We have a 3.0/0.5 DSL connection which can support 1 high quality or 2 medium to low quality Netflix streams. Web browsing is tolerable when everyone is online, but the second the uplink bandwidth is saturated (0.5Mbit/s) everything else grinds to a halt. I think you'd notice it too if your connection weren't symmetric. That is, your connection was 50/5 or 50/10.
We were on-track to get a 50/50 fiber connection (the service supports up to 1000/1000) - however the ISP hasn't yet started to build the network out to our village - a year later than they said it would be available. In contrast, our neighboring villages all have their service, but there is a risk they will pull out since the build cost is 3x what they forecast (narrow country roads where the only option is to dig up the road, rather than run cable under verges or sidewalks).
FWIW, the build cost is a measly £600,000 - or $929,670, which in my estimate works out at between £600 and £1200 per resident.
I've been around the UK and Ireland so I know what you mean about the roads and the difficulty of running infrastructure around them.
I remember back when we had DSL we could saturate it, even with just some casual youtubing.
Funny thing is, we never asked for or paid for symmetric connections, our phone company just did it one day as part of a system upgrade and sent everybody new routers. And they've done at least one bandwidth upgrade since then.
I grew up pretty rural so I can definitely sympathize with your pain. The first world will arrive soon!
FYI, based on my past experience, for avg urban customer the total acquisition cost for a cable ISP on DOCSIS 2/3.0 was about $750 -- small delta vs your new build cost.
Virgin Media is the only UK-based ISP that uses cable (DOCSIS). All others use VDSL2 where available, ADSL2 or just plain old ADSL (g.DMT) if you're sufficiently rural.
The trouble is that Virgin Media have much cut out for them if they want to match the availability of VDSL in the UK. Therefore, I can imagine they will be targeting large towns on the commuter belt long before they consider more rural villages.
We have a 3.0/0.5 DSL connection which can support 1 high quality or 2 medium to low quality Netflix streams. Web browsing is tolerable when everyone is online, but the second the uplink bandwidth is saturated (0.5Mbit/s) everything else grinds to a halt. I think you'd notice it too if your connection weren't symmetric. That is, your connection was 50/5 or 50/10.
We were on-track to get a 50/50 fiber connection (the service supports up to 1000/1000) - however the ISP hasn't yet started to build the network out to our village - a year later than they said it would be available. In contrast, our neighboring villages all have their service, but there is a risk they will pull out since the build cost is 3x what they forecast (narrow country roads where the only option is to dig up the road, rather than run cable under verges or sidewalks).
FWIW, the build cost is a measly £600,000 - or $929,670, which in my estimate works out at between £600 and £1200 per resident.