You could be forgiven believing that the UK has broadband in abundance from all the hype generated by the broadband companies but the picture isn’t quite as rosy as it’s painted – nothing new there then.

Who’s seen BT and Virgin Media advertising squillions of megabytes internet for ONLY peanuts. Well, it seems they’re making monkeys out of the UK public because absolutely nobody is living up to the hype.

I read quite some time ago the Virgin Media were able to provide 1Gigabit internet over their cable network. Where is it now? Just in their office? Anybodies guess.

Mind you, according to OFFCOM, they provide the fastest average broadband download speeds. They also advertise on their website speeds of UP TO 100Mbps but according to uSwitch, there is nowhere in the UK that actually gets this. Strange.  Oh sorry, yes they do; remember the magic two words – UP TO.

In fact, according to uSwitch, there is nowhere in the UK that gets superfast broadband speeds at all. Superfast broadband is classed as having an average download speed of 24Mbps or better. This seems to be in contradiction to claims made by BT in 2009 that they will give superfast broadband to at least 6 UK cities by 2010 and that 40% of the country would have access to superfast broadband by 2012. What went wrong BT? Could it be they got involved with Telefonica? Pass.

Add to this that at least 27% of the UK struggles to achieve 3Mbps. 35% of residents in Norwich are yet to see speeds of 3Mbps. So what is going on in the UK?

In London, 20% of people get speeds lower than 3Mbps.

In a survey 2 years ago, Halesworth in Suffolk was home to the slowest broadband connection at 0.128Kbps. Broadband?!

OK people, it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee. Whilst the UK government are pouring money into the broadband infrastructure to try to give it a bit of a boost, it’s acknowledged in many circles that they will never reach the proposed targets using the existing cable infrastructure.

It is acknowledged across Europe that the targets will never be met by traditional cabled broadband suppliers and that satellite internet is the ONLY answer to the problems experienced by many areas.

Enter the next generation of internet available to just about everyone across Europe, satellite internet. OK, it’s not cheap as chips, but then it doesn’t have that vinegar after taste and it does provide you with more or less what you pay for.

Speeds up to 20Mbps download are available with prices starting as low as €10.95 (£9.99 UK) a month.

So what are you waiting for, contact us today and get yours ordered NOW for prompt installation. Current offers include free equipment. Check here for more information.

Clive Gray (Enterprises) (trading as Clive Gray Computers & Premier Voip Solution) are agents for Europasat (formerly ToowayDirect).

Europasat are Europes largest independent satellite broadband internet service provider (ISP) and are the ONLY ISP that can connect you to any of the 3 next generation satellite networks ANYWHERE in Europe.

Europasat are part of the Satellite Solutions Worldwide family.

In addition to supplying satellite internet, we can also offer voip telephone systems that will work over satellite internet, many companies can't.

All registered brand names and trade marks acknowledged.

Just a quick update to let you know that in just two bitcoin accounts, the cryptolocker hooligans have received more than 100,000 bitcoins worth more than $20,000,000 since September of this year.

Will you be their next victim!

It has just been announced that the people behind the cryptolocker malware infection have increased the ransom fee from 2 Bitcoins to 10 Bitcoins due to the success of their campaign and the number of people and organisations that didn't have a backup policy in place and had no option but to pay the ransom.

For those who don't know about Bitcoins, they are a digital currency. More about Bitcoins on Wikipedia here.

Whilst it doesn't sound much, the price per Bitcoin is roughly $212 so as you can see, the ransom has gone from just over $400 to just over $2,100. How much is your data worth? Maybe not that much you might think but I'd advise you to think again.

You might not think you have anything worth losing on your PC but wait until it's gone, then you'll realise how much you actually did have so get your stuff backed up off your PC now - before you lose it.

If you've already backed up your data, well done but remember to add all your new documents and photos as you go along so you don't get caught out.

Keep safe everyone.

How many of you out there pay for, and expect 6Mbps internet. Well, in reality, it isn't going to happen any time soon.Internet speed checkers will give you a guide as to what your internet connection is capable of at that given moment in time which is not necessarily what you might be experiencing. Other things that will skew the perception of speed is the use you are putting your internet to. General web browsing traffic has a higher priority than than Peer-to-Peer (Skype, streaming, IPTV, torrents) traffic as does SIP (voip) traffic.

This is why so many people have problems with Skype and watching videos and TV online.

Why does my internet provider do that?

You will find with almost all internet providers, there is a little publicised thing call a fair usage policy. This basically tells you that if you use your internet in such a way that it interferes with other users or causes, or is likely to cause problems with their network, they reserve the right to throttle (put the brakes on) certain forms of internet traffic.

This throttling is generally applied to all peer-to-peer activity as that causes most network disruption. As a rough guide, 1 hour streaming SD TV consumes about 700Mb - that would probably feed a 'normal' user for more than a week.

The reason it causes disruption is that you probably share your 6Mbps connection with up to 49 other people and this is why it's always advertised as 'up to'. If you're hogging all the bandwidth with your IPTV box, torrents or whatever, the remaining 49 people experience slow internet. Additionally, as you get more and more people on your internet connection gobbling up bandwidth with their data hungry IPTV boxes, none of you will get any usable service at all so you all suffer.

The ONLY way to get a true 6Mbps connection (or any other speed for that matter) is to pay for an exclusive connection. Good idea! Not really.

How much would you be prepared to pay for that exclusive connection? Unless you're prepared to pay for the other 49 users they would normally connect to your point, it'll never happen.

Basically, you need to pay 50 times your current payment for an exclusive internet connection.

The speed issue doesn't stop there though. because that is only the speed between you and your internet provider. You also have a million and one other internet providers out there all supplying millions of people with internet.

If everyone and their grandmothers are all online together, they internet would grind to a halt and nobody would get anything, regardless of what speed their connection is capable of.

Look at it this way, if everybody drove onto the M1, the road would be blocked and nobody would be moving. The Ferrari and the Micra would all be traveling at the same pace. Just like your 1Mbps and your 20Mbps internet would.

Then you have the issue of the speed of the website you're visiting. Busy websites are more likely to go slower as their servers may not be able to cope with the volume of traffic, or they may have gone over their data limits. Yes, someone somewhere has to pay for all the data you use.

So next time you're suffering with slow internet, you can probably blame the TV/Skype/torrent streamers out there. It's not always the fault of your internet provider but do report it to them.

General rule of thumb is domestic internet has a contention ratio of 50:1 (50 people share 1 connection) and professional grade internet has a contention ratio of 25:1 or less, hence it costs more. You pays you money and makes your choice.