A new index of average global broadband speeds makes for pretty depressing reading if you happen to be Ed Vaizey, the newly appointed Minister for Broadband in the coalition government. Hotfoot from listening to Her Madge The Queen bigging up support for the broadband nation at the state opening of Parliament earlier in the week, Vaizey will have been brought back down to Earth with a very real world bump as the Ookla Netindex places the UK at, erm, well, 33rd in the global broadband download speed charts.

To put that into some perspective, Europe as a whole can muster an average broadband speed of 10.03 Mbps according to the index but good old Britain manages a meagre 7.69 Mbps. So while we may expect to find ourselves behind the Gods of Broadband, South Korea on a massive average speed of 34.19 Mbps, ending up way behind the likes of Latvia (24.30 Mbps), The Aland Islands (18.80 Mbps), Romania (18.56 Mbps), Bulgaria (17.55 Mbps), Lithuania (16.70 Mbps), Andorra (16.24 Mbps) and even flipping Belgium (11.24 Mbps) for crying out loud.

Even if Ed Vaizey tried to shift the focus by looking at the upload speed charts instead, he would have found no reasons to be cheerful. In that list the UK sits at number 66 in the world with a truly poor 0.91 Mbps. Heck, even the Republic of Moldova can manage to find an average upload broadband speed of 7.17 Mbps although once again South Korea makes me wince with that 18.45 Mbps chart topping number.

Geoff Bennett, Director of Strategy at Infinera UK, reckons that “the roll out of superfast broadband in the UK continues to lag behind some of our key economic competitors in Europe, and the rest of the world” as these Nsetindex figures would tend to confirm. “We would urge Ed Vaizey to look at investment not just in the last mile but also in the core of the network” Bennett continues, concluding “There are new technologies that have been widely deployed elsewhere that increase the capacity of the network while reducing capital and operating costs and a leap forward to wide deployment of these technologies would be beneficial for education, health care, business, and consumers.” Technologies such as Photonic integration, for example, which has been deployed to good effect by operators in the UK such as Carphone Warehouse…

I’m sad to say that I’m way below average here in my country pad, with an average download speed of 3.5 Mbps and uploads maxing out at 0.75 Mbps.

How fast is your broadband? Now is the time to let us know if size really does matter…

Now that the so-called broadband tax has been scrapped (along with the controversial Budget announced tax hike on cider) as Parliament gets ready to dissolve itself in the run up to a General Election, are those of us who follow the politics of technology meant to breathe a sigh of relief and go about our business? I don’t think so.

The Tories were against the 50p per month tax on everyone with a telephone landline, and indeed had said they would scrap it if it were voted in and then Labour was voted out. But for Labour it was a core element worth around £170 million a year towards the funding of that much publicised promise to get super-fast broadband to everyone. Has the broadband tax gone away for good then? The answer to that one would appear to depend on how the country votes on May 6th it would seem, with the Tories having no plans to bring it back while Labour would almost certainly seek to do so as a matter of some urgency.

So why was it scrapped, seeing as the Government could have rushed it through as part of the bundles of laws that are being bullied and hurried through Parliament so as to make the statute books before it dissolves? Now that’s an interesting one, and I suspect the answer can be summed up in three words: Digital Economy Bill. OK, some might suggest it was more to do with getting the Budget passed nice and quick, but I can’t help but wonder if there was an element of distraction involved, a tidbit to feed the geeks and take their mind off the Digital Economy Bill. If it was meant to be a distraction, it didn’t work. Indeed, only MPs appeared to get distracted and do something else other than attend the important second reading of the thing.

After a rather drawn out and tediously lightweight ‘debate’ in the House of Commons last night, the Digital Economy Bill has now passed a second reading and is due to be voted upon this week to determine if it becomes law or not. The debate, and I use that word with a lack of enthusiasm that can only be matched by the lack of enthusiasm shown by the Commons, was nothing short of a shambles. At one point there were only 15 MPs in the chamber, and at the peak of the thing no more than 40, while thousands of people who understand the technology and the impact that this duff bill will have on ordinary users and Internet businesses alike took part in a much more informed and reasoned debate online on Twitter for example.

You might have thought that, post the expenses scandal, MPs would start listening to the electorate and at least look like they give a damn about our opinions.

You might have thought that, with an election just around the corner, the views of the voters would take on a new sense of urgency.

You might have thought that the draconian measures being introduced to supposedly crack down on piracy would be exposed as a sledgehammer to a nut or, to put it in the perspective of other ill-judged knee jerk legislation rushed through Parliament, the erosion of our personal freedoms in order to calm irrational fears about domestic terrorism.

