OFCOM - Push for faster net 'premature'

[acrobat]

For a start off, its not un-affordable, when you look at broadband costs vrs mobile phone costs, or even basic PSTN line rental, there not that high for the land of tax. Be will happily chug out the BB for the price of a bottle of passable wine at local italian themed restraunt prices.

Eh? I don;t care about wine or italian themed restaurants and I never said broadband was un-affordable. I said when you see a broadband connection is advertised as 8mbit and you pay good money for it, and the most you get is usually about 2 and half, thats just rubbish.

Nothing improves if people don't care. Are you happy with the way it is now?

If you had to pay for the true cost of the network capacity you use, you might well squeal. Its not normal for the average home to use 500gig month, try and find fully international going everywhere p2p type transit at telehouse for less than £20 a month. Now don't forget the LLU costs.

I don't know what you mean.

No because the contract clearly states upto, and has contention,

Yeah, but thats crap.. In what other industry do you buy something and you don't know what you are going to get, and the seller can pretty much give you whatever they want? Its like buying a car and it says, "Capable of up to 150mph", and you get a rusty old old ford fiesta. Capable of 150mph... if you drop it out of a plane.

you can buy 1:1 contention broadband if you want, SDSL and such have been flogged to the SMEs for ages now, and is considerably cheaper than a leased line.

But its still a rip off, and its still more expensive than other countries.

The fact is the bottleneck isn't normally even BT's ATM network, its actually the ISPs been cheap. Now surely basic free market would state if there was a demand for home high contention BB people would offer it, problem is, your not going to pay £75 a month are you?

No, but neither are the Americans or the Germans or the Dutch etc... and yet they get a lot better connections than us.

Because companies like virgin are already expanding their network in the face of low profits

Low profits doesn't mean we are getting a good deal though. Maybe they just have bad management, or maybe they aren't popular because they just aren't good enough.

So i'd sooner pay for our leaking pipes to be upgraded, and the sewage system upgraded. That in my mind is more important (as sorry, you don't need to pirate the latest episode of heros. you sad barstards).

Assuming the need for better internet in the future, is just for people pirating Heroes.. is a very narrow view of it all though.

[Robert]

Bloody idiots.

The fact that the BBC recently did an arcticle on speeds and used Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test - which can't even provide enough bandwidth to test connections properly.

[acrobat]

lol

[TheAnimus]

Eh? I don;t care about wine or italian themed restaurants and I never said broadband was un-affordable. I said when you see a broadband connection is advertised as 8mbit and you pay good money for it, and the most you get is usually about 2 and half, thats just rubbish.

Nothing improves if people don't care. Are you happy with the way it is now?

I don't know what you mean.

Yeah, but thats crap.. In what other industry do you buy something and you don't know what you are going to get, and the seller can pretty much give you whatever they want? Its like buying a car and it says, "Capable of up to 150mph", and you get a rusty old old ford fiesta. Capable of 150mph... if you drop it out of a plane.

But its still a rip off, and its still more expensive than other countries.

No, but neither are the Americans or the Germans or the Dutch etc... and yet they get a lot better connections than us.

Low profits doesn't mean we are getting a good deal though. Maybe they just have bad management, or maybe they aren't popular because they just aren't good enough.



Assuming the need for better internet in the future, is just for people pirating Heroes.. is a very narrow view of it all though.

The breaking down of the first few points detracted from the notion its all one problem.

As it stands its affordable (hence my comparison), now you can get 1:1 ratio, it costs too much. Hence my point about cost of the clearly stated upto. My point about telehouse, is for good transit, its going to cost you minimum £10 per megabit for fully international transit at very best. This is a true cost.

Your comparison to US of A is a bad example as they are behind us in leaving most people behind.

The reason i poo-po any notion of upgrading, is that 24mbit is perfectly fast enough for all the services we have now, been a cold hearted realist who is a firm beliver in the merrits and the common place practice of free market economy, please understand what i'm saying when i mean we shouldn't subsidise this type of thing. If you really think there is a demand for high speed broadband, then become an LLU-ler, and do it. I won't be looking at your IPO. There isn't demand just yet.

Fact is, my traffic is about 50gig a month, which i consider abnormally high, this is due to too many images of applications (MSDN + keeping pace with unix... the latter eats bandwidth) but the 16mbit i get when thames water aren't digging up my street is more than enough. I've been happily surviving on my 5mbit thanks to the digging, and i still think £20 is a very fair price for this.

