After making fun of the UK broadband market (and BT in particular) a couple of weeks ago, I spoke to my Mum yesterday and found out that she has 'broadband' at home. The provider is Tiscali, the price is 15.99 per month, or around 3,000 yen. So, at last, some companies are trying to offer reasonably priced always-on access. At 156K down, the speed is not blazing (I will be paying the same amount for 40M, or 40,000K down), but it is a move in the right direction. Good on you Tiscali, and Renato Soru.
Posted by Gary at February 16, 2004 10:42 AMWell, first 150K is pathetic, basically double-channel ISDN speed which we had 20 years ago in Germany. We come back to the definition of broadband, I think there was a court case around the usage of that word in the UK some years back.
Then mind you in the UK they had that utterly stupid idea of introducing USB-based ADSL modems (not Ethernet), something I have never seen anywhere else. That has several disadvantages, for example it is harder to share access between more than one computer (you cannot use a hub like in Japan), then there are driver issues and can be a nightmare to set up on non-Windows (and even then can interfere with other stuff on a PC). Lastly a lot of the modem stuff is done in software of the host computer i.e. it is using some processing power just for the connection.
Yes, it is cheap... too cheap.
Posted by: Dirk at February 16, 2004 02:50 PM