Windows 10: Metered Broadband Thoughts

Not surprised with Hong Kong but last year Korea (South of course) was the leader.

 

I was surprised by countries like Romania & Latvia beating out the US and Germany.

 

They are still in post-comunist set of mind and government is still the boss so if they decide to have good internet, by gosh, they've got it. Of my neighbors, Bulgaria is also good. Around here government could not push toilet law, let alone make some progress but is pushing hard to get to EU without much apparent success. There's literary hundreds of small ISPs (almost as many as political parties) which on their own can't do much without generous help. Not even half government services are online so they don't have much incentive to push faster and better internet. Take recession into account and all you get is a mess. If it wasn't for Telenor, as main mobile provider even G4 would not come in.

 

We're upgrading very fast to fiber optical but this is a very big country and the cost to get this done is huge.

 

Here in Germany there has been a push by some politicians(too few actually) to have the government supply the infrastructure, because the big companies Deutsche Telekom or Vodafone for example are not going to extend their infrastructure to some small village with only a couple of hundred inhabitants because the costs would outway what they would earn. There are initiatives where smaller communities can get government funding, if they find away to do it them selves(for example running fibre optic cable from the backbone to/thru the village them selves.

 

Just tested my Pre-paid Mobile Broadband Vodafone surf stick:
Attachment 19878

 

Very similar here in the UK

The phone companies are not going to fund upgrades for people in small villages, so its a government scheme to help out these
areas

this is why my (on a good day 1.5 speed bb), should be upgraded to fibre later this year, unknown what it will go up to, but anything is an improvement

 

Vodafone being a UK firm, I would expect you all would have the same as us here. But I guess that goes back to band width licensing.

 

I expected Telenor to be same as in Finland but Balkan mentality won although they are still best around here as far as mobile network goes.

 

Dialup is not Broadband. It has a most 33.3kbps and cannot go any higher due to the narrow band of signal that phone lines pass.

If you mean DSL, then DSL is extremely limited by distance, and typically can't service anyone further away than 18,000 feet from a DSLAM which has to be in a central office or branch office.. That 18,000 feet is measured by the way the copper is laid out, not "as the crow flies". So you can often be 6 or 7 blocks from a CO and still be greater than 18,000 feet in terms of copper distance.

DSL is almost always not possible in rural areas, and often isn't possible even in relatively modern suburbs.''

Satellite is pretty expensive as well, and also bandwidth capped. Typically as little as 1GB / month, though many offer unlimited during off-peak hours.

If they provided unlimited, unmetered connections then a small number of users would use up all available bandwidth of the limited frequency spectrums. This is slowly changing, as more spectrum is being made available now that analog TV is offline, and other bands are being opened up for auction.. but it's still VERY expensive.

The UK is roughly the size of two US states. It's much easier for them to upgrade their infrastructure than for the US to do so. That's why utilities tend to be monopolies, so that the companies that invest in thee infrastructure can get their money back eventually. From what I can see, talk talk only gives you unlimited 3G, not 4G. Also, from what I can tell, I can't find a 4G offering in the UK that is unlimited.

 

Lets put this in perspective: Texas vs Iceland:

 

Draw a dot in the middle and you'll have Serbia.

 

I used to have unlimited and then they changed it. I have a cap of 300gb per month, If I go over that it is 10 dollars for every 50gb that you go over it. I can't change providers as I do not want DSL so I am stuck with what I have. I don't have to use One Drive so that is one way.

 

Hi there

Add Heads of Cattle to that map and the disparity gets even larger (although I thought nearly everything in Texas was done by Horse).

Note @Mystere --I wasn't talking about DIAL UP -- I was talking about the non cabled standard phone connections where you use a splitter on the input line that provides the broadband -- this is much slower of course than the cabled fibre optic broadband but can still give around 2mbs - adequate enough if you can't get fibre optic broadband and still possible to use these types of connections in rural areas.

3/4G are provided by the mobile phone companies --some of whom may have decent data plans -- however I was considering standard broadband rather than Mobile systems.

I can't believe though in major conurbations in Texas - say Houston, Dallas,Ft Worth, St Antonio etc that it's impossible to get unmetered broadband.

BTW Best steak I ever ate was in Amarillo Tx -- took me a really long time to eat it though - the size of it !!!!.

Cheers
jimbo

 

That's called DSL, and I addressed that quite clearly in my response. DSL is not a solution for most people.