The graph on the right shows the longest experiment I’ve ever run (by chance), having been a steady domestic online user since 1973/74. Having personally helped install the UK’s first wireless broadband for multiple schools some six or seven years ago, I was feeling a bit cheesed off that it was taking so long for me to get broadband at home! But things are changing. Check this out…

ADSLguide: ADSL reaches to 10km in Milton Keynes:
“BT Wholesale has announced details of a trial that may well bring 0.5Mbps ADSL services to lines as long as 10km. The new trial is based on research from the Ad Astral Park BT Labs that show ADSL working on lines of 10km length, along with comparisons of ultra long reach services abroad. Initially the trial will be centered on Milton Keynes, due to the fact that around 18% of people in that area are out of reach of the existing services which currently extend to around 6km (more accurately a 60dB signal attenuation). The trial will have 1000 places, and those people in the Milton Keynes 01908 STD code area interested in taking part should visit http://www.bb4mk.org/bttrial to register interest.”

Kudos to Nick Hubbard for championing the bb4mk.org lobby/pressure group that has been working extremely hard and productively, applying ‘creative pressure’ to BT for several years now (i.e. working both in opposition to and constructively with, to the credit of all concerned), and helped to establish MK as THE place for this trial!!

Hey… with a new 10km limit, I might NOT be the LAST person in the entire UK to get broadband, a prospect which I’ve found seriously annoying since I saw the first ADSL demo at BT Martlesham in 1994!!! Heck, averaged out, that’s an improvement of around 50kbps per year… in 1984, I was running a 2400bps dedicated line (as I recall); in 1974, 300bps ; interesting… I just plotted this on a log scale (shown above as “Eisenstadt’s domestic data speed”)…. generally speaking, Moore’s law helps me out by giving me radically better and faster machines (to deal with souped-up compression tricks) that way outperform the meagre ‘raw bandwidth’ improvements over the years… but of course the same law helps the telcos deliver the bandwidth improvements, so as a consumer I ought to subjectively experience a “double win” (better bandwidth, hotter machines). This is more or less true, but is offset by the greed for “more bits per ‘moment of experience’” to consume” (DVD quality movies with 5.1 surround sound, etc). Will reflect on this a bit later….

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