1) Seriously, yes.
2) He didn't mention YouTube.

The thing abou Youtube is that you start a video uploading, then you go do something else. With faster upload, you just go do something else for less time. Having faster upload hasn't enabled you to do anything else. Having faster download has enabled Youtube to exist, as it allows people to stream rather than download and watch.

The only criticism I'd have with that suggestion is:

Many other countries have fast, symmetric connections. They don't do any of that kind of stuff - if anything, the vast majority of their additional upload speed is *only* used for P2P.

Everybody keeps mentioning video streaming, as though this is a new thing - we've been able to do video streaming for years, but we don't, and bandwidth has never been the problem.

My "crack" is obviously so good that it thinks "video conferencing" and "internet enabled security camera" are clutching at straws, when all you're really after is faster BitTorrent.

Also, when you say "hanging around three years for three years to finish" - that's a batch operation. You set it going and you have to wait for it to finish. Faster upload means you just wait less, whereas with faster download, you really can "do more stuff".

The simple answer is: Download is for clients, Upload is for servers. Unless you've got a good reason you want residential properties to suddenly be servers, making things a *lot* more difficult on the security and management front, I'd keep it that way.

We don't have HD video conferencing because very few want it. My mobile network has done video conferencing for more than 5 years - still don't use it.

The limiting factor isn't bandwidth, it's apathy.

Hosting your own server is not a common thing, and nor should it be. Video conferencing is not a common thing, and 50 years of video conference availability still hasn't taken it from the gimmick niche.

Whether you upload at 1Mbit or 10Mbit, it's still a batch process. That's only a case of speed, not enabling access.

For instance, with faster download, you can do video streaming, you can support more users, you can play more bandwidth intensive games.

Faster upload speed doesn't give you any of that, it just makes things a bit faster to upload - making a 5 minute upload into a 30 second upload still means you have to wait. It doesn't "enable" anything.

I'd hazard a guess and say less than 1% of internet users do any of those things.

Why does that make it worse? Why do people need symmetric connections? As long as the upload speed is sufficient to ack every TCP packet that comes in on the downstream, why on earth do you need upload speed?

If you say BitTorrent, you automatically lose.

6,500m of cable is £48,750?

I'm hoping that includes the laying fee, otherwise they really ought to stop laying Monster Cable for phone lines.

Virgin Media have a 22.2% market share of internet connections. BT have 27%.

It's a lot bigger than 2% of the nation, though I agree it's a long way from ubiquitous.

Call connection charges are going up to 10.9p, and the daytime rate is going up to quite a large amount too. Pretty much cements the idea that for personal calls you should use a mobile phone, and for business you should use VoIP.

That is, until the mobile networks realise what is happening and get greedy, lowering the data caps on all the price plans to something silly like 1GB. Oh wait, already happened!

You mean DACS, right? I believe BT are in no way obligated to remove them as you correctly surmise, but I don't think they're fitted any more. Theoretically, if you cancelled your service, then re-ordered, they'd fit a new cable - and to supply a premises with a new service there is a cap to the charges they can assign.

Still expensive, though, I agree.

So, rather than laying fiber, which is relatively cheap to buy/install and incredibly cheap to operate, you want to replace all the phone lines with one of the most expensive metals around (copper) just so that you say "fiber is a waste".

The benefits of fiber are huge - you can use passive optical splitters that use no power and require almost no land, and it'll serve 30-300 end points using GPON. Over this single fiber, you can serve on-demand TV, internet, phone and security alerting, with efficient use of multicasting for the live TV and unicast for everything else. What's more, you don't have to supply voltage down the cable, wasting lots of energy to the environment, it doesn't corrode or degrade (to a large extent) and at the head-end you can fit literally tens of thousands of endpoints into a cable no fatter than a single twisted pair connection.

The benefits of copper are: You don't need to power it at the home, so if the power goes out and your battery backup unit has failed, you can still make an emergency call. That, and the line is already present.

Pretty simple choice, really. If the UK Government were really committed to investing in the future of broadband in the UK, they'd lay fiber to every street cabinet *now* and prepare to get the local councils digging up the capillary roads to lay a fiber alongside Virgin Media's cable, starting within 5 years for eventual turn-on by 2020.

The biggest bottleneck in broadband speeds in the UK is the copper. It's nothing to do with the low upload speeds, which are only present because it makes a lot more sense to divide the spectrum on the line weighted to the download speed rather than the upload, which is very rarely saturated - unlike the download.

The second bottleneck is that when the signal terminates at the exchange, it's backhauled over to an LNC in London inside a PPP/L2TP header and (usually ATM) cell-switched, rather than IP(v6 eventually) routed. That would kill the broadband market, however - essentially making broadband a public utility rather than an a private ISP service. Knowing how bad BT run things at the moment (especially when it comes to 21CN etc) that can only be a "bad thing" without clueful ISPs bashing them all the time to fix problems.

Wow, that's arrogant. You're an egotistical self-centered bigot that enjoys bullying others based on stereotypes and name-calling.

I'm happy living in a place where I don't have to worry about being secure in my home; that if someone does threaten me, the worst thing they are likely to have is a short-range weapon like a knife that can't "accidentally" go off with minimal effort, and that in all likelihood they are going to be caught and rehabilitated rather than punished. I like that guns are not the norm in my country, and I think that those that have weaponry are deluding themselves. If confronted, you give them what they want, then alert someone trained to pursue them like the police - rather than risk life and limb confronting them.

In the nicest possible way, I haven't anything else to say to you than "fuck off". You've given me no reason to sympathise with you, you're a nasty person, and I hope you someday see my point of view that we have better things to think of than defence.

By volume, yes, the US gives the most foreign aid. The US has 300 million people - per capita, the US isn't even in the top 10.

I'm not being anti-US-people, I quite like many Americans. I'm saying that the US government (incl. military) are a bunch of thugs who go and fuck things up for the rest of the world, and that Americans are so bombarded with propaganda and enforced patriotism that you excuse yourselves with very weak arguments.

If the US left any of the war-zones with the country in a better state than how they found them, I doubt we'd even be having this conversation. The fact is that the US didn't agree with the USSR (and to be fair, for good reason) but basically just fought "the red menace" on a battleground in a country most Americans couldn't even find on a map then left the country in ruins without helping afterwards. They left the innocent people affected by the conflict to fix the damage by themselves, and those people grew up resentful of the USA. Just look at South America and East Africa - look at Mogadishu!

We have the UN now. It exists to make sure diplomacy happens first. When the UN said that there wasn't a case for war in Iraq, the US just brushed them aside, and invaded it anyway. A great lesson to all of us - I think not.