You want broadband? That'll be £45,000, BT tells couple

A couple who want a broadband connection for their home and guesthouse business have been told by BT it will cost £45,000 to have it installed.
Ray and Frei Walker have managed with an old 'dial-up' service for the last nine years at their detached Victorian home in Dufton, Cumbria

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249324/BT-t...

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

A couple who want a broadband connection for their home and guesthouse business have been told by BT it will cost £45,000 to have it installed.
Ray and Frei Walker have managed with an old 'dial-up' service for the last nine years at their detached Victorian home in Dufton, Cumbria

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249324/BT-t...

Doesn't surprise me. They are nearly 6km from their exchange by road and the exchange is a piddling little thing that serves less than 3,000 premises:

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/LCAPP

A typical Daily Mail story I'm afraid. Take a minor matter and try to make a big deal out of it. You'll notice that they can't even spell 'megabyte' correctly.

"Mr Walker said that although the current available broadband speed in the village was only half a megabite it would be a huge improvement on painfully slow dial up"

These people live out in the sticks. In fact they've likely built their trade up on the basis that they are far off the beaten track and miles from civilisation. It's hardly a surprise if they don't have access to the full range of amenities. What next - an article bemoaning how they don't have access to a multi-screen cinema?

People need to get real. I'm all all for helping out 'extra-urban' people but you have to be realistic about it.

Andrue Cope
Brackley, UK

Just because he can

Edited by Andrue (Tue 09-Feb-10 08:07:44)

Presumably if they paid for that the kit at the exchange would be theirs and they could charge BT to use it?

Maybe if they could get a number of people to all sign up as new customers they might get the fee waived. However, if they are the only additional connection then you can understand BT not wanting to invest £45K for less than £10 per month return. If they did that then people would be up in arms saying they are wasting money.

The only question is does it really cost £45K to do this?

.... "They seem to be wanting us to pay for equipment which will upgrade the whole village, and that's what makes it more galling" said Mr Walker....

But Mr Walker expects us to pay for his upgrade without being "galled".

Not if everyone on that exchange already has it.

The attitudes of some on here beggar belief, what has spelling got to do with the article, poor journalism yes but the rest? As for them being in the country once again we come back to the city/rural argument.

So tell me when you lot that live in cities with 3/4 LLU operators want a holiday where do you go???

Subsidising broadband? When are some of you lot going to realise without rural Britain you couldn't have cities subsidising us? We're keeping you lot going from holidays to food and back.

Anyway they're not demanding anything more than their line can support, they're not expecting 8Mbps they just say 512Kbps would be brilliant

I agree. If a few more people actually read this article, they would see that the other households in this village (about 150 of them) already have broadband, albeit at 512k speeds. What BT are effectively asking this couple to do is subsidise the upgrading of the exchange so that it can support more subscribers - something which would be inevitable as the village expanded.

Home ADSL: Be Unlimited LLU
Business ADSL:
Be LLU supplied by Andrews & Arnold
Orange 3G Business Everywhere Mobile BB

Not if everyone on that exchange already has it.

There is some truth in that. Presumably it has to do with the law of diminishing returns. But, there are also a number of exchanges that have have been LLU'd that the LLU companies are saying are "full" - and in many cases probably for the same reason BT are using here, to put in more kit would be disproportionately expensive compared to the income that could be achieved. Part of the economics of supply and demand unfortunately.

Perhaps what BT should have done was to set up a "waiting" list for the exchange and take pre-orders from customers - once a level was hit they could then justify the upgrade. Perhaps they have done an analysis and there is a high probability that there would be no more subscribers? There could be a lot of background to this case that isn't apparent from the article.

In exchanges where LLU availablity is full (and that's usually only a temporary event), there are usually other choices. These people don't have another broadband choice. Rather makes a mockery of the 50p broadband tax, doesn't it ?

Home ADSL: Be Unlimited LLU
Business ADSL:
Be LLU supplied by Andrews & Arnold
Orange 3G Business Everywhere Mobile BB