Re: "...able to legally request 10Mbps..." - oh whoopie
"OK, we're happy to oblige! So long as you pay us a ton of money to upgrade your exchange."
I'm not a Vaizey fan, but what he said kind of made a bit of sense. People want faster broadband, but not so much that they're willing to pay through the nose for it. The point he made about Orkney was that they now have a "nice fat pipe" to the islands, but only a third of people have upgraded, and it's not entirely to do with whether or not it's available at the exchange. A huge number of UK exchanges are now FTTC-ready, or alternatives (cable) are available, but people aren't rushing to upgrade. Yes, yes, I know there are parts of the country still running on bits of wet string.
Vaizey did say that you need a minimum of 6Mbps for iPlayer, which isn't actually true as you can get away with significantly less, but to an extent he's right; there are very few in the way of essential internet services at the moment, nor in the near future, that realistically need as much as 8 to 10 Mbps. Where you will come unstuck is a: if your connection is highly contended or b: if you have a lot of people in your house, all wanting to watch cat videos at the same time.
Our hamlet now has FTTC available. It's quite a long way to the exchange and my ADSL2 synchronises at somewhere over 6Mbps down with throughput slightly lower than that, but I find it perfectly acceptable for most purposes. Line checkers estimate I should get around 35Mbps with FTTC, but at 50% more per month than I pay at the moment. I'm not sure it's worth it, just yet.
M.