High speed broadband to become a legal right in the UK

[BobF64]

What, like sewerage and electricity?
You don't seem to mind subsidising those... in fact, you probably don't realise which ones you are and aren't subsidising.

I can't comment on the installation of mains sewerage but I imagine it is very similar to how mains electric is, or at least used to be, installed, and I am only grumbling about installation, not subscription costs as those have always been backwards with BT only exchanges paying the highest fees and therefore subsidising those exchange users with competitors.

Openreaches "problem" is that they charge a fixed price for a line install, regardless of actual cost. Mains electric certainly used to be charged based on distance and other factors, like having to lay it underground in conservation areas. So if your phoneline actually cost £1000 to install, you paid 10% of the cost, if your electric lines cost £1000, you paid 100%.

[badass]

It's not restrictive for me 'yet' but I can see it becoming more restrictive in the near future. My use case is sending files etc to clients (I work from home) and I'm seeing a gradual increase in file sizes with 1GB+ being a very common scenario, purely because of the usual bloat from year to year (thanks software companies) and the extra bits you add in as you learn new tricks etc.

You've also 'everything' going towards 'store and access it all from online storage' (for a monthly fee of course) versus at home so I can only see uploading requirements increasing.

You've also got to look at it from a 'family' perspective, with just one maybe 2 people it's not likely an issue but if you start looking at 3+ people using the upload it can seriously dent it's speed.

There's a few similarities to mine. I suspect we are both a bit of a niche however. I certainly would occasionally save significant time by having a faster upload and even download but those times are currently quite rare.

However, would I pay extra for it? Only another £5 or so per month for at least a doubling. I doubt that's economically viable however.

[badass]

I would rather the government target 40/10 or even 20/5 TBH as I would rather more people get stable coverage as parts of the country are lucky to even get 2MB,or have incredibly flaky connections with high ping and frequent dropouts,instead of them trying to up speeds for people who have excessive use requirements for the interwebs,which just massively overinflates the cost of what they are doing and will just mean we pay more in taxes.There are parts of country which have flaky landlines for voice calls,let alone internet!!

One advantage of a minimum like that is that providers of services over the internet in the UK can start to assume decent connection speeds for everyone. So it may be sensible to invest in services that require more bandwidth. I think everyone would benefit.

[Fury559]

So that will be 10Mbit down, 0.1 up...

Honestly it's about time we had 2-3x that as the minimum and same or better upload.

I'm on 80/20 and to be honest I want more upload speed but all ISP's (well BT as I can't even consider virgin etc) is look to make it faster to download stuff (ie new upto 300Mbps g-fast stuff). I'm sure I can wait the current 1-2 minutes to download a gigabyte of data on my 80Mbps compared with the 7-8mins to upload it.... it's not like companies are pushing online storage or anything.

I agree with upload speed, got ADSL and download speed isn't too bad but the upload is awful.

[Ttaskmaster]

I can't comment on the installation of mains sewerage but I imagine it is very similar to how mains electric is, or at least used to be, installed, and I am only grumbling about installation, not subscription costs as those have always been backwards with BT only exchanges paying the highest fees and therefore subsidising those exchange users with competitors.

Yep, installation - Take, for example, a well-known water company that is building a 'Super Sewer' in London, to serve London sewers. It's costing an estimated £4.2 Billion... You really think it's only the London customers paying for that?
Most properties connected to water and sewerage will have a set (and ususally regulated) cost, designed to keep prices within the realms of what is deemed reasonable for the customer. Any further costs will have to be sourced elsewhere, which is where the subsidies come in.

So if your phoneline actually cost £1000 to install, you paid 10% of the cost, if your electric lines cost £1000, you paid 100%.

But not with fibre, as that will cost me many thousands.