Can you remember when dial-up modems linked your pc to the World Wide Web? Torment wasn’t it! It was slow and it occupied the phone line at the same time. Picture trying to run an Internet Business with that technology. Well things have moved on a pace, but we are about to get to another barrier where we all have to throw away the technology that we are currently using. Broadband has replaced from dial-up and theoretically you the can get 24 Mb/s Broadband speeds. Fast enough to allow people to Work From Home, or for local government to move people from the office, and relocate their Online Jobs to the suburban areas.

Most broadband traffic travels down a pair of single twisted copper wires. These are capable of coping with 6 telephone calls and theoretically up to 24 Mb/s Internet speeds. Compare this with a pair of fibre optic cables – 2.5 million phone calls and broadband speeds in excess of 50 Mb to begin with. Both Virgin and BT are offering fibre broadband in certain areas of the country and that is the problem. If your Internet Business uses super fast speeds and massive download capacity then you are going towant fibre broadband. Simple – just go and order it then.

And that is where the problem starts. This is not a case of modifying how we use the current infrastructure to boost the speed and volume of downloads. The twisted copper pair has attained its maximum capability. The key ISP’s need to lay down miles and miles of fibre optic cable to employ the new broadband technology. If you Work From Home that means they need to to lay cable up your street, all the way through your garden and into your home. If your company’s business revolves around Online Jobs then cable must be distributed all over the office or factory. The cost is massive and even if you can utilize the underground water or existing telephone channels, it will take years to roll out.

The other problem is that only key urban areas will get the new fibre cables because corporations like BT and Virgin need to make profits and dividends for their shareholders. Currently the USA is about 16th in the world concerning broadband access, but this is with an typical speed of 3.9 Mb/s. The UK still has 1 in 10 houses with less than 2Mb/s speeds. Unless the UK Government sets up a national plan for fibre broadband, we will sadly fall behind countries akin to South Korea who aim to improve their national network to 1Gb/s by 2012.

A few people will say that it’s not essential. Others don’t yearn for it at all. Nevertheless for those of you who do own a “state of the art” Internet Business , using faster internet is the only means to compete globally. Unless everyone wants our knowledge founded industries to disappear the same way as our manufacturing, coal and steel industries, the country must invest in for the future. Sure a small company where you Work From Home distributing goods may not demand super fast speeds, but if you are a web developer or your company has high tech Online Jobs, then it may be a major competitive aspect on your future success. For my part I would settle for anything above 5 Mb/s, never mind 50 Mb/s from Virgin Media or that South Korean utopia of 1Gb/s!!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 31st, 2010 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Business and Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.