UK's DSL is so relatively slow, it's
for mostly preserving legacy revenues for BT,


I watched the unbundling of the local loop issue with interest, and
agree that BT were acting badly. But I think that was the previous BT
CEO's fault (he was a bit of a fk up really), and you've got to give the
new CEO time to get BT's act together. The first thing he said he'd do
when he took charge was to improve broadband, and to my mind he seems to
be sticking to his word. Could it be quicker? Obviously you could get
things done extremely quickly if you throw money at the situation, but I
reckon we're catching up. And the UK is at the top of the league as far
as market penetration of broadband is concerned IIRC, and I'm afraid
that'll have been achieved by making your multi-megabit connection a
lower priority than those that don't get broadband at all, and I agree
with that.


and political
expediency. In
no other field at the moment I think are the 'early adopters' so
poorly catered for.


DAB stations in the UK used to be usually transmitted at 192kbps, now
98% of stereo stations use 128kbps, and a load of music stations now use
mono, so DAB is going backwards, not forwards, so clearly the
early-adopters have been completely screwed.


--
Steve - http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/ - Digital Radio News & Info

DAB sounds worse than Freeview, digital satellite, cable, broadband
internet and FM

Ben wrote:
DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:
Also, I think it'd be cruelly ironic if broadband TV became
successful by being the first to deliver HDTV.

I'd pay for that :-)
It wouldn't surprise me. Broadcasters have no plans for HDTV, HD-DVD
is years away


I read the following article yesterday which says that HD-DVD is waiting
for the licensing for H.264 and WMV9 to be sorted out (trust Microsoft
to stick their bloody oar in...):

http://www.planetanalog.com/news/sho...cleID=18311332

So hopefully once that's sorted (and it says that they're going to
revise the situation in 60 days' time) then it can start moving ahead
again.

Reading comms/electronics web sites there seems to be a lot of standards
squabbles these days. The UWB spec is frozen because there's 2 sides
that have competing technology and neither will budge an inch, and it
looks like each side is going to develop their own proprietary systems,
and before that there's the obvious writable DVD format war, although
with DVD+/-R drives it's not been as bad as it could have been.


--
Steve - http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/ - Digital Radio News & Info

DAB sounds worse than Freeview, digital satellite, cable, broadband
internet and FM

Ben wrote:
DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:
I guess if they can get away with 4Mbps MPEG-2 on freeview, then
with something like VC-9 or H.264 the same sort of quality should be
possible over 2 or even 1 Mbps ADSL



They mention DVD-quality, and so using one of the newer codecs I
assume that'll be about 3 Mbps?

Or maybe they mean DVD quality in the same sense that DAB is CD
quality?


Possibly.


--
Steve - http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/ - Digital Radio News & Info

DAB sounds worse than Freeview, digital satellite, cable, broadband
internet and FM

"DAB sounds worse than FM" wrote in message
...
http://media.guardian.co.uk/city/sto...167284,00.html

Broadband bandwidth is going up at a similar rate to Moore's Law
(Moore's Law states that CPU speeds double every couple of years), so if
that continues over the next decade (and from what I've read it is
likely to) then TV-on-demand via broadband becomes a feasible
alternative to digital TV. I for one hope it succeeds so that Sky have
some competition in the premium-content arena.

IIRC BT developed ADSL in the '80's for Video on Demand but couldn't
actually provide a service because the regulatory framework of the time
forbade them from being a broadcaster. This was to stop them competing with
the cable companies who needed the protection as an incentive to dig up all
our streets in the name of cabling us all up! (Funny how I still can't get
cable, even on a new estate. Oh, I forgot, the cable companies are all
virtually bust now. Most of their subs are being paid straight to $ky and
their only profits are coming from broadband! There's a really skewed logic
here, I'm sure, but I can't work it out.)


--
Antony Colwood

Antony Colwood wrote:
"DAB sounds worse than FM" wrote in
message ...
http://media.guardian.co.uk/city/sto...167284,00.html

Broadband bandwidth is going up at a similar rate to Moore's Law
(Moore's Law states that CPU speeds double every couple of years),
so if that continues over the next decade (and from what I've read
it is likely to) then TV-on-demand via broadband becomes a feasible
alternative to digital TV. I for one hope it succeeds so that Sky
have some competition in the premium-content arena.

IIRC BT developed ADSL in the '80's for Video on Demand but couldn't
actually provide a service because the regulatory framework of the
time forbade them from being a broadcaster. This was to stop them
competing with the cable companies who needed the protection as an
incentive to dig up all our streets in the name of cabling us all up!


