Island Life

Broadband Changes

According to Jersey Telecom around 31% of Jersey homes have a Broadband connection, this compares to a similar number in the UK.

You may have already noticed that the cost of broadband in Jersey has gone down recently. You can now get the standard 512kb line from Jersey Telecom for £17.99 a month, but did you know there are new restrictions in place as well?

OK I guess some of you would have lost me at the first mention of broadband and others at the mention of a 512kb line so lets get the introductions out of the way first.

But what is broadband?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary it doesn’t exist as a word! Who needs the OED, this is a website so we turned to the Urban Dictionary instead and they define broadband, among other things, as “Connection to The Internet, with a data carrying capacity of 512*kbps (kilobits per second), or more”.

That’s a fairly straight forward, simple definition and works for me although the first definition is probably more common “The most efficient way to download porn from the internet”, and could be replaced with “music”, “TV” or “movies”.

In Jersey the main type of broadband connectivity is ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line).

ADSL is a technology for the transmission of digital data over standard copper telephone lines. This allows the high-speed transmission of signals from the telephone network to an individual subscriber, but a slower rate of transmission from the subscriber to the network.

Now the changes

As I’ve already mentioned the cost of broadband is dropping and as a side effect JT are upping the contention ratio from 40:1 to 50:1 (contention ratio is the number of people sharing the same line, so now it will be 50 to one line).

Contention ratio isn’t really much of a problem unless you log on at peak time or live in a built up area, in those cases 50:1 could be quite a problem for some people.

It does however bring Jersey inline with most UK ISPs.

The other big change is the introduction of download caps, they are fairly generous but what they basically mean is you can only download a certain amount in a month.

This doesn’t just apply to mp3s or movies it also includes e-mails, websites, online radio, online TV and more.

Although with the average webpage being around 35kb (one mb is 1024kb) and the cap for 512kb (that’s a potential 512kb of data downloaded a second) set at 20gb I doubt your average user, or even high end users will have much of a problem with this.

20gb would allow you to look around 650 thousand web pages, download about 4000 mp3s or watch Spotlight Channel Islands online about 500 times.

If you do have a problem with the cap Newtel and Localdial aren’t introducing one so you will get the reduced cost without the extra restriction.

Basically in laymans (or non geek) terms it’s the internet on speed. Dial-up (what most people have with a standard modem) is just 56kb a second so even the slowest broadband is 10 times faster than that.

More detail please

Here is a brief overview of the new pricing structure for the three main providers in the island, JT, Newtel and Localdial.

Prices correct at time of publishing

It’s hard to compare these prices to UK ISPs as in a number of cases 1mb has become a standard although download caps are, in a number of cases a fair bit lower than the ones introduced by Jersey Telecom.

There are also a number of other options available in Jersey that this article hasn’t touched on including Business Broadband and Hi-Band from JT.

Hi-Band is primary aimed at business and is a much higher specification service offering download speeds and uploads speeds at the same rate (with ADSL regardless of download speed you will only upload at around 256kbs).

But why broadband?

If you’ve got through to the end of this article understanding what broadband is, what the new changes mean and the new pricing structure in Jersey then will you come around and explain it to me?

IF you’ve got through all of the above and still can’t get past the point of broadband in the first place then lets tackle that here.

I’ve already mentioned that the average user probably won’t notice much difference. If all you do online is visit websites to read the news or check your e-mail then broadband probably isn’t something you need to worry about – although it would allow you to have an always on connection without the hassle of per-minute call costs or a more expensive line-rental for free calls.

If however you want to listen to do anything online that might use more bandwidth such as:

Then you will notice a BIG difference with broadband.

Here are a couple of sites worth looking through that really show the reasons for having broadband.