Broadband tax of £6 per year to fund rural fibre rollout

Statist Cnut gives State Aid to State Monopoly?

Is this what it seems to be, which is yet another subsidy for BT so that it can continue to pump taxpayers' money in to its shareholders pockets?

Wurzel Tax

Why should we pay for these cousin-copulating rural bumpkins who eat hay all day? They won't even know what to do with the internet, they'll just dig up the fibre and sell it or eat it or something.

Brilliant <\sarcasm>

OK, so the poorer, inner-city areas will now fund the more affluent, rural areas. Gee there's a logic I can't help but be unimpressed with. It's not my fault that some people choose to live in picturesque, exclusive (and, in their minds, elitist) areas, yet it seems to befall me and my ilk (i.e. hard-working, lower-paid tax payers) to fund their sodding broadband. Goodbye, Labour - yet ANOTHER cash-based reason to NOT vote for you at the next General Election.

Also, "Asked if he believed it would be a popular measure, he said: "We'll have to wait and see."" REALLY?!?! He's not got the slightest inkling that this 'measure' will be about as popular as Gary Glitter at a Kindergarten open day.

Idiocy. Utter idiocy!

What?

We are being made to subsidise broadband for people, quite a lot of whom don't actually want broadband?

Please stop the planet, I want to get off now.

Stealth tax

It is a stealth tax in that it is a tax in all but name. As far as I see it, if people who live in rural areas want or need broadband they can pay for it themselves. I, like most of the other people who will be subsidising this shambles without benefiting, live in a town where I can receive a perfectly decent internet connection, albeit paying through the nose for line rental already.

If people want broadband they only have to move. Otherwise, make them pay for it and don't force yet another unjustified price hike on the rest of us!

My Gran will be really happy.

I'm sure she'll be super keen to fund the next generation of super-fast broadband.

she's always complaining that with out fibre to home her current 22mbps is just not fast enough for her torrents to download at the same time as running apache server to to distribute her content to the other people in her sheltered housing.

another tax to pay

getting taxed on everything now.

cant even die without paying tax!

What about mobile broadband

This government has no idea on IT.

The 3G carriers are trying to expand data coverage and encourage usage, with HSDPA cat 10 users will have connection speeds of 10.8 MB.

Why go to all the trouble and great expense of laying a fixed line to the doorstep?

Wake up to mobile comms.

Hmm .....

Am I the only person who thinks that providing universal broadband Internet is solving the wrong problem? And that we should be concentrating instead on making sure that Internet access simply never becomes a necessity in the first place?

Instead of introducing broadband so that people in rural areas can benefit from Internet-only shopping deals, for instance, why aren't we insisting for businesses to make their goods available at the same price in bricks-and-mortar stores for the benefit of non-computer owners?

Nobody should be obliged to own a computer. Making people dependent on toxic, proprietary technology in order to live their everyday lives is tantamount to privatising the Law of the Land.

Oh well, back to my little shack in the woods .....

Oh ... great... thanks NuLabour...

I love how NuLabour treats my bank account like their piggy bank. When they are finished giving my taxes to their Banker friends, their other friends in the broad band business want some cash as well, so NuLabour decide to dip in and grab some more cash from us all. Wonderful.

Its not as if we don't pay (waste) enough money on taxes already ... but no, now they have to dream up some more reasons to just take more money from us.

Maybe NuLabour wants better broadband in the country because they are getting ready to retire to the country, now they have robbed us all mercilessly for years.

A Shambles

Though not unexpected.

Handy for your 2nd home

Thinking of getting a rural retreat with that city bonus? Put off by the lack of broadband?

Worry no more - problem solved, courtesy of the taxpayer.

Sold everyone out to "the industry"!

They have also sold everyone out by offering to supply names of serial copyright infringers to the rights holders directly.

We all know the gov, OFCOM and the media industry can be trusted to play fair and get their facts right first time!

oooh you city slickers!

We rich elitist country dwellers, or penniless bumpkin hayseed village idiots according to the commenters above, are not all millionaires like the London City guys who nearly broke the country and needed billions in bail-out money.

We ordinary town or country dwellers earn a helluva lot less than those with city weightings and would like to use the internet as much as you guys who think milk grows on milk-trees. Oh, and I wear a tie to work, spent years in IT support, can use phones and stuff and have a television at home. Nor am I being subsidised by someone who thinks an Underground strike is the end of the world as we know it.

Let's pull together and complain about ID cards, Paris Hilton and BT profits from Indian call centres going to their shareholders

Rural areas...

are definitely not affluent. Here I am in Shropshire, look out of my window into a village that is mainly council housing. This village is less than 2 miles from a mid sized market town. My 'broadband' doesn't go beyond 1.5Mbps. People saying this is the city funding the rural areas are wrong. It's just everyone funding BT.

Yet more tight-arse comments

The comments on Reg articles often amaze me in their selfishness, and this is yet another example. How can people begrudge so little money to give people a benefit that we all take for granted? No, people in rural areas aren't all rich, and of course it costs more money to connect them up. Without a nationalised provider giving a fixed-price universal service (as we had in the good old days rolling-out telephones), these people are never going to get connected.

What else do you object to? Should people who live in the countryside pay more to get their post delivered? Or what about their electricity? Maybe the council shouldn't bother building any roads for them until they pay ten times the road tax? Sheesh... what is it about living in London that makes you all into selfish twunts who value nothing but money?