Great!


(Funny how I still can't get cable, even on a new estate. Oh, I
forgot, the cable companies are all virtually bust now. Most of their
subs are being paid straight to $ky and their only profits are coming
from broadband! There's a really skewed logic here, I'm sure, but I
can't work it out.)


Someone said NTL's broadcast transmission section is profitable.


--
Steve - http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/ - Digital Radio News & Info

DAB sounds worse than Freeview, digital satellite, cable, broadband
internet and FM

DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:
Ignition wrote:

DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:


Ignition wrote:



Speaking from my own usage I've moved home twice in this time -
here's my stats:

I had 56k in 98, 64/128k in 99, 600k in 2000 (cable), 1Mbit in
2002(cable), 512k in 2003, 1Mbit in 2004 (gaydsl). At no time did I
pay more than £50 a month, which I consider to be absolute maximum.



1 Mbps / 56 kbps = 17.86

2004 - 1998 = 6 years

Moore's Law predicts a doubling of speed every 2 years, so in 6 years
you get:

56kbps x 2 x 2 x 2 = 448 kbps

So you're more than twice ahead of Moore's Law. I don't really see
what you're complaining about given that some areas can't even get
512kbps, let alone 1Mbps.


I fail to see the relevance of Moore's Law to this. CPU enhancement
comes from improvements in technology.



Moore's Law says that the number of transistors you can fit onto a given
area of silicon doubles every 18 months, and because the clock speed of
a CPU is dominated by the duration it takes for transistors to switch
from one state to another, and that doubling the number of transistors
in a given space implies a halving of the size of the transistors, and
that it is the time it takes electrons to move from through the
transistor that determines switching speed, then making the transistors
half the size implies that the switching speed doubles.

Conclusion: CPU speed is directly related to Moore's Laws predictions
about transistor size.

Still completely irrelevant to available DSL speeds though, isn't it?

With ADSL the same technology
that gave 512kbit 6 years ago will give 8 now.



Yeah, it's going up extremely quickly, so what are you complaining
about?

Sorry, there's no excuse for not going up at all really in 4 years.
Dialup progress is completely irrelevant, and I fail to see what the
issue is with grasping this.
For dialup to be accelerated equipment at both sides of the connection
has to be updated. The CVXes or whatever would require new modem cards
at very least, probably new system controllers as well.
For ADSL to be accelerated it's just a case of changing the rate cap on
the DSLAM, a *trivial* configuration change - is it that complicated to
grasp that to offer a PAYG or capped 8Mbit service will in no way
require more money from BT in most cases, just reconfiguration, and not
particularly nightmarish reconfig at that, and will in no way impact on
Farmer Piles getting his 512k.

18 times faster in 6 years is not any sort of progress?? I suggest
you look in the dictionary for the word 'progress'.


OK and since 2000 when I left the narrowband technologies? Even had to
take a step back due to no cable...



You are just ONE consumer, and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

About as irrelevant as discussing dialup platform progress along with
ADSL, and Moore's Law in relation to it.


Extreme bottleneck close to the consumers? The bottleneck close to the
consumers is controlled by the multiplex contention ratio, isn't it?
It's usually 50:1 isn't it? So clearly if they lowered the contention
ratio then bandwidths could go up.

No.
If contention goes UP bandwidths can go up. Think about it.
At the moment BT are running some of their 'usual' 50:1 DLEs at 12:1 -
15:1. Contention being visible is an apparent swearword right now, which
is part of the reason for the slow development. Most other places will
accept some slowdown at peak times, although saying that they start from
4Mbit or whatever so some slowdown is more tolerable!

Speaking from my own *experience* having
worked for ISPs in the past.
The original form of Moore's Law doesn't apply in any way to this.
Juniper's higher end kit switches and routes better because it has
multiple switching modules working in parallel. As I said anyway well
run backbones aren't even stressed, due to extreme bottlenecks over
the 'last mile'.



Parallelization will of course allow higher capacity.

As will advances, remember this is ASIC hardware not generalised x86
or whatever so new developments allow routers to significantly break
Moore's Law, although as I've already mentioned backbones are
underutilised anyway!

My increase in 2 years has been nil, in 4 less than double.



An increase by a factor of 18 in 6 years, that's excellent. What do
you need this bandwidth for anyway?


