Superfast broadband will cost £30 billion in the UK to roll out

A REPORT released today claims installing high speed broadband in every UK home could cost an eye-watering £29 billion.

The figure comes in a study by the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG) - the Government's advisory group on broadband - on the costs of fibre-based next generation broadband in the UK.

One way to reduce costs by about a half would be to miss out the 30 per cent of homes who live in the more remote rural areas.

Superfast broadband will allow speeds of up to 100 Mbps (megabits per second), up to four times faster than current speeds.

Interesting - but I wonder whether there really is an urgent need - would users really notice an awful lot of difference?

The average user probably doesn't download massive files all that often, and online games seem to run as fast as offline most of the time.

The thing to also remember is, the speed of download often depends on the server and how oversubscribed it is.

Slow servers [no finger pointing here for obvious reasons ;)] mean that it doesn't matter if you've got the fastest turbo nutter broadband ever.

I often find a crucial patch or update downloads at snails pace because of popularity making the server slow to a crawl.