So still no uncapped, unthrottled FFTC for less than £30 PCM

Currently with Be getting a liitle over 11mbit down 1.3 up with SNR tweaking and pay a little over £14. For this I get an uncapped, unthrottled service.
I have been pestered the last few days by one of BT's partners telling me my cab is now lit and ready to go. I told them to go away and to remove me from their database but that's besides the point.
I know for a fact BT throttle P2P traffic during the day as my father has FTTC - mainly because his broadband was ridiculously slow so any upgrade was an improvement on previous speeds. Except P2P traffic which is actually slower during the day than his previous 1mbit service.
I'd happily pay double what I pay now for a speed boost. Mainly in upload speeds so I could do more remotely (like streaming movies from my home server in HD). But it seems nobody can compete with BT on price and what is offered. If it were not for the throttling and generally hating BT with every bone of my body I would jump. Is there nobody out there that can offer what I want at a reasonable price?

BT appear to have the monopoly in this area (again).

Aquiss - just as one example - do 10Mbps upstream, 135GB/mo peak and unlimited off peak for £54/mo + line rental + VAT which sounds quite fair to me.

BE don't have to contend with users with higher speeds as the fibre suppliers do.

Perhaps it depends on your definition of "reasonable price"?

It could be worth a look at this spreadsheet.

UTV come closest but I don't like the two year lock in period. Also they are an unknown quantity. Do they throttle P2P? I don't know. BT offer the cheapest deal because they have total monopoly. There appears to be no real competition on residential FTTC and I don't understand how OFCOM are allowing BT to get away with it (well I do, because OFCOM are completely useless).

The whole thing is a farce.

The other providers are offering a non throttled service though - your options broadly seem to be:
-limited usage, throttled, cheap - plusnet
-unlimited quantity, throttled (exact protocols and speed restrictions are always in flux) - BT
-limited usage but no artificial throttling - a plethora of others
-unlimited, fast, no throttling - expensive compared to what people currently pay, but priced sustainably.. This is available from a few.

To me it looks like BT might slow down in future, or be being run at a heavy loss - nobody else wishes to compete on those terms!

Is it at a loss though?

For years people like Be and o2 have been offering "all you can download" internet for less than the cost BT charge. Sure the headline speed is slower but you can still download terabytes of data if you wish.

It also depends how much data the average customer is taking from the service. I'd consider our household fairly heavy usage. We have several computers, use iplayer regularly. I play online games a lot and download games and patches digitally for example. Still, most months we're probably under 100GB transferred.

Edited by orly (Tue 01-Nov-11 23:52:02)

If you live in South Yorkshire, Digital Region through various smaller ISP's offer unlimited FTTC for £25/month. I will probably move over to their network next year if BE can't bring anything out by then.

And look at the congestion appearing on o2/be now...unlimited does have a ceiling and history so far has shown every provider who tries it either does

1. Introduce caps
2. Introduce traffic management
3. Raise prices as average usage increases - very very rare, and often offset by the lowering of wholesale costs in the last few years.

I'd rather have a connection that slows down slightly (even to half of the speed) but is unlimited, than one where I have to worry about the caps.

I'm happy with traffic management provided it's made clear exactly how it works. Like virginmedia do on their 10 and 30 mbps packages

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

And look at the congestion appearing on o2/be now...

Cough - no congestion on BE. There have been faults recently, but now resolved.

O2 has introduced traffic management - unsurprising at those prices. BE prices are significantly higher.