From the BBC:
A study of the global state of broadband has put the UK 25th out of 66 countries in terms of the quality and reach of its networks.
The research for Cisco found that countries such as Latvia and Bulgaria were better prepared than the UK for next-generation net applications.
The UK was listed among countries whose broadband is "meeting needs for today".
25th? Ouch, but not surprising.
Disappointingly however the UK's rubbish upstream doesn't seem to get as much attention as it should. Most other countries in Europe have two or four times the upstream bandwidth that we have in the UK. On bog standard ADSL here we get a crappy 448kbps.
That's beyond pathetic and certainly isn't meeting needs for today. People doing these studies only seem to care about watching 8 HDTV streams over the internet. How about talking with your friend on a decent quality webcam? Or heck, posting 50 odd photos up on the internet? At the moment you're going to be there for a couple of hours uploading them all.
Get it sorted. BT and all other communication companies should be nationalised, merged and required to blast fibre out to everywhere, with at least 10mbps upstream and have it done by tomorrow afternoon. The UK broadband market has been driven by price for far too long, and it shows, we have dodgy connections, crappy bandwidth, latency has gotten worse over time, stupid usage limits etc, its time we nationalise and let some geeks run the show instead of the market.