We’ve had access to 50 Mbps in the UK for some time now; it’s about the fastest line you’ll be able to find outside of making special arrangements or having your own community network set up. It’s not exactly widely available though, only certain areas can pick up a 50 Mbps from Virgin even if their area is connected by the company at all; the Virgin Network currently only handles about half the country.

However, the company is now bringing the service to rural Wales for the first time ever. Rather than digging up the ground and placing fibre optic cable, Virgin is instead providing citizens access to the line by using the existing infrastructure of electricity poles. Currently only a single village, Crumlin, will be enjoying the service, which can pick up both 50 Mbps services as well as the Virgin Media cable TV service.

The trial is due to begin next month and will run for the rest of the year unless problems arise.

Executive Director of Broadband at Virgin Media, Jon James commented:

“We’re already bringing broadband speeds of up to 50Mb and, soon 100Mb, to over half of all UK homes and are pushing the boundaries to ensure that homes right across the UK benefit from ultra fast broadband.

Working in partnership with companies like Surf Telecoms, we can more rapidly and efficiently expand the reach of fibre optic networks to towns, villages and communities right across the UK.”

Putting the cables overhead has it’s own problems such as making the service much more susceptible to bad weather, but it does save the massive cost of having to dig up land to plant the cables, which can cost millions of pounds and take a very long time to complete, which is why cable is never available in rural areas, who usually have to rely on low speed ADSL connections or internet without phone line services such as mobile broadband.

Earlier last week, the government announced that the long standing target to bring 2 Mbps broadband within reach of everyone in the UK will not be happening in 2012 as had been previously hoped and would be delayed by 3 years. While this isn’t a massive surprise to many, it’s still a hit for the UK broadband community as a whole and has made those affected by the choice upset and disappointed in the lack of funding and commitment from the government. Funnily enough, the 2015 date just happens to coincide with the end of this parliament, too.

More affected by this news than most are those living in rural areas which have been marked as broadband not-spots. Consumer Focus (CF) and the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) have both told the public of their disappointment of the news of the delay.

Broadband Expert at Consumer Focus, Jillian Pitt, said:

“We are, however, disappointed that the time-table to provide a universal 2mbps broadband connection has been pushed back to 2015. Also, the Coalition Agreement itself acknowledged there are areas where the market alone will not reach. We would like to see a clear Government plan on what happens when this is the case. We would like to be reassured the estimated £250 million under-spend from the Digital Switchover budget will be enough to tackle this issue.”

While CLA President William Worsley was even more frustrated by the news:

“The Government needs to recognise that broadband can act as a fundamental driver in propelling the UK out of its current financial situation. This will be put in jeopardy if we have to wait an additional three years before everyone can gain adequate broadband coverage.”

In some cases using internet without phone line services like mobile broadband might be an option, depending on coverage. It seems the only way rural areas are likely to enjoy any sort of coverage in the next five years will be to set up their own community networks or rely on satellite broadband coverage. These are both viable options, but only if you have the support or funding to set them up. There are some schemes available to people living in Wales without broadband to get funding from the government, but in other areas of the UK this unfortunately is not the case.

Normally it’s the everyday net users that are the first to complain about speed problems holding back the way they use the internet, but every now and again a bigger company or organisation will point out problems with the net infrastructure in the UK. Spotify is the latest company to note that their services have to be limited in the country purely because of the average speed of net users and low availability of proper high speed net access.

Spotify is one of the biggest free internet music services ever, and offers literally millions of tracks from popular artists completely free of charge, supported by advertisements. Currently the service sends the music out in a basic quality of 128 kbps with premium users being able to access the music at 320 kbps. With cheap speakers most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between this and CD quality music, but with more expensive set ups a much higher quality would be very desirable.

Spotify’s Vice President of Products, Gustav Soderstrom said:

“This has more to do with the user experience based on current broadband and mobile internet networks. Streaming lossless files would consume very large amounts of bandwidth for people.

It would also make Spotify much more prone to a bad user experience, with problems such as stuttering and the like, which is something that we pride ourselves in not having at all. Higher audio quality with a bad user experience is not an option for us.”

We can see where Spotify is coming from, and it really highlights just how poor Europe actually sees the UK broadband service; nearly as poorly as we do ourselves. However, in this situation it seems like Spotify are being overly cautious. Surely it’s up to the end user of the program to decide if their connection speeds and bandwidth can handle FLAC streaming. After all, even YouTube can stream HD video now.