Re: Money talks
"but because I choose to live in the arse-end of nowhere on the end of 3.8km of thin overhead wire I get 3-4Mbit/s on a good day. "
It equally affects those who would choose not to live there, but cannot afford to move, but I totally agree with your point. Most if not all ISPs have a "speed estimate" check before the customer signs up and while those aren't perfect, they generally point out what speed one might get (barring the worst technical issues). Smoothing out the pricing is common and yet very few ISPs offer a lower price when Openreach is forced to charge less (where there is lots of competition... Plus.Net passes on the reduction, which makes rural pricing look even less fair, despite it being the hidden Openreach rental charges that have an effect on the price). Openreach is often the culprit with delays and problems but the ISPs get the blame and cretins demand their pound of flesh, from the ISPs!
When I moved to a village on the edge of a town in north Wales, my initial line speed was a little more than bonded ISDN at 160 kbps. There was also a bad hum on the line (and the b'stard Openreach engineer told me I'd have to live with it, and even put in a report that internal wiring was at fault so I was landed with a call out fee about 3 months later, which I disputed and was cancelled). However, after 6 months of grotty speeds and complete loss of voice and internet for several days at a time (*), a young engineer one Saturday morning spotted the problem - perished insulation on the drop wire from the gutter to the hall. He was up his ladder inspecting the cable before I got down to the front door, and installed a new master socket in the computer room upstairs.
My 2.5 / 3 Mbps went down to about 1.5 Mbps when ADSL 2+ went live at the exchange, because it had a benefit for those close by (but I was 6km away as the copper ran around the villages). If I had stayed there I'd now be enjoying 70+ Mbps on FTTC as the cabinet was a few metres from the house, but having moved away, and ended up in a street in an urban area that has a cabinet some 700m away and 250 flats served as well, the highest estimate for FTTC is the 'up to 38 Mbps' variety, while the cabinet visible at 10 metres from my back window serves properties the other side of the main road, and the chippie, could get up to 76 Mbps!
(*) whenever there was rain... Using a pulse dial phone, I could sometimes restore life for voice calls but not the internet.. I guess the pulses evaporated a little of the water...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
