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NZ Scientists Discover New Broadband Prefix #digitalbritain #fttp

Just when I thought I had my life in order someone from the far side of the planet has dropped a bombshell with the discovery of Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB). What’s more UFB sits between Superfast and Hyperfast.

You will remember it was only last Friday I confidently announced the broadband progression as being Superfast (24Meg+ 1), Hyperfast (1Gig) and then Uberfast (placeholder for an as yet undiscovered number).

Over the weekend a pigeon arrived from Telecom New Zealand telling me that UFB is defined as a fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) broadband service providing downlink speeds of at least 100 Mbps and uplink speeds of at least 50 Mbps.

When I think of it it is blindingly obvious but it is easy with hindsight. It certainly gives food for thought. Is there yet another broadband prefix between UFB and Hyperfast and should the latter take the acronym HFB? Hmm.  I find it difficult to imagine one at 500Megs but maybe 300Megs.  BT is after all talking about the current generation of Infinity products roadmap going to 300Megs. I think we have to assume that there will be a defined prefix for 300Megs and we need to start looking for it now.

These things don’t come cheap though. “Superfast” will have cost a fortune – the combined brains of Ofcom (what do we pay Ed Richards – £400k odd?) and BT locked in a darkened room for a few months.

B4RN’s “Hyperfast” will have been one of those lucky discoveries by a maverick marketing person working on his or her own.

“Uberfast” is my own donation to the world community unless someone can prove prior art in this context in which case  I would of course either gracefully back down or at least claim to have been the one to have popularized the term.

I know for a fact that the NZ government has spent $1.5Bn NZ 2  on “UFB. If something is worth doing it is worth doing right3 . It is not known how much of this was spent on the original words and how much subsequently on the acronym.

Perhaps some of the BDUK £530m (or is it £630m, or £830m??) might usefully be diverted to this challenging and worthwhile task. I would willingly lead a team assembled specifically to crack the problem. This is no job for the inexperienced.

This could be the start of a groundbreaking research project. Who knows where it might lead. There might even be a periodic table of broadband marketing prefixes!!! How cool is that?

Anyway if you are wondering what on earth I’m wittering on about and haven’t clicked on the link in the 3rd paragraph, the New Zealand government has announced it will be spending $1.5Bn to support the rollout of FTTP to 75% of premises in that country over the next ten years.

You heard it first on trefor.net…

1 actually Ofcom’s definition not mine.

2 warning – I’m not totally sure how much this equates to in Euros pounds sterling

3 “worth doing right” is the specifically Anitpodean version of “worth doing well” – a replacement because the latter phrase sounds like “worth doing wheel” if spoken with a NZ accent which of course sounds totally strange. In Canada they say “worth doing, eh?!”

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

9 replies on “NZ Scientists Discover New Broadband Prefix #digitalbritain #fttp”

wow, fttp, futureproof and may start at ultra but move on up to hyper when the time comes. Unlike super which stays that way for infinity.
I agree, if a job is worth doing, its worth doing right, and anything less than fibre to the home is a stop gap solution. Needs must where the devil drives as me gran used ter say, but she was right. Lets get as much right as we can, and like NZ and OZ we can light up our digital economy. The days of darning socks are long gone.

And there was I thinking all along that 100 Meg was simply known as Fast Ethernet.
1 Gig = Gigabit Ethernet
10 Gig = 10 Gig ”

I thought broadband referred to technologies that used RF over copper?

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