[dangel]

24 Mbit will be available to a select few - the majority will be well below that and that's true even in cities. I get 8mbit (the max I can at my exchange as it's a few hundred metres from me and no LLU will exist for the forseeable future) on MAX, whilst a friend in the city gets just 4.5mbit out of his '24mbit' connection. 21CN won't change the inherent limitation of a copper line, so we'll still be broadband-retarded (or special needs if you prefer it) in 2008/9 regardless.
We would do well to remember how BT has had to been dragged kicking and screaming into offering broadband *at all* (remember the insanity of the ISDN charging?) and that saying 'it's enough for now' is a bit short-sighted when dealing with the realities of what we'll need in years to come. Sure, there aren't too many services needing massive bandwidth now, but that's just chicken and egg - if the bandwith isn't there then.. why build the service? I do find it amusing (and sad) that the cross london rail link will cost as much as sorting this out (or so they say) and have far less impact (IMHO) to the country as a whole.
There is a seperate issue on how things are then sold - the 'up to' problem. That I don't really have so much of an issue with as the 'unlimited' thing which is plainly a lie in my eyes - broadband is not narrowband and so 'unlimited connection time' is a poor excuse. Clever bastards.

[TheAnimus]

enless your prediciting the end of the UK economy as we know it, via high speed broadband, i really doubt it will have the same impact.

Remeber how much money is made in the 'square mile'. London generates more wealth than any other city in the world, if we want to keep it that way, we need a good commuter service, as more and more people come to work here. (even thou RBOS and the like have sacked 6,000, they've been hiring more!)

Are you saying we should fund residentual broadband instead?

Remeber how quickly ADSL was rolled out once it was eventually decided to be needed? Same will happen with this, but as it stands i've no intrest in paying any more than i am right now, bursting to 16.5mbit on my 24mbit is more than enough.

[dangel]

Impact - who knows? I raise it as a point, personally I don't think London needs another train line as much as the country needs a decent internet infrastructure - that's my opinion, but i'm not in London Quite a lot of aren't..

ADSL rollout was painfully slow - trust me, I ran the campaign to bring it to my town.. I'm glad you're getting such high speeds - but, as I said, that's not a reality for the vast majority (although based on my line stats I could get 24mbit lol). For the record - i'm jealous of you now I'm paying 35 quid a month.

EDIT: and now you can relax as BT have agreed with ofcom that us plebs don't need better connections. Ahhh.

[TheAnimus]

but at most conservative messures 1 in 10 people in UK are in london, so transport links here will benefit those, but also remeber how much money is generated here in london, which funds the rest of the country to a large degree, improving links in the most crowded city makes sense.

As for subsidising residentual broadband, how will that directly benefit the economy? Subsidies are always trickey, and crossrail isn't something i'm a big supporter off (as it completely ignores my north to south commute).

But it has made me think of an analogy for those whinging about the (in my mind fair and obvious) advertised speeds + limits of the ISPs.

Travel card for tubes + trains + buses + boats is £4.60 off peak. Most people will not make 5 trips on this. But some occasionally will want to make 10.

As long as people don't spend all their time on the tube, the simple pricing model can work, which benefits most people by its simplicity.

However, if large groups of people started to use public transport constantly, this would really be unfair, as the normal users would be subsidisng them.

This is why i'm all in favour of the simple pricing models we have now, most people (as can be seen why the ISPs have these packages) don't use 50gig a month.

If you look at most hosting (good peer'd) providers, 20p a gig is what they will charge for transit. think that i could download about 5TB a month. that would be a cost of £1,000. Assuming scale of economics drives that down by a factor of 50 (unlikely) that is still £20, on my broadband that costs £20. Wheres the money for LLU rent, ATM network Rent, Advertising, support goign to come from?

[dangel]

So 90% of us aren't in London, and of those 10% that are how many % will benefit from crossrail? Let's be generous - 2.5%? Sounds like a folly to me.. But anyway, this isn't going anywhere and the point is moot - crossrail will happen and fibre won't (see previous post). Off topic: London was ranked 8th in the World (you piqued my interest!) in 2006 (wage index) whilst being the most expensive to live in (City Mayors: World's richest cities) - freaky - and the 2020 projections for GDP are interesting (City Mayors: Richest cities in the world in 2020 by GDP).

I agree (wholeheartedly) that simple pricing works - but (as I indicated) I have a problem with the terminology of 'unlimited broadband' (clearly it isn't and the comparison to narrowband is downright silly). Hosting isn't really relevant - what we're talking about is the cost at exchange (charged by wholesale) which (AFAIK) works out at circa 65 quid a month for 'true' unlimited broadband (shop around - i did). But again it's meaningless in the light of the decision by BT and ofcom which really means the bulk of us (who don't live a stone's throw from the exchange and have perfect line conditions [ignoring cable I suppose]) won't see any change with the advent of 21CN and longer term - well there's now no plan at all. That's somewhat disappointing.

[TheAnimus]

fiber to the home would be folly, to the street curb makes sense, but again isn't this what virgin is doing? Surely BT should be having healthy compitition between them. If all consumers stopped using virign because their service is just plain ****e, then mabye they would improve?

