Wireless Broadband

[Ldoone]

I've seen 11Mps (eleven!) two way symmetrical wireless broadband in rural NZ but I can only find limited coverage in the UK and the speeds quoted are a maximum of 1Mps - mostly 256Kps which I don't consider is actually Broadband. Is this really the case? Why don't we have the same or better technology here?

[Hippy]

Ldoone, we do have just the same technology in the UK. Standard wireless LAN systems here operate at at around 11Mbs (that is Mega Bits per second). The ADSL broadband supplied by BT and others typically run at speeds, as you say, of 1MBps and 256KBps. As it is an assymetrical system, that supplied from the Internet to you is normally faster than the speed from you to the Internet. Note that these speeds are expressed as Mega Bytes per second. As we know, there are eight bits in a byte. Confusing, isn't it?

[Ldoone]

Thanks, Hippy, but I think pacificnet runs at 11MBps not 1.1. It's radio not an internal LAN. Perhaps I should have asked, why isn't radio BB technology more available here as we are generally ahead of places like NZ? I have a place in Exmoor (Ldoone, geddit?) and while my family in NZ enjoy wireless BB beamed to their home via a non-satellite aerial which looks like a giant claw (their dail up is worse than ours, with analogue telecom exchanges), there don't seem to be suppliers in the UK. If anyone knows of them, I'd be really grateful but I read that one supplier has bought all the licences for the UK and hence we face a monopoly.

[Gumbo]

I think your last comment may point to the reason. The cost of replacing all of the analogue telephone exchanges may be substantial and therefore to introduce the "Giant Claw" may be more cost effective. However here the exchanges are capable of running a relatively fast system and therefore the introduction of the "Claw" would be expensive for not a great deal of benefit. Also the problem as I understand it with Radio is that you still run a slow connection in the other direction. Its effective because when you click a link it sends the request which is very small but the page returned is large but supplied by the faster connection. This is great when your downloading but rubbish when your uploading, but in general most web browsing is done in this fashion.

[Loki128]

Internet speeds (like 256kbps and 1mbps) are measured in bits (Kilobits/sec and megabits/sec). That's why, on a 'standard' UK 512kbps line, you can only make a download at 56kbytes/sec. (10% of the total is a network overhead, hence why you can't download at 64kbytes/sec.)