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This coming Tuesday Car phone warehouse is to launch Free Broadband, for "Talk Talk" Customers.

This will effectivley promote a Price war
which can only be good for us

28 quid cheaper than my 28 quid per month 1mb broadband with BT.

BT broadband is a shambles. Its 2meg felt so slow,especially now that i know what real broadband (fibre optic cables) feels like. Telewest 2meg is loads faster. U cant send bband signals down phone wire,yet BT think they can,What a bodge

I am with Tiscali 2mb uncapped bb for about £20 a month including Norton Anti Virus.

Never had any problems with it. Very fast all the time, no slowdown, excellent ping times in online games.

Only drawback, they don't seem to offer static IP's

AOL 2mb bb and never have slow downloads unless its a torrent.
ping of about 15-20 on counter-strike

i'm on ntl 10mbit about £40 a month, not had any problems with it since i got it

Dont forget your only as fast as your slowest connection.

Hopefully a little price war will shave off a few ££ here and there.

Hehe, wait until LLU becomes widespread, then ADSL will hit its real potential.

Don't forget, that cable is utter crap when it comes to uploads, the UBR's take an absolute hammering if a few people upload at their maximum speed.

Cable is good for downstream, but upstream it is nigh on useless, hence why NTL are really trying to get FTTH off the ground (and have been since the first trials in 1999 in Dolphin Square).

Even worse, Telewest use euroDOCSIS, and NTL only use DOCSIS 1.1, and neither (although they are effectivly the same company now) can afford to upgrade their network to DOCSIS 2.0. And some parts of the NTL network (mainly the orig-NTL network) still use the DAVIC standard, which is even worse then euroDOCSIS.

ATM, cable in the UK is utter crap thanks to bad financial decisions by the two (now one) big players over the years (how could CWC UK Residential be worth £8.1billion hahahah!) which has led to a complete lack of investment in the network.

Hence why Sky still have a far better service and format then the crap Liberty based service NTL and TW have.

Once LLU is more available, ADSL will really come into a world of its own, cable cannot compete with upstream speeds and whilst it does compete with downstream speeds people are becoming more wise to the fact we need high upstreams nowadays.

Whether you have 2Mbps or 24Mbps, it does not make much difference, you try finding download servers or even P2P files that will give you more then 2Mbps on a regular basis.

Cable is catching up with both Sky and BT's LLU plans, but it will be many years yet before it actually competes with them in this country.

Cable is the way forward and is by far the superior technology, but only if the infastructure is built and maintained correctly (which unfortunatly went out the window in 2000 when CWC left).

Just my 2p's worth

talktalk are doing free broadband for life, i work for the carphone warehouse and they kept it quiet until today, they never told any of us as today is the official launch date.

the package sounds brill to me, basically you have to sign upto talktalk landline and go onto the talk option 3 international package which gives you unlimited anytime calls to all landlines in the uk and unlimited international calls to 28 countries. the line rental and talk 3 package costs a total of £21.99 per month and then you can sign upto broadband and get it free forever.

the catch:
you have to sign an 18 month contract and you have to go onto the talk 3 international package.

if anyone needs any more info on this then give me a shout and i will try and find out for you.

also if you fancy switching over to talk talk then i can do it for you as long as you have a BT land line at the moment, then i just switch you over to talktalk landline, just send me a PM.

i have just rang up BT to see if they are going to offer their customers anything as good as this and they just said at the moment they dont have any promotions this cheap, the cheapest is £17.99 per month with them but you have to pay £11.00 line rental aswell and you dont get any free calls with that.

i wonder what will happen from now, i can see price wars.

Brill info MattyC.

I have heard the Japan are running 100Mbps internet connections, but they also have very poor upload speeds.

100Mbps is the speed of most companies internal networks lol

Well an internal network running at 100Mbps is just IEEE 802.3, it has no limits really, except the hardware and quality of cables that are being used.

The problem with fast internet connections is two things:

1. The network infastructure that is in place.
2. The total amount of peering bandwidth that the company and/or network has available to it.

People who think that cable in this country is a state of the art digital network, are correcty. However, the fibre optic part of the network when it hits the little black box down the road. From there on, it is simply Coax, which is why there are physical limits on the speed that connections can run at. Dont forget a large amount of the bandwidth available on the Coax is already used for the inefficient MPEG2 digital television feed whether you have it or not and dont forget that they are only just starting to cut the analogue feeds off, which is partly why speeds are improving in the last 6 months or so. This is why they are really trying to push FTTH, as then available bandwidth woould be almost unlimited, although the government are concerned about the cancer risks associated with FTTH. So until the government get off their high horse, the best hope is DOCSIS 2.0 for a speed improvement.

