Re: Disingenuous advertising
>""Well that should be Ofcom's job"
Why not the people using it?"
@codejunky - are you really that dim?
We the people have appointed through our elected (and sovereign) Parliament, Ofcom to represent our ("the people") interests. So if you contribute to their consultations, you are able to have your say on what the base speed should be...
>Most people are not on modems although I did know someone who still had one little over a decade ago.
I've still got some clients with modems, they are a second route into some key infrastructure systems - if Internet access is not available for whatever reason then the dial-up modem provides an alternative path to the Console port, which can often get things working again without a site visit...
>But speed can only really be economically identified by what people are willing to pay.
Thay's why you specify a minimum, which if you have been following Ofcom's guidance over the years, is exactly what they have been doing. It seems Ofcom's approach is annoying some who would prefer it to be set significantly higher, more for reasons of marketing than actual consumer need.
>This is where capitalism works and the gov spaffing doesn't.
Not been around long enough to realise that capitalism isn't all its cranked up to be. Suggest you go and live in the USA (or even Australia) for a while to get a better appreciation of how dysfunctional capitalism can be - remember GSM, 3G and 5G (which you seem to be a fan of) arose out of European concepts of mutual benefit capitalism, not the "survival of the fittest" neoliberal capitalism that some worship. Also what the 2008 financial crisis and the current pandemic have shown is that government action is a key and necessary player in the economy - without government intervention the UK economy would have died in 2008 and again in 2020.
>Satellite and 5G etc advancing and the gov even bought a satellite network already. Fibre may be a part of it but it doesnt take long to be out of date.
Having worked on point-to-point, VSAT and various other broadcast satellite links, I'm not particularly in awe of the various Internet/5G access satellite consellations getting media hype. Likewise the hype surrounding 5G - you only need to look at the hype around the launch of 3g, then 4G to see that reality was something totally different.
As for fibre being out-of-date, well have yet to encounter anyone removing 1980's/1990's fibre and replacing it with 2020 fibre, people simply replace the transcievers - I'm just upgrading one such circuit to 10Gbps through the purchase of a pair of £50 SFP modules; which in some respects is exactly what we did with copper - replacing the 1200baud modems with 56bis modems, then 512kbps ADSL modems, which in turn got upgraded to 18Mbps ADSL2 modems, which in some situations can be replaced by VDSL and gFast modems... Personally, I expect to see vendors having another go at promoting LTE/5G home cells that utilise the FTTP connection to increase and expedite rollout of 5G coverage.
>I do wonder how low our tax bills could be if they would stop spaffing money on pet projects.
Not much, there have been various papers by economists about tax bills and percentage of GDP.
However, a more level headed approach to matters might mean that projects got properly funded. For example, HS2, from the outset, has been about minimising cost, with corners cut at every opportunity to make it affordable - hence the reason for the dog's dinner 30mph interconnect between HS2 and HS1, the current project fails to satisfy many of the governments original mandatory requirements. Interestingly, lessons from HS1 clearly haven't been learnt and we can expect the bill to continue to rise as more of the thinking and penny-pinching assumptions prove to be wrong...