So where has the legal 'right' to 10Mbps broadband gone? UK Chancellor George Osborne's budget may have provided a sprinkling of sweeteners for businesses and middle class savers alongside the headline-grabbing sugar tax last week, but details on digital infrastructure plans were distinctly lacking. No mention was made of the Universal Service Obligation (USO) in the 148-page …
"it might be reasonable to speculate that if money were to be set aside for the project we'd know about it by now"
True. Given the tendency of our politicians to announce every bit of spending three or four times, and try to pretend that each time it's new money, silence is very worrying.
Given that he's been publicly called out as a liar (he says he considered every response to the governments BBC proposals, yet didn't ask for the decryption key protecting 6,000 of them) I suggest we purchase all the salt in Siberia before believing a word he says.
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We don't even have a broadband connection, period. Let alone anything SuperFast........ SuperFast Berkshire has spent millions with BT but for those of us that don't have broadband to upgrade to SuperFast we're just forgotten and keep getting told that 95% of the county has it. And because our exchange is broadband enabled, we come up on their coverage map has having superfast, so the numbers are completely skewed. Statistics, Statistics and damned lies - that's Government for you :-(
We're in a similar situation where I live - BT exchange a mile up the road, all fibred-up and Infinity-ready, except I think that when our street was built in the 2000s, they cabled up our street with overcooked noodles. (Just under 7Mb download, is the fastest SpeedTest has ever recorded in our house, and that was exceptional.)
And we're not even out in the proverbial boondocks, but on the outskirts of a large and supposedly-hi-tech town in southern England. I'd like it if BT could do the honours by linking their exchange to our street's cabinets, some time before 2020 without being frogmarched into it, but somehow I can't see it happening. Hope I'll be proven wrong...
As far as I know I have the legal right to request a 10 meg connection now.
I can also request may other things that people are not obliged to supply me with at a cost I am prepared to pay.
If the wording included "and to be supplied with at a reasonable cost" it might make more sense.
G.Fast...
G.Fast is Scrapie infected Mutton dressed as Lamb,
Weeks past its sell by date,
Fed on the offal of BSE Cows,
Massively marked up,
Promoted and presented at BT's rural "organic farm shop", as prime cuts,
Ready to be sold to the next technically incompetent Politician that walks through the door.
"Lewis believes the key to getting better connectivity is greater market competition, rather than by setting a relatively low USO. To that end, he supports the aims of Ofcom's Digital Communications Review to open up access to BT’s telephone poles and ducts and thereby dominance of the former state-owned telecoms group.
Forcing BT to allow other telecomms providers to have access to the pole and duct networks is not competition. It may well be one solution to a problem but to call it competition is an abuse of the language; it would be like forcing Tesco to deliver Asda's orders for it and calling it "competition". For the avoidance of doubt any two different supermarket names would have done equally well; I have no axe to grind about either of the two mentioned.
In addition, if reaching the last 5% of potential users is "uneconomic" from BT's perspective it is hard to see how any other provider is going to find it materially cheaper, unless of course BT is so firmly wedded to its existing technology that it is incapable of considering radio technology to access users in those circumstances where that approach would be viable.
Just "increasing competition" is not going to make the final 5% any easier to reach.
Strange - a one-off spend of £2bn is "uneconomic".
But the Good Sinking Ship Cameron is willing to spend more than £50bn on a train set that will never be profitable. And the Highways Agency spends more than £2bn a year on road projects. And rail itself is subsidised to the tune of £3.8bn a year.
The Treasury usually works out a cost-benefit multiplier for critical infrastructure. Why hasn't this been applied to broadband?
Strange - a one-off spend of £2bn is "uneconomic".
It is if it doesn't generate enough revenue afterwards.
But the Good Sinking Ship Cameron is willing to spend more than £50bn on a train set that will never be profitable. And the Highways Agency spends more than £2bn a year on road projects. And rail itself is subsidised to the tune of £3.8bn a year.
I agree with you about HS2; IMHO not really an economic proposition, but 2 wrongs don't make a right. As to road and rail subsidies from general taxation this has been the practice for so long that we are all accustomed to it. Oddly enough parallels between the road / rail networks and broadband infrastructure do exist; the best road / rail links exist between major population centres, but get into "the outback" and rail infrastructure is between non - existent and patchy while the roads are narrow and a bit twisty. There are no motorways in some places for very good reasons; there isn't the traffic to make them economic.
The Treasury usually works out a cost-benefit multiplier for critical infrastructure. Why hasn't this been applied to broadband?
Perhaps it has and we are now witnessing the result. I do not see viewing cat videos or downloading films as indicators of "critical infrastructure", and perhaps the Treasury doesn't either.
"Perhaps it has and we are now witnessing the result. I do not see viewing cat videos or downloading films as indicators of "critical infrastructure", and perhaps the Treasury doesn't either." (Commswonk)
Wow, just wow. The sheer de haut en bas entitlement of that remark is truly...a giveaway.
"There are no motorways in some places for very good reasons; there isn't the traffic to make them economic."
Isn't the entire point that electronic communication, unlike motorways, has much lower costs per km? Although it will take time for people to adapt to reducing the need for face to face meetings it won't happen until remote conferencing works really well, and that needs fast broadband. The potential cost savings of eliminating unnecessary travel are enormous.
But in any case we know that building roads causes trade to increase - which was known to General Wade, he of God Save the Queen, but not to our own genius civil servants who failed to anticipate how the building of motorways would affect traffic and business.
