In 1998, I worked for a company involved with cable companies in Poland. As part of my role at the time, I had to work with our IT teams there and in one key respect we had a major problem. The main headquarters in an University of Warsaw co located building was connected to the outside world using a set of low bandwidth leased lines. I say low bandwidth now but back then we were talking high speed, greater than 64Kbps links. This was fine within the country, and allowed email and Internet access to a wide variety of sites but there was one major problem. For any sites outside of Warsaw or Poland (which was most of the sites anyone wanted), the actual data transfer speed peaked at 2.3kbps. Yes, that is a decimal point in there. This was for a major company, a company located in a good place in Warsaw. For the senior management at home in the suburbs of Warsaw or even outside of the city, the Internet connectivity local loop was dial up (as it mainly was in the UK back then), but then we were still talking about lower than 2kbps data transfers at best. For many of the management, they found that they could not get anything due to the quality of the phone lines and even that they had to wait 18 months for the phone line to be installed into their apartment.
In the UK, I was enjoying full line speed 128kbps to 256kbps leased circuits for the main business location (which was increased to 2Mbps by 2000) and at home we had ISDN2 services giving me 128kbps service to my home. Cable connections were giving 256/512kbps services and ADSL was in trial. The comparison between the two countries was stark.
Now fast forward 10 years and the roles are reversed. In the UK we have up to 8Mbps services over ADSL and for those lucky few, we have between 20 and 50Mbps on cable and ADSL2+ services for the home. Many business make use of the lower contention ADSL services with the same speeds. Poland however has just launched 120Mbps services. Yes you see it right, 120Mbps. And more importantly, that speed is available against International sites.
This is an important message to Digital Britain and the UK government… up your game unless you want us to be left behind.
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