Colour us shocked: ISPs not that keen to sign up for Universal Service Obligation Telco regulator Ofcom has admitted that internet service providers are not particularly eager to sign up to the government's Universal Service Obligation. The USO is intended to give everyone the legal right to request 10Mbps by 2018. However, in its summary of responses for its call for input to the plans earlier this year, …
That could be made illegal too, in a way that gives the ISP an incentive to hurry up, e.g. Give consumers the right to extend the current contract indefinitely at a yearly-decreasing price, reaching nil in say 5 years, until the connection is improved to 10 Mbs+. And the same deal to be offered to new sign ups too.
It just needs a bit of creative thinking and a regulator with real purpose and real teeth. OK that's 3 requirements, none of which is going to happen (in the UK at least).
I suggest that ISPs and telcos should not be allowed to install any fibre (or other >10Mbs) upgrades or any related infrastructure until all their customers have a working 10Mbs connection.
And how do you propose that they provide 10 Mb/s without using fibre? Until FTTC came along here our immediate locality had < 2 Mb/s ADSL on about 4 route miles of telephone pair between the exchange and the various cabinets. It was only the provision of fibre that got us anywhere near 10 Mb/s, never mind more than that.
So please clarify the modus operandum that the ISPs should be using.
Upgrading to fibre is going to be one major way that customers will get a connection > 10 Mbps. Are you saying that if a customer has a 6 Mbps ASDL connection they can't be upgraded to a 50 Mbps FTTC connection until they and all of their neighbours has first been upgraded to a FTTC connection that has been throttled to exactly 10 Mbps?
Are there any last mile providers other than Openreach providing less than 10Mbps downstream? My experience with Virgin or other alternative last mile providers is that they provide at least 10Mbps and usually more.
If the UK is serious about improving residential/SMB Internet access, more investment is needed rather than pretend obligations from ISPs when the majority of them use a common last mile provider - the investment via BT Openreach doesn't appear to have produced great results compared to other countries efforts over similar time frames.
"the investment via BT Openreach doesn't appear to have produced great results compared to other countries efforts over similar time frames."
That's because thanks to the miracles of creative accounting, BT have mostly taken the broadband funding allocated for rollouts and spent it elsewhere.
This is why when New Zealand regulators looked at what was being done here, they refused to play along and made it a condition of getting any more broadband funding that the telco and the linesco be completely split up into 2 companies with separate (unshared) boards, C-level staff and shares.
The "spectacularly unprofitable" linesco turned out to be doing quite well after all, once the dead hand and vampire squid of the telco head office was removed from it. It's also extremely responsive (Openreach is _deliberately_ setup to be hard to deal with - as an independent company it has to be easy to work with or go bust)
"The simple solution is to remove the constraints for those who are willing to provide a service - for example by providing free access to Openreach's existing wires and poles in poorly-served areas"
Those will be the areas that they'd left poorly served in the years when BT wasn't even allowed to provide fibre? They cherry-picked the areas they wanted to cable up and now the argument seems to be that they should be allowed to piggy-back on somebody else's investment to do what they weren't prepared to do themselves.
In my case it's the BBC who'll be losing. I'm one of the freetards without a TV but who uses iPlayer. That is I used to use it because these days my internet is too slow to stream it. So I won't be buying a TV licence, sorry!
BTW, BT is my least favourite company, they are total ***********!
"An official BBC torrent system would make those problems go away."
No, an official BBC torrent system would reduce server load.
If the enduser line is so crappy that it won't allow enough throughput to stream the data from a server it's not going to magically have any more bandwidth if you try and transfer it by torrent.
The fundamental problem with the UK market is that you have a single monolithic company acting as retailer and wholesaler, getting away with margin squeeze anticompetitive tactics and a regulator loathe to do the logical thing.
Which is the same thing that happened in New Zealand. The regulator which forced the split was the ministry of commerce (the UK equivalent would be the competitions and markets authority) on the basis of the damage that was being done to the national economy (it was estimated to be affecting GDP significantly to the tune of 8-9% in NZ thanks to the telco's blatent behaviour, but the MoC estimated that BT's behaviour was costing the UK economy about 2-3% of GDP in the current "chinese wall" setup.
Whilst the end expedient was making further broadband funding conditional on breaking up the company, if they had refused to do so there were plans in hand to pass legislation to force it i(Ie, "we can do this the nice way or the nasty way")
Simple, just force everyone to provide the service using their own infrastructure. At that point all the whingers like Virgin will suddenly discover how much it actually costs to provide a service where there isn't a connection every 20 feet. This obsession that BT/Open Reach are the root cause of all problems is unfair. They have invested heavily within the regulatory constraints that bind them. Do you see BT burying fibre 6" underground along the pavement? No because it is too vulnerable. If you live in the middle of bugger all they will provide a phone, there maybe some extra costs but they will do it.
This is the same as the mobile operators and coverage. We need working 4G before ruching to provide 5G in London.
>Do you see BT burying fibre 6" underground along the pavement?
No, but I frequently see people with intermittent broadband problems and noisy telephones because of BT cabinets standing in water when it rains. BT has used the "higher engineering standards" and "safety" arguments as a proxy for "rent seeking" right back to the days when you weren't allowed to own your own telephone.
Simple solution for the government. Create a 'Legacy' option for all lines that are not capable of supporting the bandwidth required by the universal service obligation, then put a very low cap on the maximum line rental and service charges for those lines.
If Openreach is only allowed to charge £1 per month line rental, and ISPs can only charge a pro-rata amount of their advertised 'up to' bandwidths for any line failing to meet the obligated minimum, then there will soon be a real effort to upgrade these sub-standard lines.
I suppose if "up to X Mbit/s" would suddendly become "up to £Y/mo" instead of flat £Y/mo that might prove some incentive.
I suspect if that was to happen Y would become higher than it is currently, if Y suddendly became £(real_speed/X)*Y
Down not across
"I suppose if "up to X Mbit/s" would suddendly become "up to £Y/mo" instead of flat £Y/mo that might prove some incentive.
I suspect if that was to happen Y would become higher than it is currently, if Y suddendly became £(real_speed/X)*Y"
You teach algebra to school kids don't you?
;-)
"However, the majority of industry and some consumer and business groups argued that public funding would be more appropriate," it said.
Yeah... make the public pay a corporate entity to upgrade the company's services so that the customers can then pay for those better services. </sarcasm>
I agree with some others, institute financial penalties for not meeting certain criteria. Don't give the companies a dime. If they want to stay in business and stay competitive, they'll have to invest in their own infrastructure.
If a store doesn't have the product you want, you don't give the store the money to stock that product, and then buy it off the shelf at retail price.
I suggest imposition of free line rental / internet access / phone call for customers with lines incapable of supporting the a 30Mb limit, with a clause forbidding the telco from dumping the connection / customer, That way fibre would be rolled-out universally & Virgin would be on the hook too. The country would benefit fro a modern infrastructure & maximum prices charged to customers could be capped to prevent these shirker providers from milking the public to cover their enormous under investment in non-city centre areas
I like your suggestion - of course it would never see the light of day under the elitist tory regime!
But I like it all the same.
It conjures up a mental image of a highwayman of old who pounces on traveller at the roadside, drags his target into the trees...
and then proceeds to get robbed by his target.
Makes me feel all warm and tingly :-)
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