[wrboyce]

Mine is, and I live in the UK also. I'm not sure what joke you're making. Sure, we may not have the best bandwidth (although at my previous house I had 250MBit), but supporting IPv6 (etc) has nothing to do with being in the UK. Find a decent ISP, I recommend Zen (or if you can afford them, AA).

[tluyben2]

Depends where you live. In Storrington the internet is rubbish and no phone signal. This is 2017 UK. Driving to London from that region you lose mobile signal at least 5 times completely.

People act so entitled when they live in cities; I happen not to like cities which makes me a minority, but there are plenty of wealthy business people crying every day about their connection south of London (and probably in more places; most places around Exeter aren't great either).

[lucaspiller]

My parents live in a Dorset village and have the same issues. I'm on Three and even in the nearest towns (Dorchester, pop. 20k and Weymouth, pop. 50k) there is usually no or a very weak signal. They finally rolled out BT Infinity last year, so at least that's something.

I live in Lithuania now and it really shocks me how bad the UK is for these things. Here I have 600/600 FTTH for €20/month and LTE is basically universal, even in remote parts of the country.

[DaiPlusPlus]

It's cheap in Lithuania and other countries because they were was no significant prior investment in telecoms infrastructure, and the costs of deployment are generally lower too (cheaper labour, easier planning-permission) - so when it comes to deploying Internet access to a previously disconnected community it only makes sense to roll-out the bleeding-edge technology (e.g. FTTH).

Whereas in the UK, BT was/is obsessed with squeezing every last drop of bandwidth from POTS connections - because the cost of upgrading everyone's last-mile connections from copper (or even aluminium in some cases) to fibre is very cost-prohibitive: look at the sheer cost the cablecos shouldered during the mass roll-out of coax in the early-1990s (and even then, it was only to boxes in the street, not houses) - I understand their near-bankruptcy from this move lead to them all coming together under NTL and Telewest, and then Virgin Media.

(The only thing that is inexplicable is how even modern, brand-new housing developments still have unshielded copper last-mile connections instead of FTTH: they don't even lay conduits to make it easier for possible future FTTH... idiocy)

Give the UK a few more years and there should be a mandate from above requiring FTTH and we'll see progress: maybe even 10Gig FTTH as standard, then the tables will turn and people in Lithuania will be stuck with their 1Gbps service until their next round of major infrastructure investment, potentially decades away.

(I'm aware that Fibre is generally more future-proof than copper, and a high-quality fibre line that handles 1Gbps today can easily handle 10Gbps, and potentially 40Gbps or even 100Gbps in the future - so my entire argument may be moot)

[bazzargh]

BT was/is obsessed with squeezing every last drop of bandwidth from POTS connections ... that wasn't what they wanted to do at all.

BT were preparing to do FTTH when I joined them in 1994 (I left in 2001). This was as you say going to be eye-wateringly expensive because BT have a universal provision requirement - they couldn't upgrade the network in the cities and not do it in the countryside. The idea was to pay for this by providing television services, but OfTel (now OfCom) said this would be unfair competition with the cable providers - who were cherry picking cities to make rollout cheaper. They would also have been in competition with Sky, which meant the Murdoch press lobbying against BT (among others; the media market is always a tangle of interests)

Additionally, local-loop unbundling (ie ADSL) was being proposed; BT were required to allow access to the last-mile network from in-exchange equipment, and do this at line rental prices that undercut themselves, in order to break their monopoly. OfTel were very likely to make the same requirement for FTTH/FTTC.

Of course, you pays your money you makes your choice - if BT had been allowed to go ahead with their TV services back then, we might've had FTTH way sooner, but BT probably still would have had a monopoly.

Source: I met the engineers doing FTTH on my first visit to Ipswich, I was part of the team working on the local-loop unbundling ordering systems (where other providers booked engineering time at exchanges) and gave presentations to them at OfTel's offices.

[stordoff]

> Whereas in the UK, BT was/is obsessed with squeezing every last drop of bandwidth from POTS connections - because the cost of upgrading everyone's last-mile connections from copper (or even aluminium in some cases) to fibre is very cost-prohibitive

This is especially frustrating if you have a line that's directly connected to an exchange - you don't even benefit from the FTTC upgrades. Download-wise I can't complain too much - ~20Mbps is fine most of the time (though with family members that tend to leaving streaming video running constantly and various game consoles that auto-update almost constantly it's not ideal), but the sub-1Mbps upload speed is terrible. If I've anything large to upload, it's usually faster to take it to my grandparents' house - connected to the same exchange, but get a order of magnitude greater upload speeds because they are connected via a cabinet.

