BT wasn't really truly unlimited until lately; they did have the 100 / 300GB FUPs which, when triggered, would nobble both throughput and ping.

I would speculate that by "Truly unlimited", MaverickJesus wasn't including BT in his thoughts for that reason.

So, therefore that leaves only Sky.

In reply to a post by blueacid:

BT wasn't really truly unlimited until lately; they did have the 100 / 300GB FUPs which, when triggered, would nobble both throughput and ping.

I would speculate that by "Truly unlimited", MaverickJesus wasn't including BT in his thoughts for that reason.

So, therefore that leaves only Sky.

Well next week brings 80/20 unlimited to BT - I guarantee MaverickJesus will start thinking about that

Well, yes, as BT's policy seems to more be to only traffic manage to avoid maxing out their links, but to otherwise allow a free reign, it's currently going rather well for them.

I must say I didn't think BT was going to do so well with Infinity; I suspected there'd be a honeymoon period followed by hideous slowdowns. Hasn't happened.. yet.

In reply to a post by blueacid:

I must say I didn't think BT was going to do so well with Infinity; I suspected there'd be a honeymoon period followed by hideous slowdowns. Hasn't happened.. yet.

Could be as simple as people don't see the need yet for the speed. I have friends on cable 10meg who could easily have 30 or 50 but really don't see any reason. They're not IT types, don't stream video (have cable TV with its on demand and iPlayer built in) and mostly just use web.

If many ISPs are getting people saying "no thanks, happy with what I'm getting now" on the upto 8, or upto 20/24 services, then really its the "BE" customer base who you'd have expected to jump to FTTC and/or cable. Why? Because they were already paying for the best speeds they can get, not the lowest price. (cough, talktalk cough).

In reply to a post by jchamier:

From the BE Blog today:
http://blog.bethere.co.uk/2012/04/update-on-fibre.html

I wonder if this means the application for finance from the Telefonica group in Spain was turned down?

Yes - i'd say that is the likely cause of the posting, but perhaps not too unpredictable.

Telefonica is servicing a huge debt pile and, also given the economic situation in Spain, is not going to find it easy to raise any financing at present especially for an area which is not core.

By that I mean that Telefonicas core market in the UK is mobile, and they are much more likely to want to put their scarce resources into LTE than fixed line at present, especially with the LTE auctions imminent.

BE must feel like they are having the ground dug out from underneath them by their parent group.....

I was fairly certain they wouldn't get the funding so had already decided to jump to BT FTTC. I wouldn't put any money on BE or O2 ever launching a product based on Openreach FTTC/FTTP now

Yes, you can almost hear some of the boardroom conversations now. I wonder whether LTE could ever hold a candle to FTTP/FTTC; if O2 plan to become a provider using that as their backhaul instead.

For the moment at least, I'm a happy Be* camper - it's the best thing on MRARD. No Fibre yet, and I seem to have miraculously dodged all the outages and issues! If it weren't for reading these forums I wouldn't think anything was amiss with o2/Be* at all.

So... until Fibre arrives (placeholder date Sept 2012), here's where I'll stay

In reply to a post by Colin_London:

Yes - i'd say that is the likely cause of the posting, but perhaps not too unpredictable.

Telefonica is servicing a huge debt pile and, also given the economic situation in Spain, is not going to find it easy to raise any financing at present especially for an area which is not core.

Exactly:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/apr/10/euroz...

I highly doubt it. The LTE air interface isn't dramatically more bit/Hz efficient than 3G (better on latency, for sure, though) but it would become horrendously congested.

o2s current 3G spectrum is redlining right now in certain areas -- I couldn't make a call at peak times here and download speeds were absolutely woeful. 4G isn't going to fix this overnight.

There's obviously a serious, serious lack of investment in new capacity right through o2's business. 4G won't solve any of these problems. I'd guess it might actually make them worse.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Could be as simple as people don't see the need yet for the speed. I have friends on cable 10meg who could easily have 30 or 50 but really don't see any reason. They're not IT types

I am an IT type, and a fairly heavy user too, but the ~12Mbit I was getting downstream from Be was fine enough. The 7ish mbit I got on an earlier ISP was fine too. Fast enough for anything interactive, and if I was downloading anything big it got done overnight (or otherwise unattended) so I didn't notice the delay. The near 40Mbit I get now is very nice and I make good use of it, but I could easily live without it.

The big draw for me was the much better upstream speed (from ~1.5mbit on ADSL2+/AnnexM to near 10mbit), but that doesn't really affect most home users. I run a couple of small servers (well, one server with a couple of virtual servers running on it) and sometimes have reason for people to pick up large files from me - but that isn't going to affect most home users much. The biggest difference that could be advertised by the ISPs would perhaps be uploading a hiqh quality video to youtube or facebook. Of course the many people might make use of the better upstream to help keep share ratios high on private torrent trackers, but that isn't something that ISPs can advertise as they won't want to be seen to be encouraging breaking the law.

tl;dr: It isn't just that people do see the need for the speed, for many there simply is no real need for the speed. They'll take it if it is free (in terms of both cost and hassle) but it is a luxury which they don't want to pay for (or go through the hassle of switching for).

In reply to a post by dspillett:

The biggest difference that could be advertised by the ISPs would perhaps be uploading a hiqh quality video to youtube or facebook.

Or indeed uploading their photos to a digital photo printing service. That can take an absolute age on ADSL(2+), and it will only get worse as digital photos continue to increase in resolution.