UK Online offers 22Mb broadband - IT Week

UK Online offers 22Mb broadband - IT Week

Oddly ADSL2+ seems to be going through a reverse hype process and peopel are saying it's not going to deliver high speeds to most people. That may be partially true, but in urban areas where people are within 1.5Km of the exchange they should get 20Mb/s+ speeds which is enough for HDTV etc.

Most poeple do seem to be ignoring QoS though, as having 20Mb/s downstream and 1.3Mb/s upstream is still useless for VoIP unless some of that bandwidth can be guaranteed so the voice traffic doesn't get mixed in with everything else. Using traditional codecs and then packetising them uses more bandwidth than over traditional telephony links. VoIP bandwidth can be squeezed to much lower levels, but then the calls are not what's called toll-grade.

Broadband providers moving into VoIP are going to need to look long and hard how they actually implement services such that they are competetive (in terms of call quality) with existing analogue lines.