The cost of a motorway has a high speculative risk, as does HS2, but the cost of broadband is much less. If we can take a bet on HS2, if we think it's worth spending however many billion a year it is on Trident just in case Putin secretly plans to nuke London, we can surely afford broadband.
Wow, just wow. The sheer de haut en bas entitlement of that remark is truly...a giveaway.
Oops; I seem to have rattled a cage*. However, if you think about it, my assumption is no worse than that of those who would happily force the costs of FTTP on to the entire community whether the entire community needed it or not. I cannot recall your objecting to that, although it may be that my memory has let me down.
Why should I or anyone else be forced to pay more for a far higher speed than I actually need, and yet "broadband" threads seem to be populated by those who would force me and others to do just that.
* This is an observation, not an apology!
BT are a big ship and as such they turn slowly. They are very much wedded to their existing way of doing things.
The extra 5% could be connected up using a variety of different technologies such as point to point wireless, satellite, and even fibre. Just look at organisations like B4RN and how they're rolling out 1Gbps to farm houses in the middle of nowhere. It just takes some thinking outside the box.
BT won't do things like that though.
"Just "increasing competition" is not going to make the final 5% any easier to reach."
Spot on.
Too many technologically and economically illiterate folks out there expect £50k investment for their broadband line and expect to only pay £20 a month.
1+1=2 and not any number you may otherwise want.
"Forcing BT to allow other telecomms providers to have access to the pole and duct networks is not competition."
It is nothing at all like forcing Tesco to deliver Asda orders. Pole and duct aren't even equivalent to railway lines or roads; they provide a route but they don't carry the traffic. If BT doesn't want to lay fibre or string fibre, and someone else does, surely they should be allowed to if they carry a fair share of the maintenance costs? In the Tesco and Asda example, both companies already use the same roads. If a previous Conservative government had sold the motorways to Eddie Stobart ridiculously cheap, and the radical proposal was made that other hauliers should be allowed to use those motorways at a reasonable cost, that sounds awfully like competition to me.
The original BT sell off with its many hidden subsidies and monopoly retention was disgraceful whether you believe in socialism or genuine free markets; it was crony capitalism at its worst (closely followed by British Gas.) Meanwhile, in semi-communist Cuba, the telecoms system is being built out by Huawei and Google, which is going to be interesting to watch.
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I'm at the end of nearly 5km of wire in a setting (in northern France) so rural it gets pitch black here at night. 2Mbit isn't terribly fast but it suffices and can even handle streaming SD video (I watch NHK world via their app).
Sure, I'd like faster (who wouldn't), especially seeing as I'm paying for "up to twenty", however unless the EU is able to legislate changes to the laws of physics, I don't see myself getting anything faster unless Orange rip out the wires and fit fibre and install a mini exchange just for me. Well...ain't gonna happen. So 2Mbit it is. And with that I'd rather have slow reliable than fast flaky.
Me too, but I actually get >5 most of the time, in a small rural village 60km from Marseille. Whilst it was a joke not so long ago, the policy decisions made about telecoms in france revolutionised it. France Telecom itself, the incumbent, was required to offer access to exchanges and inter-exchange links. It was made to create a sales subsidiary, Orange, to sell their services.
The only downside now is that as prices fall there is consolidation, possibly leading to less competition. OTOH, French legal structures prevent monooly or near monopoly suppliers making agreements to restrict access/services.
It might yield an ROI for others, though, if BT weren't hovering in the wings to snap up the more lucrative bits of the business on the back of that investment.
BT's overheads are a hindrance to their investment but their scale is a disincentive for anyone else to invest. And the supposed solution to this is to give them more money from the public purse?
"But the Good Sinking Ship Cameron is willing to spend more than £50bn on a train set that will never be profitable."
It may not in itself be profitable, but in terms of economic value by taking thousands of car journeys off the road etc, it will yield a benefit.
No modern railway upgrade has ever turned out to be a white elephant - they all get full up and not to slowly either. I understand why affected people dont like it, and why lefties think they can ignore the problem and give the money away to the homeless, but it will get filled up, it will be popular and after a few short years, people will wonder how on earth we ever managed with out iy.
Do these 5% of (presumably mostly remote) folks want connecting?
A perfectly reasonable question. All the "noise" about superfast B/B states that everyone needs a much faster speed than they actually have, irrespective of what that speed actually is.
The public debate - such as it is - is woefully short of meaningful statistics, starting with how many premises (households) have not taken up any B/B service at all? I would expect this figure to diminish over time.
How many people with ADSL are happy with the service (speed) they get? How many people with ADSL declined the opportunity to upgrade to better service from VDSL / FTTC when it became available?
What do people actually use their B/B for?
The above is a very short selection of all the questions that ought to be answered before committing any further money for trying to reach the "final five". I cannot believe that information such as this doesn't exist, but I've never seen anything published. Without proper market research any investment can all too easily be misapplied, going off in entirely the wrong direction.
And why is it that BT get a roasting all the time for, well, practically everything, when cellphone network providers seemingly get away with not - spots over which no meaningful action is demanded? OK BT now own EE but for all practical purposes BT cannot be blamed for EE's shortcomings; well not yet anyway.
I can assure you that a chunk of that five per cent is, round here, part of a large geographic area, encompassing groups of many parishes who struggle to get 0.5Mbps. This is Suffolk, hardly the back of beyond.
I don't really believe that figure anyway and can't help feeling that it's based on numbers supplied by enabled exchanges. Ours is enabled but the cabinets that serve the bigger villages it supplies are not and have been "under review" for the last two years. The only benefactors are a cluster of houses by the exchange, which is in the middle of nowhere.
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