> (The only thing that is inexplicable is how even modern, brand-new housing developments still have unshielded copper last-mile connections instead of FTTH: they don't even lay conduits to make it easier for possible future FTTH... idiocy)

Reminds me a story my granddad told me from the 60s/70s (not sure exactly when it was). They'd just finished constructing a new road, laid all the conduits under the road for the various utilities, left them plainly labelled (IIRC it was also pre-planned with the companies, but not certain).... then came back two weeks later to find multiple utility companies had dug up parts of the road to lay their own and done a rough job of patching it back up. He was (understandably) less than impressed!

[lucaspiller]

One of the things that really helped is that all passive telecommunications infrastructure is by law "common use" - so things like ducts, pipe work, man holes, poles, etc can be used by any company. This has really helped to level the playing field so a single company doesn't have an unfair monopoly because it was there first (cough BT cough). Where I'm living right now cable and DSL was available (maybe up to 50mbit?), but last year fibre was rolled out by a different company. There are also guidelines on how the infrastructure should be delivered within buildings, so most apartment buildings have duct work going from the basement to the top floor, and space for the providers equipment for future upgrades.

Edit: Looks like Ofcom wants to do something similar: http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2016/02/a-closer-look-a...

[extrapickles]

Where I live in the states, telephone pole access is "common use" but the bureaucracy around actually being able to do so makes it pretty much impossible to add new lines (eg: needing to get a expensive environmental review for adding a wire to a pole that already has wires). Last I checked it took about a dozen permits which took ~12-24 months to get. After you got the permits, you then needed to pay for the inspection and full replacement of any poles found to be old/substandard that you wanted to attach to.

[alicewales]

I can get an unreliable 3Mbps with the wind in the right direction on Openreach, or anything up to 200Mbps on Virgin Media. I'd rather not use VM's heavily filtered IPv6-free zone, but it's not a question of not being able to afford a decent ISP, it's just practicality.

[dx034]

I use Virgin Media and have no problems on any of my devices. Downlink can be a bit slower at busy times, but I guess that's nature of cable internet and uplink is always at the limit. And I really like that they very rarely change IP addresses (have mine for at least 3 months now).

I have the feeling that Sky has slightly better peering (more stable speed to US & Asia during peak hours), but the higher speed on VM is more important here, and ping times are generally very low.

What do you mean with IPv6-free zone? Have ipv6 disabled on my PC (for different reasons) but haven't experienced any connectivity problems on either Computers or other devices (which should be able to use IPv6). IF you mean missing availability of ipv6, I don't think that there are any pages you can't see on ipv4?

[icebraining]

IF you mean missing availability of ipv6, I don't think that there are any pages you can't see on ipv4?

And there won't be while ISPs are lagging in their adoption, meaning nobody can set up a IPv6-only site if they expect to be accessible by everyone.

Also, there's more than sites: an IPv4-only client can't connecting directly (P2P) to other clients behind carrier-grade IPv4 NAT, which leads to more centralized systems (and which give an advantage to large companies over more independent developers and open source groups).

These ISPs are holding everyone back, hence the site submitted in this thread.

[dx034]

I know that NATs were not designed as security features, but I'm not sure if we want to have every device out there to have an IP address without NAT. I think that this would bear massive potential for botnets to take over older machines. And replacing NATs with firewalls would ultimately lead to the same problem with P2P.

It's unfortunate for people with more technical knowledge, but most people don't have that, and there is point protecting them from attacks (even if it's their fault that they didn't update).

[zeristor]

Perhaps only test pages:

http://ipv6.google.com/

[aneeshnl]

I live in India and having 4 Mbps, which is a luxury. Not ready for IPv6. Situation is improving a lot recently though.

[eb0la]

Probably you'll get IPv6 in India sooner than people in Europe.

I've read that the last mile in India is not yet liberalised and that's a huge growth factor in Internet usage.

Once this barrier falls, invesment in network equipment (IPv6-enabled) will follow.

Older, aka "mature" markets like Europe need some kind on incentive to switch to IPv6. Usually goverment subsidies...

[Magnets]

It's good if you have FTTC, it's very patchy if you don't