BT seeks apartment dwellers to sign-up to 'superfast' FTTP trial BT is on the lookout for around 1,000 residential buildings to sign up to a pilot to allow the national telco to test superfast broadband speeds in apartment blocks. The company said it needed to carry out the pilot on buildings in areas where its broadband had already been laid. Fibre-to-the-premises will then be blown into …
Expensive is fine, IF it was offered. I would accept that the fibre install would be costly but seeing as all 5 exchanges around me were not upgraded from 8Mb and show as not planned for infinity either you actually have no option.
I can't help but think that finishing one roll out would be good, then moving on to the next. But BT would rather upgrade some areas, change the tech and cancel the previous upgrade then upgrade those same first areas again.
I live in a Kentish village, with one telephone exchange (closed to other suppliers) providing services for approx 1500 homes and 90 non-residential premises. No cable alternatives.
In the middle of the night and most of the working day my ADSL can provide the good 6 to 8Mb that I pay for, as my house is about 200m from the exchange. (FireFox downloader shows rates of over 800KB/sec). Problem is that like most people I'm at work during the "working day" and asleep most of the night.
From about 17:00 to 22:00 my ADSL will slow down to around 0.3MB (FireFox dowmload reporting between 26 to 40 KB/sec).
That's not enough to use iPlayer (or equivalents) without constant pauses every vew seconds, and all but the most basic browsing is slow, and there's only so much time spent online banking and looking on amazon...
Considering most ISPs cap bandwidth (last time I looked at BT is was a few GB/month) prividing massive speeds that mean you reach that cap in a few hours seems pointless.
Providing a decent service to thousands of customers by upgrading the back haul to the nearest major exchange would be better that fiber to each and every a tower block.
Start cracking jokes about killing the prime minister's children, and BT upgrade your exchange and clean your copper line too, then you get 11ms ping, 9.31Mbps up, and 37.98 Mbps down. Hey presto. They turn up in hours too, if a falling tree takes out your line, rather than days.
Of course, it does preclude security cleared work from then on, but on the whole, you can watch iplayer brilliantly from then on.
See, you've got it all the the wrong way around - the CURRENT situation is that people 'out in the sticks' and in other poorly provided areas are paying AS MUCH or, even MORE, money than you do, but for a significantly reduced service.
So, my sanctimonious little mother lover, WE are the ones subsidising YOU right now.
How about, instead, a pricing model that charges by average speed attainable on the link provided; say, for example, £2 per Mbps per month. You are, after all, the one arguing vehemently for a pay-only-for-what-you-get model on remuneration.
Your shiny new ADSL2 set up, delivering 20Mbps would then cost you £40 pcm, and my old ADSL Max circuit, delivering average attainable throughput of around 4Mbps, would cost me £8 pcm instead of the current £37. Both of them on the existing POTS circuits with no upgrading required beyond normal maintenance and repair.
How's THAT for fair, boyo?
Life is full of choices and you need to choose your own balance.
If you want super fast broadband, move next to an exchange.
If you want pubs, clubs and kebab shops, move to a city centre.
If you want sunny weather, move to Spain.
If you want pretty views and country air, live in the country.
I make my choices based on the balance I want in my life - don't expect me to fund your choices as well.
At least in rural they have some excuse. The majority of suburbs are even worse (mine being one of them) because at least in the country there's the chance you'll be near enough to a business park or motorway. Suburbs just get completely forgotten.
Course the best way to do it would be to find out where the execs' families live because regardless of location you know they are gonna have the best available.
Twice is not how much it would cost to provide fibre to a small rural village exchange. Besides, whilst you are willing to pay twice what you currently are, I would expect large numbers of your neighbours are not.
I know a lot of self entitled baby boomers, who having made their bundle of cash, buy some lovely pile in the Styx and then complain that their broadband is slow. Boo-hoo. Us town dwellers already massively subsidise the cost of your phone line, now we need to pay for your broadband too? Cry me a river.
My exchange - the largest in the county is still waiting for WBC. Two smaller ones were done and others have RFS dates but not my town. maybe its time OFCOM put in a decent price reduction to reflect the third rate service that we get on 20cn/IPSC mash up.
