Twenty years to build a railway line.....

[Axe_meister]

Meant to respond to this earlier (and getting increasingly off-topic) - what makes you say that the reason data centres are off-shore is the internet connectivity in this country? Regardless of the bandwidth provided in the hosting country, if the data is required in the UK, we're still using our backbone to utilise it.

In my (frankly, fairly extensive) experience, when DCs are located off-shore, it's for geographical resilience (i.e. redundant DCs somewhere in the Americas, Europe and the Far East) or simply because their provider hosts their DC in a different country. Purely UK-based companies seem to have their DCs in this country.

The current bandwidth is not the reason we are offshoring, but having a very fast and reliable backbone within the country could be one reason to get the DCs on shore, especially if the average end user has much faster links and higher bandwidth requirements.
i.e. at the moment average ISP speeds are still pretty shit, so Joe Blow does not exploit the internet to its full potential, i.e. using movie on demand services, etc. Now if you upped the average end user speed and increased the UK backbone bandwidth, then offshore DCs would no longer be that viable due to bandwidth/latency restrictions to offshore DCs.

We have recently stood up a Cloud Service in our Norther Datacentre that has actually worked out cheaper than using our previous offshore Cloud offering. Factors being People Costs (fewer but more highly trained support staff), believe it or not Land costs, and inftrastructure costs (better discounts with better 24x7 support offerings).

But to get back on Toppic. Due to shit speeds to the home, I still have to travel regularly from London to Manchester to get work done on the local network and for meetings where video conferencing would prevent any travel.

However do I use the train? No. Why? Cost.
Average Ticket price, London to Manchester, leaving at 7am is about £150 fixed return (£200 open return).
Car cost. Roughly £70 in fuel on which I can make a little bit of profit on expenses.
Recently I had to get a short notice ticket open both ways. Cost £390.
I ended up hiring a car for £50+£70 in fuel.
For £390 I could have hired a taxi for the day!!!!!!

[evilmags]

Unless you have to the train is pointless. I's cheaper to fly to Edinburgh from London City half the time than take the train and a lot cheaper getting a budget flight from Gatwick or Stanstead.

[frankus]

I's cheaper

standard, innit.

[erictheweary]

Twenty years????? Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha................ some sort of joke surely????

(China plans to start and complete a 10,000-mile network by 2020)

My brother in law is doing that. Well, bits of it. 50+ engineer in railways struggling to find a job here has moved to China to stay in a hotel, be paid lots of money and help build railways.

Either that its a massive lie designed to get him out of his turn at taking my mother in law to Tesco.