luckily I live right next to the exchange so i probably get the best speed in the whole of the town.
It reaches 16mb later in the evening and usually 6-8mb during the day, all through a phoneline.
There's talk that virgn are laying fiber here in 2015.
My mate has 100mb fiber internet and its rapid to say the least.
In Hartlepool, it seems BT fiber optic are using virgins infrastructure - underground conduit and possibly their cable aswell.
I must say, i've been with a few adsl companies while living here, and virgin is by far the best - always upgrading and increasing speeds free of charge (i took my contract out on a 8mb line)
Its time this country changed, we are soooooooo behind the times on most things.
Look at DAB for example. The country doesn't have that much of the spectrum free to run it at a quality we all want to hear. The only other alternative is DAB+ which is doubly efficient due to the codecs the stations use over in Europe.
Despite being the leaders in sound quality (in my opinion), the BBC still are with the rest of the countries stations - using MPEG2 which by today's standards is out dated. DAB+ wont work with MPEG2 and therefore a massive swap out of hardware and software is needed to get this country changed over to it, thus allowing double the DAB stations whilst maintaining its current bitrate/quality. The BBC have the upper hand as such with them having their own nationwide multiplex. They can chop and change bitrates of stations in order to fit others on their network.
The other issue is the transmitters themselves, which tend to be lower power than fm, as care must be take not to have two multiplexes with different stations on crossing over each other.
If you have a DAB radio in your car, switch between the same station but using DAB and FM and then hear the difference. FM allows more of a bitrate, but because DAB doesn't, it often sounds horribly compressed, with lack of depth.
I can't see them ever switching FM off, as its a huge issue. Mainly as some car manufacturers categorically refuse to install DAB radios into their cars and so where does it leave people then? Even people now with relatively new cars are likely to keep them for some time, so if in 5 years, fm was switched off, they would be knackered for a signal.
The digital switchover was supposed to happen in 2007 wasn't it? finally 5 years later we are there but not without problems and missing channels (probably down to multiplex bandwidth)
Bottom line is that this country is behind the times.
Look at this row over the 4G stuff. Quite simply, it wont work, again because there is a fixed spectrum for mobiles and 4G. When every man and his dog logs on with their ipads etc, streaming videos off youtube, then the network grinds to a halt, just like 3g does at the moment. I guess the ratio of increase in network speed, compared to more people using it and them using it for bigger files etc, then really we are no better off having 4G over 3G...
Dan