But, alas, no. It was the same old, same old. With very few, and as it turned out rather honourable mentions (Tom Watson MP take a bow) MPs just took the opportunity to stand up and rant about something they know precious little, and in some cases apparently absolutely bugger all, about. Even those such as Jeremy Hunt, Shadow Culture Secretary, who appeared to understand that the Bill was flawed stood and declared it should be passed anyway. WTF?

No wonder MPs are despised more than traffic wardens and tax inspectors these days…

Could tomorrow’s Budget be the most broadband friendly in history? The odds are looking good for some pre-Election bribery in the form of Super-Fast Broadband for All it would seem. Gordon Brown has already announced plans for every citizen to get a government services web page of their very own, accessed by super-fast broadband which the PM refers to as the electricity of the digital age.

Of course, there’s the small matter of how you pay for all of this. Which is where the Budget on Wednesday comes in. It looks likely that there will be an element of taxation in the form of a land line levy of around £6 for every land line, which is already being referred to as the broadband tax. It’s also expected that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair ‘eyebrows’ Darling, will announce that savings of billions made by closing down existing government offices will contribute to the funding purse, along with the creation of some 250,000 new jobs over the next 10 years as a result of the speedy web access.

But how do the main political parties in England view the Digital Britain road map, and how their plans to deliver that digital economy vary? Thinkbroadband has been analysing the different approaches and come up with the following:

Labour

A ‘Universal Service Commitment’ of 2Mbps by 2012 to virtually everyone in UK funded by surplus money from the Digital Switchover fund.

Next Generation Broadband available to 90 percent of UK by 2017 funded by 50p +VAT per month levy on fixed phone lines which is expected to raise £1bn over seven years. This will fund next gen broadband to the final third where the market is unlikely to deliver a service without some intervention.

In his speech, Gordon Brown said that proposals for online delivery of government services “depend on reaching 100 per cent” coverage of next generation broadband and that by 2020 he expects “to make Britain the leading superfast broadband digital power creating 100 per cent access to every home”.

Conservative

Supports the 2 Mbps universal access by 2012 funded by surplus from that Digital Switchover fund.

Next Generation Broadband of 100Mbps to majority of homes by 2017 funded possibly by using a proportion of BBC license fee at any point beyond 2012. Funds would be used as loans or on a matched funding basis.

Thinks that BT should open up access to underground ducts and overground telegraph poles so competitors can lay their own fibre like they do in France and Singapore for example.

Wants a change to the rating system for fibre networks to remove all current disadvantages suffered by new operators.

Believes intervention may be necessary in due course for next-generation broadband, but market should be given a chance first.

Liberal Democrats

Supportive of government USC plans for 2Mbps by 2012 funded by digital switch over surplus, essential to have a minimum standard of service but 2Mbps is an unambitious target.

Thinks universal service funding should be combined with a project for rollout of next generation broadband, so those who can’t get broadband would get next generation broadband sooner.

Thinks that mobile broadband could have a role to play in hard-to-reach areas. Effective use of spectrum is important.

Would like to see vast majority of the country being able to access 40Mbps+ by 2017.

Wants immediate intervention to target areas unlikely to be reached by next generation broadband by the market, the final third. Would adopt an outside in approach (start funding the most rural of areas first) but admits “it won’t be possible for absolutely everyone to receive next generation access” immediately.

Opposes the Conservative policy to top-slice the BBC license fee.

Supports 50p/month levy “if applied properly and with exemptions for the least well off”

Welcomes BT decision to open up ducts.

Sees a need to encourage more services that make use of high speed broadband, including national and local government services, to drive demand.

Thinkbroadband, however, believes therefore that the key question will be what percentage of homes and businesses will have access to 100Mbps by 2017? The challenging target will be in the 80-100 per cent range. “The main political parties all accept the importance of securing a strong digital future with super-fast broadband, but each has made vague promises, leaving out some crucial factors that would allow us to hold them to account if they form part of the next government” says Sebastien Lahtinen, co-founder of Thinkbroadband, concluding “we see some differences in the plans for how next generation broadband will be funded, in particular the level and timing of government intervention, but we don’t have clarity from any party on both the question of what ‘next generation’ broadband means in terms of speeds, and how universal will access to this high speed broadband be? In other words, will they guarantee that every single household will get it?”

According to a new BBC poll the vast majority of people think that Internet access is a right and not a privilege. When I say ‘vast majority’ I mean nearly four out of every five people questioned by the BBC, and that’s not just in the UK or even Europe but across the globe.

