A slow route to faster broadband

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The speed of broadband in the UK has been rising in recent years - a growing elite can now browse the net at home at speeds of up to 100Mbps (megabits per second).

Among the first to try such high speeds are tenants in The Wembley City development in London built by Quintain Estates.

Spencer Kelly tests the 100Mbps connection

Called Velocity 1 the high-speed broadband uses fibre-optic technology to deliver speeds of 8, 16 or 32 Mbps to the new homes.

Residents can boost their access up to 100Mbps for 30 minute periods by paying £1.

Limitations

James Saunders, managing director of commercial ventures at Quintain, said it had good reasons for not offering the top line speed to homes.

"The market's not really geared up yet for 100 Mbps in a residential context," he said. "There are a lot of servers that are tuned to the market norm of 4 to 8 Mbps."

Also, he said, there were limitations to the wider broadband infrastructure that are beyond the control of net providers that could dent expectations of what that faster speed could deliver.

"What we can't control is the speed that other people can serve content that you can download from their servers," he said.

Mr Saunders expected next-generation internet would become more widespread as the UK's infrastructure improved.

An attempt to use up the 100Mbps connection speed

Old copper

Net speeds depend not only on how much someone pays an internet provider, but also on what type of wire the data travels on close to the home, and the distance of that home from the telephone exchange.

The further the data has to travel, the more interference it encounters, and the slower it becomes at the other end.

Domestic net use too has evolved from browsing and sending e-mails to the downloading and streaming of music and video content.

The decades-old copper wires currently in use across the UK were originally designed only to carry voice, but have been adapted to support computer data too.

By contrast fibre-optic cables can carry more data, and even deliver on demand TV and telephone down the same cable.

Faster fibre networks are spreading slowly because of the cost of digging up roads to lay the new cables. Some nations shouldered that cost a while ago and now some, such as Japan, have more people connected via fibre than copper.

"Not viable"

The upcoming Digital Britain report is expected to outline plans to give the UK population universal broadband access at the modest speed of 2Mbps by 2012.

In South Korea, the government is aiming for speeds of 1Gbps by 2012, up from the current average speed of 15Mbps.

It is unlikely that that the UK will ever match that because the copper network limits UK users to a theoretical maximum of 8 Mbps. Faster fibre connections of 50Mbps have only recently become available in large towns and cities.

Net users today play games, stream and download films and music

Ian Fogg, from Forrester Research, said the advantage of super-fast net is that two people can be using one connection "without having any impact" on each other.

"A lot of the benefit of these very high speed services is… more than one laptop on wi-fi each with 30 or 40 megabits, rather than one laptop user on wi-fi with 100 megabits," he said.

British Telecoms (BT), the UK's largest net access provider, said it was "not economically viable" to take fibre all the way into homes.

Current plans mean that fibre will go as far as the cabinet at the end of the street and copper wires will connect to homes.

"It costs numerous times more to do fibre-to-the-home than it does fibre-to-the-cabinet, but you can only charge a small increment for the higher speeds," said Olivia Garfield from BT.

"So fundamentally if it costs five or six times more, and you can only charge 10% or 20% more the maths just doesn't make sense," she said.

Ms Garfield added that if take-up increases "dramatically" in the future and government assistance is made available, plans could change.

With HD television shows and films already available to download using Xbox, PS3, iTunes, amongst others, internet services are likely to become increasingly bandwidth hungry.