The same reasons you don't have a 486 in you PC probably. Do people
ask you why you aren't using a 500MHz CPU, does most things a 2GHz
does, just *slower* What is it to do with you why I want better
services for myself anyway?



Just asking. I've had broadband for about 6 months now and although I've
not gone scouring the net for such things, I've not heard much about
decent high-bandwidth content that's available, and I've assumed that
we're just going to have to wait for broadband market penetration to
grow before we start seeing useful wide bandwidth services, that's all
really. Also, most of the delays when general surfing I've experienced
seem to be due to delays within the internet, and not at my end, because
if a website is slow, if I try a random different website in my
Favourites folder it isn't slow, which proves to me that the broadband
connection isn't the problem.

You and I obviously use the Internet for different reasons. The takeup of
1Mbit services was so high BT couldn't keep up with demand, and are still
struggling to maintain that leased line like performance as apparently a
lot more people want the bandwidth than they thought.

The popularity of the 2Mbit services also indicates some considerable
interest.

snip DAB stuff


It's not madness at all. I think it's the right thing to do to give
rural areas access to broadband ahead of you getting your multi-megabit
broadband connection. And for the record, I live in a not small city
either, and am looking forward to higher bandwidth broadband, but I'm
not so selfish that I demand multi-megabit broadband while those that
live in the countryside can't get it at all.

I do apologise. Maybe we should give them 100+ store shopping malls as
well, buses every 10 minutes, trains every 5, cinemas, etc.
Some rural areas don't have mains gas or sewage, maybe I should offer my
sewage pipe up for the water company to recycle so someone in a village
with a 3 figure population can have it?

If you're happy
with the current situation I'd suggest you look elsewhere and see we
are at the bottom of the pile of the G8 as far as connection speeds
available go,
but at the top for availability.



Can you provide a URL to back up your claim?

I don't need to. Google will tell you all you need to know.

Although of course by the time the
nationwide rollout is done 512k will be a laughable connection speed,
but hey at least we'll all be shafted together, and BT make more
profit either way.

You have no idea about why the UK's DSL is so relatively slow, it's
for mostly preserving legacy revenues for BT,



I watched the unbundling of the local loop issue with interest, and
agree that BT were acting badly. But I think that was the previous BT
CEO's fault (he was a bit of a fk up really), and you've got to give the
new CEO time to get BT's act together. The first thing he said he'd do
when he took charge was to improve broadband, and to my mind he seems to
be sticking to his word. Could it be quicker? Obviously you could get
things done extremely quickly if you throw money at the situation, but I
reckon we're catching up. And the UK is at the top of the league as far
as market penetration of broadband is concerned IIRC, and I'm afraid
that'll have been achieved by making your multi-megabit connection a
lower priority than those that don't get broadband at all, and I agree
with that.

Ben Verwaayen is not interested in offering faster services. I have spoken
to him about this myself and the vibe was very much that BT aren't
interested in it right now as people don't get excited about it.
Even Ofcom commented on the unhealthy obsession with rollout of these
services and concern at them being obsolete - which they already are.

and political
expediency. In
no other field at the moment I think are the 'early adopters' so
poorly catered for.



DAB stations in the UK used to be usually transmitted at 192kbps, now
98% of stereo stations use 128kbps, and a load of music stations now use
mono, so DAB is going backwards, not forwards, so clearly the
early-adopters have been completely screwed.

How many people take DAB just out of interest? Probably significantly
less than
the 3 million HSI users (I am NOT calling current services 'broadband').
Interesting you get somewhat more animated at discussion about DAB -
maybe you should stick to what you care about. I feel as strongly about
this issue as you do about DAB. I'm happy that you're happy, I'm not,
and I'm quite happy to stand on the highest mountain and shout about it.

Sorry, there's no excuse for not going up at all really in 4 years.
Dialup progress is completely irrelevant, and I fail to see what the
issue is with grasping this.
For dialup to be accelerated equipment at both sides of the connection
has to be updated. The CVXes or whatever would require new modem cards
at very least, probably new system controllers as well.
For ADSL to be accelerated it's just a case of changing the rate cap on
the DSLAM, a *trivial* configuration change - is it that complicated to
grasp that to offer a PAYG or capped 8Mbit service will in no way
require more money from BT in most cases, just reconfiguration, and not
particularly nightmarish reconfig at that, and will in no way impact on
Farmer Piles getting his 512k.

The DSLAM config would be trivial, but the required upgrade upstream to the
capcity of their core ATM network might be more of an issue. It most
certainly would not be cost-free.

David