The survey, undertaken by the BBC World Service, questioned 27,000 people in a total of 26 different countries including the likely suspects of Finland (which has already decreed Internet access a human right for its citizens) but also the perhaps less likely residents of Brazil, China, Mexico and South Korea for example.

A total of 87% of the Internet users questioned thought that the Internet should a fundamental right,while 70% of those not yet using the Internet also thought they had the right to access. Overall some 79% agreed that Internet access should be a fundamental right for everyone.

Leading the way in Europe was Turkey where 90% thought this way, while South Korea had the highest percentage of believers with 96% which is perhaps not too surprising as the vast majority of South Koreans already have high-speed Internet access.

Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), told BBC News that “we have entered the knowledge society and everyone must have access to participate”.

I have been a professional Internet access evangelist for the best part of twenty years now, and have to say that I’m pleased to see organisations such as the ITU pressing the right to access issue. Like many others, I recall all those stories (and even wrote a good many of them myself) warning about the dangers of a digital divide. The introduction of broadband has, for a large part, helped to bridge this divide at home but the same cannot yet be said of many countries. Indeed, there is still an argument that the people who might benefit most in terms of cultural, educational and vocational exposure to the Web are the ones with least access to it in the UK - namely that section of our society which remains culturally, educationally and vocationally disadvantaged through poverty.

Has the BBC poll got it about right? What do you think, should Internet access for all be a basic human right?

The trouble with putting a fair usage cap on unlimited broadband accounts is, quite simply, that they are unfair. If those accounts were advertised as being ‘actually really rather limited broadband, dontcha know old chap’ then maybe I would be happier with the notion of traffic management policies. If traffic management policies were explained in real world detail to the consumer at the point of sale, before they became just another unhappy mug punter, I’d be happier still.

Not that I think that someone doing an online equivalent of the fat bloke in the all you can eat joint should pay the same as the healthy eater, that would just be unfair on the majority. However. I think that the virtual fat bloke should be able to stuff twenty burgers and fries an hour in his face if that’s what the sign on the door says he can do, without having a waiter watching his every mouthful waiting to pounce with the smallprint on the back of the menu in hand after burger number three.

Replace burger with BBC iPlayer or Spotify and all of a sudden you realise that there are more potential ‘fat blokes’ than you might imagine. Broadbandchoices recently undertook a survey of some 1400 broadband users and discovered a completely unsurprising fact: many people don’t have a clue when it comes to what fair usage actually is, what data caps their ISP imposes or even how much they themselves download in an average month.

Michael Phillips, product director at Broadbandchoices, reckons “the rules governing fair usage policies and download limits need to be taken out of the small print and made clear and easy for everybody to understand. Whilst we do urge broadband users to take responsibility for their downloading habits and find out what the rules are, ISPs also need to do more to raise awareness of this issue”.

So a press release lands on my virtual desk this morning, informing me that I have ’so much freedom’ in my pocket and extolling the virtues of sharing the mobile 3G Internet. There is just one thing wrong with this enthusiastic release for a 3G router so I can share my mobile broadband connection around between friends, family and colleagues - and that’s the real world.

“The new Wireless Mobile Router 300N X2 enables the user to easily share wireless mobile 3G internet at any location such as a hotel, conference room, café or camping site” the email from the PR begins, and the release itself continues with such classic lines as “ideal for mobile users, who want to share mobile 3G internet with multiple users at any location”.

I particularly liked the optimism shown by Sitecom, whose product this is bigging up, when talking in terms of sharing ones “3G internet subscription with colleagues in a conference room or on a business trip, with fellow students at school or with family on the camping site”.

Have these people never actually bought a mobile phone, or indeed a 3G mobile broadband access dongle and used it for Internet related stuff? Have they never looked at the terms of the contract? Or do they live in some fantasy world where the words ‘usage cap’ and ‘monthly data limits’ have not been invented perhaps? Accessing the Internet courtesy of your mobile device is great, but exceed the monthly limit and you’ll find yourself either dumped into the world of no access (or at least no vaguely usable access) or the world of the ‘now the network provider can charge you at the truly exorbitant per Mb rate’ which is even worse.

I am fortunate in that pretty much everywhere I go my 3G connection is rubbish, meaning that I can stay within my monthly data cap. That said, when armed with a netbook and a 3G dongle in an area of decent reception and given a day with nothing better to do I am like most nerds in that I can do some serious damage to it by way of streaming video and some monster downloading sessions or perhaps a bit of chatting via Skype even.

Look, I am willing to admit that this mobile router looks impressive on paper: “two Internal High Performance Antennas to strengthen the range of the wireless network” which “reduce dead spots and guarantee expanded coverage at any location” and comes complete with 802.11n and WPA2 support via a one-button setup system.