Hidden Agenda

Come on boys and girls, get with the real story behind this.

Not content with shoving ID cards on us all Labour now plan to stick a web cam in every home. Only to get the decent piccies they want they need a network pipe with the capacity to collect the information.

The sooner we get shot of this lot the better. can't someone send them a packet of swine flu?

Bloody cheek

So BT etc who have been creaming in the profits for years from over selling the same bandwidth to as many people as possible and blaming us when we try to use it. Now expect us to pay from them to extend their service so they can rip even more people off.

Amazing not only do I now have to pay for bandwidth I don't get, I'm also going to have to pay so someone else can get limited broadband and the ISPs are going to sit back and enjoy the extra profits.

Taxes

I think the idea is that the tax will work like fuel tax. The suppliers set the price according to what the think the market will take, then the government take a chunk of that. If the tax didn't exist then the suppliers' profits would be higher; the price would not be any lower. This works because supply is somewhat limited.

The Great British Public have been voting in favour of indirect taxation for the past 30 years, Labour have just carried on where the Tories left off. It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone campaigned on the promise of 'No Stealth Taxes, just a huge Income Tax'.

I was shocked when I lived in Sheffield 10 years ago to meet people my age who were baffled and intimidated by computers. We cannot afford to have children growing up today who aren't comfortable with using computers and accessing the internet. Private enterprise has so far failed to provide decent internet access in rural areas and are disinterested in doing so in the future. Rural broadband could be a good long term investment for the country.

Rural

I am "happy" to report that there is a number of financially disadvantaged people in the village I live in. We're a few miles from the M40, so not geographically rural, but we get a maximum of 500kbps downstream on ADSL and the exchange is not unbundled and regardless of what Virgin Media's marketing team think - we're not in their cable area. Only Vodaphone gives us any mobile signal - and that's poor (one bar) - so mobile broadband is out. Digital TV is not great either - it keeps dropping out.

The village is developing "social housing" and there are several sites in the village being considered by the parish council. You need a car to get anywhere which is expensive enough as it is (road charging would damage the ability for people to live here). The nearest farm shop is a mile and a half away and the nearest town is a few miles beyond that.

I think that believing that people living in the country are generally more affluent is a little naive. I also think that believing research that says that people believe that Internet access is as important as electricity is also naive.

I can see how it could help some of my older neighbours for online shopping with delivery - that's vital for them now we don't have local post offices or amenities. Also local government changes mean access to their web sites for support services is critical. As applications continue to appear online, then the digital divide will continue to get wider.

Many of the people living here, particularly the poorer ones, have been in the village for generations and are now tied to the area by bonds of caring for elderly relatives, or because they cannot afford to move. They live in ex-council houses now run by a Housing Association. Perhaps not the image of the affluent country-set imagined by some urbanites.

Because my local exchange will probably never be unbundled, I already pay £180 per year more than people in cities with access to "free" "up to 24Mbps" broadband - just to get 500kbps.

My lifestyle allows me to get by with that capacity and I can afford it. I'm not that bothered about IPTV and I don't stream content or use P2P applications. Lucky me.

To those people in the city complaining about subsidising connectivity improvements in rural areas, the money that I pay today is not being invested in new services for rural locations - it is going to subsidise the excellent service enjoyed by people in the cities. Thanks for your support.

I am happy to pay a bit more for my copper service to make sure that my poorer neighbours can get access to a reasonable suite of communication services. I think it will help prevent rural communities being increasingly seen as the sole preserve of the wealthy who are able to afford to drive and fend for themselves.

@M7S

That may well be true, but remember you do still have the right to move to an area where there is a bus service that's reliable and close to your home, as well as a broadband connection.

The point here is that no-one 'put' you where you live. No-one 'forces' you to stay there. No-one (and I apologise for the bluntness here) commenting here really cares about you. Nothing personal, really.

But I think I (and I daresay others) have a right to be affronted by a bloody 'tax' levy so folk living outside of a service area can have access to a service we already pay not an inconsiderable amount of money for.

Our Great Leader...

...said that alongside water and electricity, broadband is one of life's essentials.

Here's an experiment for you. Take 3 cabinet ministers and deprive one of them of water, one of electricity and one of broadband and see which one dies first. If necessary take the whole parliamentary nu-lab party and repeat until absolutely sure, or all are dead, however long it takes.

QQ moar

waaah waaah went the townies....

Because without this, country folks haven't been been funding your super duper fast broadband for years which they have no chance in hell of benefiting from now would they, and it wouldn't really have continued now would it.?

Kind of like the crap loads of council tax we pay for the priviledge of NOT receiving the services townies do, higher fuel prices than in towns, and we get to have only one bus a week 3/4 mile away... post that arrives at 2 in the afternoon, heck ho wants it in the morning eh.. Higher fuel prices out here too, because with no bus services having a car is flipping luxury of course, you don't really need to leave the house do you ....... *snip*

Subsidies eh?

Having subsidised those bonus-stealing, expense-stuffed, twin-home city dwellers with their calf-skin pouched iPhones tucked into the gloove boxes of their Lexus GSes for the last 10 years, the possibility of getting a portion of it back to my 480Kbps-on-a-good-day, no-mobile-coverage hovel just three miles from the main Exeter to Plymouth trunk route fills me with glee. Stuff you all.