My broadband has been falling down a lot recently. It’s a standard BT Home Broadband, running at the fastest it can run (which means it’s running a lot slower than advertised). I pay about £30 a month (when you include the line rental for the land line – which I don’t use). This is a fixed line broadband product and where I am (BT5, 3 miles from the city), I cannot get Virgin Cable or the new BT Infinity product that DETI just paid for.
As you can see, while the download is not too bad (though I rarely get throughput of over 2 Mbps), the upload speed is really poor. Compare that to a Speedtest result on my phone on the Three 3G network.
and lastly, compare this with $30 a month in Korea.
Good broadband infrastructure is important for our developing economy. It doesn’t matter what fat pipes are added if the problem is still last mile access for home and business users alike. It’s not that our broadband is expensive or cheap – it’s “competitive” – competitive being the world they use after they compare their product to the acknowledged worst in the market (cf “competitive” salaries).
There is an issue that the folk deciding on what “good” broadband is, evidently don’t have a use for it.