But, and it’s a huge J-Lo booty sized but, why would anyone in their right mind want to share their 3G Internet access with anyone? Seriously, if you are on a camping trip with me bring your own Internet enabled mobile device. Honestly, if we are at a conference and your mobile phone won;t connect to the Internet well tough, should have bought a better mobile phone. And as for fellow students at school, gee whizz, if ever there’s a case for a stupid argument in a press release getting some kind of award then that has to be it.

Here’s the bottom line: buy your own 3G dongle, buy your own 3G mobile phone, use a WiFi hotspot.

So, to conclude, nice looking bit of kit which falls squarely into the for use by millionaires, tech philanthropists and idiots only.

Usually the kind of crystal ball rubbing industry predictions that start arriving at this time of year are fairly upbeat affairs. Not so when it comes to the batch announced at the telecoms and media Industry Outlook event in London which, to be honest, were pretty depressing on the whole.

Heck, you know it’s not going to be a fun ride when the press release includes in the strap line “2010: a year of slow recovery” and mentions “cost control” in the same breath.

The organisers of the annual Industry Outlook event, Informa Telecom & Media, and specifically the Chief Research Officer Mark Newman who, speaking at the event, insisted that it had “selected the most compelling and critical predictions from across all our research areas”. Mark if these are the most compelling then I recommend anyone working in these sectors put up the barricades, make sure they have enough tins of baked beans to last a year, and take 2010 off.

If you are feeling just a little too happy for a freezing cold, grey and dismally wet Sunday lunchtime, read on and prepare to be brought back down to a suitably depressing level.

Let’s start with: Mobile LTE commercial launches will slip to 2013/2014 but LTE’s role as a provider of rural broadband connectivity will gain momentum. Apparently, 2010 will be a “year of further LTE trials” but “progress towards commercial services is likely to be slow”.

Or how about: Operator app stores will struggle to compete with handset-manufacturer initiatives. Informa predicts that operators will be “unable in most cases to compete with Apple and other vendors in global reach, brand coolness and agility”.

This one is a bundle of joy as well: Mobile operators will make small steps towards a de facto functional separation in order to position themselves to address the demand for 3rd party connected devices and applications. The use of the words ’small steps’ in a prediction is always a giveaway that things are not good, as they are often used in place of phrases such as ‘going down the pan’ or ‘missing the boat’ in my experience. Informa says that unless operators “give full autonomy to wholesale units, we believe they will be too slow to succeed in shifting internal mindsets”.

I also liked: Fixed broadband operators will experiment with new business models in a bid to end the “arms race” of increasing speeds and declining prices. As Informa notes, operators have to address the need to grow revenues in saturated markets, pointing out that a major effect of declining prices and increasing bandwidth has been “the emergence of mass markets for the consumption of on-line video and music, which other players are now better placed to profit from”.

There was some good news in the predictions though, such as the continued importance of widgets in harnessing the power of the mobile web, open Internet apps being embraced by IPTV operators and an extension of coverage and reduction of costs through network sharing and outsourcing being on the cards.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and cheer myself up by reading some Kafka while listening to Radiohead…

Is the news that some 7.5 million users of broadband in the UK are disappointed with the service provided by their ISP surprising? Yes, to be fair I thought more people would be right royally cheesed off, a lot more in fact.

The Broadbandchoices of more than 4000 users revealed that 47.3% felt the ISP they contracted with had simply not lived up to the promises made for the service they used. Working on the latest estimates of 63% of the 25,751,000 households in the UK which have broadband access gives us 16,223,130 households and 47.3% of that is 7,673,540. Perhaps the most surprising figure here is that this leaves 8,549,590 households which are, by implication, quite happy with their broadband service thank you very much. All I can say is that either they commute to South Korea or Japan and therefore have access to some truly fast broadband or, more realistically, their expectations are set far too low in the first place.

Look, I happen to be with one of the true good guys of the ISP business (Zen, take a bow, you deserve the blatant plug) and while I cannot, like 34% of folk in that survey, complain about the reliability of the service my ISP provides I can sure as hell can join the 30% who are disappointed with the speed of connection. Sure, my rural working retreat has seen connectivity improved beyond recognition over the last few years. No longer am I stuck on the broadband hard shoulder where my download speed was slower than most people’s upload rate, and I am grateful that I can average anything between 3Mbps and 5Mbps on a good day, with a following wind and all fingers crossed. Grateful, but not satisfied. I want more, a lot more. I don’t even just want a 20Mbps connection, I want 60Mbps as a stop-gap until something really fast comes along - and I want it yesterday.