Hosting is relivent, as it still has the same principle of peering costs. Remeber getting your IP link to somewhere link LINX is only half of the challenge, transit costs differing money depending on if your route uses 40 hops to brazil, or 10 to denmark. Its not as cheap as many seam to think. (Peering might negate some costs, but you still have to maintain infrastructure etc).

I for one would hate to see my good latencies to websites in AU slowed down so people can use more europian P2P networks, if you except a finite amount of money for the net infrastructure, and knowledge of students/kids/un-employed pricacy, then this would happen. Its not as simple as just getting homes on faster links, if people actually used 100% of the pipe, 100% of the time... wow.

The service is unlimited, they are not restricting what you can do (ie, you can host your own website on your box, you can use VOIP etc.) thats what most ISPs claim their unlimited to mean.

[dangel]

Virgin/sky is irrelevant to the bulk of us i'm afraid - there are no plans to provide it in my area for the next five years at least (remember the hole NTL dug themselves when build infrastructue?). BT (realistically) doesn't have UK-wide competition - it's encumbant, established and I know stacks of people who get their broadband from them to 'get one bill' or 'because I know them'. That's what your up against. Hence Sky offer silly prices with their broadband etc - all services tied up in one neat bill. People like that.

Traffic shaping/throttling already handles the biasing issues well enough - so your surfing is already seeing better priority. Very few users drench their bandwidth 24/7 (as you've noted by the relatively low limits in place now) and fatter pipes would probably mean short spiking versus longer sustained use in reality.

Unlimited is based on no limit on protocol used? Give me a break mate - my dial up was 'unlimited' in that sense years ago I'm lucky - my broadband actually has no download limit (there's that key word again) written in stone but there's certainly a (extra small print) FUP there and shaping during peak hours (which I don't mind versus a limit on how much i can download). Sorry but we'll just have to disagree on this one.

[TheAnimus]

I don't get the problem with fairusage limits on the un-limited, its not as if its not made quite clear, its not as if they won't warn you the first time.

As most make clear in their contract un-limited means they're not restricting the use of it, this is espesually important with mobile phone GPRS which was until very recently limited (no VoIP).

https://www.bethere.co.uk/fairusage.do

seams fair to me, obviously the un-limited includes limits on things that are illegal.

new limited broadband, we only insist that you don't host terroirst training sites, but we can't call that un-limited because we limit you.

Thats their cop-out, now i think we could say that the vast majority of users will not fall fowel of these will they, i think you could even say that without P2P or usenet or a massive linux iso addiction, you couldn't.

So, what we need is for ISPs to see a clear and present business model for delivering high definition media content, that would make them want to upgrade their network, ah look at virgin, they are doing it, pitty their service sucks. But the important street level infrastructure is already been rolled out.

Hardly fair to force BT to roll it out everywhere, rather than let them compete on a fair free market playing feild is it?

[dangel]

I'm not going to retread the unlimited thing - as I said we'll agree to disagree - but it seems a lot of people don't like the way it's marketed versus it's true meaning. Enough said.

I have very little sympathy for BT - they're effectively a private monopoly as a result of once being a state monopoly - nice situation to be in. BT could afford it on their own - very (very) easily - but their not known for their foresight. They really didn't see the point in spending on ADSL until the profits started piling in (and they realised there was a massive market for it) - hence the horrifically lethargic early days of enabling ADSL in exchanges. The playing field is far from level - wholesale is still part of BT (which many argue it shouldn't be) albeit divisioned and thus the bulk of 'net traffic puts dollars in their pockets.

[Oobie-]

I whole-heartedly agree with you stoo & others.

They just don't seem to realise that not everyone has the same speeds as the people next to the exchange...
They seem to think that everyone is a standard 1/2mb user who is satisfied with that as they don't need more.....

errr no.

My only question is, when/IF they finally pull their heads out of their neighbours arses, how exactly do they get their money back after laying the fibre down?

[chuckskull]

I guess no-one from OFCOM has a home Internet connection? The time is perfect for fibre, the amount of people using their PC for media is exploding, even TV stations are jumping in on the act, BBC iPlayer, C4 has something similar too, the number of uses for (legal) P2P is also exploding which means that 250kps upload speed just isn't good enough anymore. Assuming that you even get near that speed any time other than the wee hours of the morning. Same goes for download. I tried to download Top Gear the other night(legally, let me just stress that ) I managed 25kps, on my highest tier BT broadband package.

People don't want to wait 5 hours to download a 60minute show. The same logic applies in just about every other area.

End of the day, who's OFCOM to decide this? I think it's up to the customers. Not some guy in London with a 6 figure salary, who never gets closer to a PC than dictating something to his secretary.

[htid]

Acrobat, Spud1 said it's possible to get a really fast line and you replied with:

No. A small business cannot afford a leased line, neither can an individual in their home. And some places can't even have one.

If you want speed, you pay for it. You mentioned Ferraris and Porches - if you want the best and fastest, you have to pay for it, most indivduals also can't afford these types of cars and have to accept something more average.