Compusential.com

Based just along Regents Canal off Broadway Market, my office is just about 1 mile away from the nearest BT exchange at Hackney Wick, according to BT’s own data.

Not surprisingly, the upload speed for the entire office is just 512 kbps, considering mail, RDP and uploading loads and loads of data.

At times, when we are doing large projects or when a few people work remotely, this can lead to suicidal bottle-necks in the office. We often ask ourselves how the creative digital industry can transfer large amounts of data between clients.

Solution 1: Get a courier to courier a portable hard drive with the latest videos, files etc, preferably on a mono-speed bike.

Solution 2:  Get a dedicated BT 2 mbps line for a whopping 5k/year (don’t fall for the trick of BT salesmen quoting you the lowest price of dedicated lines on the web).

Solution 3: Chain multiple DSL lines together, still only getting us 1 mbps up-stream and 16 mbps down-stream, theoretically.

Back in the days of dial-up, 56 kbps was the max (if you chained 2 lines together, you could get double speed). Now even the British government wants to increase the Internet speed, thus proposing to leverage even more taxes on the BT line rental, which would mean that in order to deliver faster Internet, BT would have to put in more telephone exchanges.

Most of the times though, downstream DSL is faster than upstream DSL anyway, so it’s fine for the trendy people drinking coffee, eating their fancy salad and surfing the web in Cafe La Bouche on Broadway Market (which happens to be my favourite place for Chicken BLT’s – true programmer food).

But for business, it would really make a difference if we had fibre to the house (and because the canal is just across the road, Virgin won’t dig up the road to give us faster broadband).