I hear rumours of 80 Mbps coming to some BT areazs soon where mine doesnt even get a tenth of that, and yet we pay prices close to some of the cheaper infinity plans. tell me how that works!
So who do you think should pay for it? The cost of living in a major city is already astronomical, so frankly "we gave" and I see no reason for the cities to be burdened with the cost of rural broadband with what would amount to another tax.
As DJ Smiley says, it's gonna be expensive, get over it....
On another point, the 100M fund is frankly hilarious, BT's own estimates are over 12 Billion to do this country wide.
If this ends up being paid for via taxes then the new fibre infrastructure should be publicly owed and turned into a utility.
Some simple maths suggests that a 20GB game would take you at least 11hours to download. Don't do much gaming then I take it (I'm talking Steam here, not torrents).
Your 4Mb/s connection is not really enough to do HD streaming either (720p and above, not iplayer 'HD').
Nor will it be enough to do things that we can't do yet because the vast majority of people don't have superfast broadband, like we didn't have any kind of movie streaming before most people started getting broadband.
Do they exist? They seem to me to be nothing more than a web front end that collates emails and residential addresses.
If you register, it doesn't tell you "Yes, we do it there, no we don't." Instead it says something like "Thanks for your details, please tell all your friends about us"
Does anyone actually have it?
Hyperoptic are doing the same thing (FTTP) but offering much higher speeds, and probably cheaper prices, 100Mbps (up and down!) for £25/month? Yes please. And double the price gets you 1Gbps if you like.
Apparently they are currently trying to convince Ballymore (the company that owns the building I'm in) to allow them to get all their equipment installed. Might have to hedge my bets by registering for this too!
But would we really get 100Mbps?
I can see my telephone exchange through my kitchen window. With a bit of effort, I could probably throw stones and break the windows of the Openreach vans in the carpark.
My ISP offers me "up to 24Mbps". What speed have I been getting all day? 3.26Mbps.
Yes, that's right, 3.26Mbps.
So, let's do the maths and scale up. Oh, that means with this new fibre whatsit I could get 13Mbps.
Whoopy doopy do.
With no *enforceable* legal minimum for "broadband" WTF that means BT have no *incentive* to do so. The call it broadband and you're connected to it so it's not their problem it it happens to run xKBS.
This *might* improve if OFCOM agreed a *minimum* and forced telecos to it.
It might end the era of super-duper-omg-its-so-fast broadband (IRL available for about 3 mins sometime on Wednesday nights between 1 and 4am. T&C apply, including a download limit you will exceed in less than a minute at full speed).
So what?
Naturally the telcos will plead "But we can't "guarantee" a rate because we don't when when we might have to hook up to some wire installed in 1970 and besides it's all those *existing* users with their downloads. Boo hoo, whine whine" The fact that modern exchanges (and by now they are 8all* modern exchanges) run automatic line tests on a *daily* basis makes their ignorance of where any *real* problem areas would be somewhat implausible.
Britards if you want a better pitch you need to complain to the groundsman and the ref. IOW The regulator ain't getting their fingers out. I suggest a short letter to both your MP and OFCOM.
Handy hint. Want super fast broadband? Move to South Korea.
BT can suck my fuckin' arse! Even if they offered to have the internet hand-delivered to my house and gold-plated, it tell them to piss off. Quite possibly the most loathesome corporation I've ever had any dealings with; bill after bill for the wrong amount, or on the wrong tariff, support staff who can barely speak English and an attitutde of total and utter contempt for their customers, which seems to permeate every level of the company.
Until that is, you tell them where they can stick their crappy service, at which point you'll spend the next decade being bombarded with spammy leaflets, adorned with plastic-faced clipart twats, grinning inanely over their laptops, as BT tell you how much they loved you and want you back.
If we're talking about subsidising other people's llifestyle choices here, why the hell am I [and everyone else who is not even a BT customer] having to pay those leeches nearly £20 a month rental on the bit of crappy copper wire that stretches from my house to the exchange, just for the privilege of being able to use the internet at all? [A length of wire, incidentally, that in many cases will have been laid down before BT was privatised and therefore paid for by the taxpayer, in the first place]
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