3UK has announced that it is planning to have 14.4Mbps speeds rolled out across the UK by 2010. Currently it has 3.6Mbps rolled out to 95% of the population, and the intermediate step of 7.2Mbps will come sometime between now and 2010, depending on where you live.
Of course, the thing with these numbers is that they are largely coverage/user dependent – if you don’t got good coverage, or you are in a busy cell, I shouldn’t expect anything like these numbers. In fact, reading some of the comments from 3 Mobile Broadband users, they seem to suggest that the uplink rates (which are usually less than downlink, but should still be respectable) are actually throttled to a very low number- which isn’t really what the messaging of this announcement is trying to convey.
Right now there seems to be a bit of a backlash against any sort of advertised ‘possible speeds’, and also toward the ‘unlimited usage’ policies that always have a caveat of ‘within fair use limits!’ in small print.
Overall, I think there might have to be a paradigm shift soon where Operators focus on quality – both in the sense of network capacity, but also of customer care – rather than the maximum theoretical speeds of a given service
[Via: The Register]