This is likely not useful in most west european homes (even gigabit connections are unheard of in the uk, 10 megs being advertised as “superfast”, let alone tens of gigs). But still a fun project!
The uk is behind most of europe. Even east eu countries have fiber to a significant chunk of the population now, and west is doing great. In france i get 5Gb/1.2Gb for 49 euros. Switzerland is even better. When i sold routers to businesses they would always be gigabit fiber available, so much that i had stopped checking.
> Even east eu countries have fiber to a significant chunk of the population now
Yes, “even” the barbarians of east europe have it. In romania you get around 10 gbps per second for roughly 10 euros a month from what i hear, and pretty much everyone has fiber. I believe Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia are doing great as well.
Peering outside of Romania might be questionable. I visited a few months ago and got 500Mbps within the country and just 50Mbps to my server in The Netherlands.
I tried running speed tests to other datacenters in NL and had similar issues across the board. It was probably just an isolated incident that weekend, but that was my experience regardless. When I did speed tests domestically, I had 500Mbps both up and down.
They'll eventually be dragged into the future by requirement, 1GbE is already standard on most equipment, with 2.5GbE and 1+gbit wifi becoming more common on consumer equipment. The increasing reliance of on-demand delivery of various forms of content, from multimedia to gaming, is already pushing 100Mbps connections to where 10Mbps connections were less than 5 years ago.
I think its worth choosing fiber in a new deployment, at least at the distribution level (between floors, or zones of the home). Most new computers come with ultra fast solid state storage, so even between systems on a local network, 10GbE speeds could be useful.
With the way the price of copper is going, and how much less efficient rj45/copper chipsets are compared to optical, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a shift to optical as a replacement to rj45 in the next decade.
At a time when more internet developed countries are moving towards 10gb connections, the uk is moving towards 1gb. Instead of playing catch it should lead. Now if only there were competent people in power.
Fast local network is useful even without fast uplink, e.g. for accessing data on local server. 1 Gbps is still several times slower than disk speeds, so going to 10 Gbps seems like reasonable future-proof config.
This is not an accurate statement. I'm paying GBP25/mo for 1Gbit symmetrical in London suburbs. Same provider offers up to 3Gbit symmetrical for non-business. And I'm not in some fancy new build- the fibre is run from the existing street telegraph pole to the front of the house.
Yes it's not necessarily nationwide but "unheard of" is way off, before you even consider Virgin cover a sizeable chunk of the country and their DOCSIS upgrade means they can push gigabit now.
About 70% of UK homes have access to a gigabit connection through either fibre or the Virgin Media HFC network. FTTP coverage is about 40% nationwide. It’s not that rare.
Respectfully, I find the 70% figure for access to a gigabit line extremely hard to believe.
When I lived in central London (tube zone 2), all that was available at my address was a wet-noodle quality 20 Mbps DSL connection. No BT FTTP, no Virgin, no Hyperoptic, no G.Network. This was in early 2022.
I now live in Switzerland and have a 25 Gbps FTTP connection, paying about 30% more than I paid in London for the DSL line.
It's a completely different world connectivity-wise.
FWIW last time I checked, central London did indeed have slow connectivity, but it didn't extrapolate to the rest of the UK.
No idea why the center of the capital was equivalent to a remote small town in this regard.
I agree, that's very counterintuitive. You'd think the economics would generally be in London's favour, given the high population density. (Though digging up the streets might be harder and therefore more expensive?)
Well i clearly couldnt find such homes and believe me i looked. I was happy to have found homes with proper structural integrity let alone high speed internet.
That's because the UK is way behind mainland Europe in this regard. My previous house in a very busy area of London had 80mbps max...
However in a small town in Switzerland we have 25Gbps available. The UK could be in this position, but Thatcher happened unfortunately, and the project was canned.