The other reason exceptionally high speeds are not realistic is to do with peering. NTL amd Telewest could place everyone on 20Mbps connections tomorrow (although it would mean a lot of SACM and STB replacements due to most having 10Mbps ports), but if every single person downloaded from a server that is not on the NTL/TW network, then speeds would seriously struggle.

This is because ISP's don't have unlimited bandwidth, indeed such a thing does not exist. This biggest worldwide connections (IE. the connections that transfer all the data from one side of the world to another) are OC192, and there are only a few of these. They run at around 9.6Gbps, but they cost a hell of a lot to build and maintain such powerful networks. So when ISP's go to companies such as Peer1 and Level (3) and AboveNet, they have to pay high amounts of money to "peer" with these networks, and even more to actually use them for IP transit (the movement of data from their network, using the worldwide netwoeks). In Europe, we are luck as we have several Internet Exchanges located in the major cities arouns Europe (with AMS-IX in Amsterdam being th largest pushing around 20Gbps at times) and these are where all the ISP's and carriers can sort of terminate and meet up with everyone else, so essentially the traffic is very low cost.

However, once outside Europe, bandwidth is is expensive due to the complexity and cost of running networks under the sea etc... And of course ISP's cannot have just one carrier, they have to have many to avoid their customers having problems (not so long ago Level (3) and CogentCo fell out causing all sorts of trouble for US ISP's).

Yes, there are 100Mbps services available in Japan, one of the most famnous is provided by Yahoo!, and I believe they are based on FTTH, however whilst the bandwidth may be great within Asia, it is not 100Mbps international bandwidth, it may be as little as 1Mbps international bandwidth, who knows, but the point is if someone on these services wants to download something from an EU or US server, then they wont get ever get near the 100Mbps mark, even if the server is on a dedicated GigE with only that person downloading from it.

I have tested many different servers from Asia (mainly China Telecom and Singapore data centres) and the bandiwdth is good to some parts of the western world and absolutely appauling to other parts. The reason is peering, the Asian providers dont peer with enough western carriers because of the high costs.

So to summarise all that crap I have just written, even if we get 100Mbps, it wont truely be 100Mbps internet, more like 100Mbps ISP network bandwidth and maybe a few Mbps o internet bandwidth.

I beleieve myself that it is just a numbers game nowadays anyway, consumers think thy need the fastest connections, the more Mbps a comany can advertise, the better. But this simply isnt true. Yes, the jump from 56Kbps Dial Up/128Kbps ISDN to 512Kbps broadband was gigantic. Then the jump from 512Kbps to 2Mbps was fairly impressive. but the jump from 2Mbps to 24Mbps is barely noticable for most users.

And ISP's are starting to cap usage now anyway, which makes high bandwidth connections almost a catch 22 and therefore nigh on useless. A 10Mbps with a 75GB cap? It may as well just be an unlimited 2Mbps connection.

Mannnnnn, I need to get out mre



PS. With regards o the Talk Talk offer, is it only available on LLU'ed networks, or is available to all? I am just wondering how they argoing to b able to provide this service for "free" (which is a bit of a con asits not rally free,its bundled, just like NTL do withtheir "free" phone line bundles haha) as BT charge around £12.70 alone just for an L2TP connection on their non-LLU'ed network???

Sweet
I understood it all lol...

I remember watching the discovery channel say 6 years ago and they
featured this island that the japs had flattend,
as they do.

And it was to be an e-commerce hub.
The Backbone was a Fiberoptic with a Terrabite
capacity. And all the buildings all had fibre optic connections.

It was way ahead of its time and cost the earth,
i guess that's where Yahoo or Google
decided to set up lol...

Well theres a nice 8Gbps network in London, around the docklands area if I am not mistaken, jsut for "small" businesses to use. Its connected to the LINX (direct fibre). Not sure how much internet bandwidth that pushes, but it sure brings a new meaning to ICS

A terabyte capacity is a hell of a lot of bandwidth, are you sure it was a terabit? Sounds like a similar conecpt to Dolphin Square, where NTL have been testing a completely Fibre network with 100Mbps connections as standard (although on a much larger scale as they Japs probably invested more then the couple of pence invested in Dolphin Square with NTL haha).

trust you matty to have all that to say! u know too much and u dont get out dude your right!

kray this sat my 21st!

Lol init I do need to get out more haha, I might pop along to the Kray with ya lid ill let ya know before Friday