24 Meg Broadband

What would someone do with all that bandwidth?

and that costs how much?!?!?!

As you've said - who would really want it??

They'll probarbly put a rather stupid cap on bandwith and give a slow upload speed (24mbits could be useful for serving stuff).

BTW "24 meg" doesn't mean 24 megabytes per second, it means 24 megabits per second, which is, err 3 megabytes per second. Advertising thing, give it in mbits, looks bigger and so many users think it's bytes.

This is in fact completely above board, and is something BT have been testing with their employees for several months.

There are however several caveats:

1. The copper wiring from the exchange to your phone socket needs to be pretty much perfect, as even small soldering errors, which do nothing noticable to the telephone, can degrade the signal enough to cause problems.

2. Like ADSL, the signal is degraded with distance from the exchange. 24Mb is theoretically available up to 1km from the exchange.

3. Combining 1 and 2, you need to like pretty much next door to the exchange to get 24Mb. Do you know the location of your telephone exchange?

4. As mentioned, it's likely that the server at the other end will become the bottleneck. I have a peak download speed somewhere in the region of 40Mb, but there are few places outside the university where that is actually noticable.

5. Unless you are downloading large files regularly, can you actually do sufficient things at once to go anywhere near saturating such a fast connection?

T/op 92, BT Broadband offers me and my family no problems at all - its a 2Mb and it works fine and dont worry about the 1Gb - unless you're downloading huge files, its not a problem at all.

Hell yes!!! Downloads of OS Distros, apps, game demos, VoIP, with a liberal dose of online gaming. I could probably saturate a backbone given half a chance!!!

Whilst I'm encouraged by the speeds claimed by Be I am also fully aware of the degradation argument put forward by compsci. My local exchange is getting kitted out next month and I'm thinking of going with Be to test them out and also taste working with ADSL2+ for the first time. I probably live at the outer edge of a 1km radius of the LLU equipment, and very rarely have line problems, but I'm still being pragmatic about it by expecting no more than 16Mbit downstream. You cannot expect such bandwidth over that distance of copper. My calculations are more fag-packet than switch cabinet but I still make that twice what other LLU operators are currently offering - bring it on!

MIIIIAAAAOOOOOWWWW!!!!!

Sadly that is true but I will never understand why though?