I admit, I’m not sure what I would actually do with it. Indeed, most of the things that superfast broadband promises to deliver I have already. Movies I get via my Sky HD box or LoveFilm or the big shelf of Blu-ray discs over by the telly. Television programmes I get, funnily enough, on the television set which is quite good at the kind of thing. I avoid video-conferencing as much as possible and have done for years, so I don’t want anything that makes the experience easier or better as it reduces the excuses not to talk to people. Occasionally I do need to squirt a big file around, and it would be nice to speed that process up a tad but still not exactly a life changing moment dontcha know.

Yet I still want faster broadband and I’m still disappointed I do not yet have it.

Michael Phillips, product director at Broadbandchoices does not think I am alone, commenting “the main reason for dissatisfaction is overwhelmingly because of broadband speed, demonstrating that ISPs are still falling short when it comes to meeting their customer’s expectations after advertising unattainable headline speeds in the media.”

In the grip of a recession, businesses are being forced to cut costs. No surprises there then. The results of a new survey have landed in my mailbox, and they reveal that when it comes to the IT sector the first area where those costs get cut is in the hardware spend. Again, hardly surprising as for most of us, most of the time, hardware upgrades can be filed under desirable rather essential. This particular survey targeted SMEs and asked what areas they would cut and in what order, if the recession forced their hand. Hardware was top of the list on 62 percent, followed by 35 percent who said they would cut their investment in IT support and then software licensing on 28 percent. Because the Internet is “a crucial tool in helping them through the recession” only 8 percent considered cutting back on their Internet access compared to 9 percent who were prepared to reduce their back-up and redundancy services.

So, the Internet will not be a victim of the recession then. No surprise there either. However, the least surprising fact comes when it is revealed that the company who undertook this survey was a business Internet Service Provider.

Chris Stening, Easynet Connect managing director, reckons that the findings “reflect the broader trend of IT moving from a software/hardware-based model to increasingly being delivered as a service. As a result, businesses are placing less value on their physical IT assets, and more value on IT services such as the internet and SaaS.”

Davey Winder, cynical journalist, adds “what next, an email provider reporting that the recession will not impact upon communication, or Apple reassuring us that people still want to listen to music when times get tough?” It’s Easter, must be a slow news week…

Virgin Media, together with Nortel and Juniper Networks, has successfully conducted a North-South 40G trial over a live commercial network covering 217 miles of the current 10G network infrastructure. As far as I am aware this is the first time such a trial has been attempted in the UK, certainly the first to be successful or I am pretty damn sure the PR companies would have been shouting about it given the competition in the domestic broadband market right now.

It all took place, so I am reliably informed, late in April and involved carrying live 40Gbps wavelength traffic across that 350km optical network span using Nortel core optical kit and Juniper Networks T-series core routers with 40Gbps interfaces. By deploying 40Gbps technology in this way, Virgin was able to increase the performance of both IP/MPLS and optical networks as well as, obviously, the overall capacity. Perhaps most importantly, however, it showed that Virgin Media is up providing a dynamic 40G wavelength service over the entire length of its Nortel supplied Common Photonic Layer: that’s 2500km nationwide to be precise.

The April trial itself happened between the Manchester and London PoPs where the Juniper Networks high-performance T-series core routers are located. It is the first time that 40Gbps transport has happened over a commercial network carrying live traffic over the 40G wavelengths in the UK without any regeneration, external dispersion compensation or costly Raman amplification by using the Nortel 40G Adaptive Optical Engine WDM transponder technology. This allows those 40Gbps wavelengths to be deployed “immediately” and in conjunction with the fact that the existing Juniper T-series router cores can be upgraded to 40G ports means that, hopefully, more effective deployments of next generation services can be achieved for a relatively low incremental investment.

“Our aim for this trial was to ensure we continue to meet the growing capacity needs of the high-speed services we deliver and provide a quality experience for Virgin Media customers,” said Daniel Hennessy, director of Technical Architecture, Virgin Media. “Our strategic suppliers have demonstrated very clearly how existing network assets can be scaled to meet the growth in demand associated with evolving customer behavior and step changes in the products provided as part of our high-speed broadband proposition. Our optical network will provide a solid foundation for growth as it takes advantage of technology designed to avoid electrical regeneration and where possible reduce the incremental cost of scaling transport capacity.”

Which just leaves me to ask the question: so when will a Virgin Media 50Mb service be available in my South Yorkshire village? Actually, when will any Virgin Media cable be available in my village? Never, oh, I see. Still, the thought was nice while it lasted…