Chucking cash at sport and broadband starts to pay off for BT BT shares climbed three per cent this morning off the back of decent end-of-year results from the one-time national telco, which saw its sales growth outshine market predictions. But, despite being buoyed by its unexpected achievement of flat revenues of £18.3bn as well as a six per cent rise in adjusted pre-tax profit of £2. …
"Don't be silly. They all use BT/Openreach's backhauls so when these get filled with TV traffic, bye bye performance."
Hmm. It's not the same backhaul though. ISPs buy as much capacity as they need or want to. They're not all sharing one creaking pipe. That's how you can choose between different ISPs based on contention ratio.
Don't be silly. They all use BT/Openreach's backhauls so when these get filled with TV traffic, bye bye performance.
There's no need to be rude, especially when you're wrong.
I suspect you don't fully understand the way broadband works in this country. In particular you seem to think that 'BT the ISP' is a special ISP that is selling capacity to other ISPs. That isn't how it works. 'BT the ISP' (the company that bought the sports rights) is no different from any other ISP. It buys capacity off BT openreach just like all the others do. Nothing it does with that capacity is going to affect any other ISP. Well..not as long as BTor aren't overselling and I think that's extremely unlikely.
In effect you can think of all ISPs as being like transport companies and BTor are providing the roads. BT Infinity trying to carry more goods than its vehicle fleet can handle is irrelevant to me as a Plusnet customer.
There is contention in backhauls and cores. But there will be mechanisms in place to ensure that one ISP cannot unfairly impact another one. If a link is oversubscribed it's a failure in BTors network.
(cont'd due to editing time limit). Links can get oversubscribed but it's rare and usually dealt with very quickly by BTor. As a general rule it's fair to say that most of the time BTor always provides as much capacity as ISPs have paid for.
If a link is oversubscribed I'm not sure how BTor handle it until it gets upgraded. Possibly we just duke it out packet by packet. Maybe they have traffic management to limit the ISPs based on the proportion of traffic each is responsible for. Whatever happens it's going to be traffic agnostic. Ofcom would go nuclear on BT's ass (as would all the other ISPs) if it thought that one ISP could interfere with another's service the way you imply.
On the Isle of Wight we have a very good competitor to BT. Wight Fibre. They were the first here with FTTC and have been providing broadband and cable TV for many years while BT have been dragging their heels with anyone on their network being stuck with ADSL and piss-poor coverage outside of the towns.
Then along comes the government with a wodge of cash for rural broadband rollout.
Guess who gets the dosh?
Yep. That'd be B bloody T.
" lost to a company (BT) who showed no interest in providing decent broadband to local communities until a stack of cash was on the table"
Isn't that kind of the whole point though? The government is providing a subsidy where there's no commercial case to invest in better kit.
The only reason their consumer section made more money is because they keep whacking up the price of line rental by amounts well above inflation.
For example they've just increased their 'line rental saver' from £141 to £159.84, an increase of 13%! It wasn't that long ago when it was £120 either.
There isn't enough competition (and people are lazy and don't switch) and so they get away with it.
From This BBC Article
"He describes a recent experience where he had to jump through hoops set up by BT - "do you want to set up parental controls? No. Do you want BT's added features? No." before finally getting onto the web, only to be greeted with a BT advert. "If you want me to look at an advert, I will charge an administration fee," he says, to chuckles from the audience."
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