In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

How can you argue that people will pay when that is not proven either?
If people will pay for faster broadband, why is the takeup of 50Meg from VM so poor?

If ADSL is so dodgy as some assert, I do wonder why it ever sold, particularly in areas that have 3G/cable services.

The reality is this, £50 bought you 0.5Meg unlimited in 2000, and that £50 plus inflation pretty much can get you unlimited at faster speeds in the majority of the UK now, i.e. the footprint is vastly larger. Is that progress?

As for the current government doing anything, BDUK is running at a budget of £60 per household it helps, and Ed Vaizey is talking about getting the market to handle things, but the problem is the market does not want to do this final third, without sufficient money to sweeten the deal. Digital Pump anyone?

because there is cheaper products than 50mbit, I am talking about if all the bottom tier prices go up.

depends how you see it as progress.

first of all it was £40 not £50 I was an early adsl adopter, in fact the first on my exchange. My exchange was also the first outside of london to be activated. Hope that gives you an idea how early. At the time pretty much every isp available was £40 month for 512kbit down and 256kbit up unlimited with £150 engineer install.

Of course back then we had no shaping so it would be full speed 24/7 on all protocols, latency 100% stable. I remember those good days, I had a fair few sync faults but back then all I had to do was ring up freeserve and within an hour a BT tech would have fixed at exchange, so fault resolution has most defenitly gone backwards, this happened even on a saturday when I was watching a world cup game. Before openreach existed of course

Now we have maybe a few isp's offering unlimited on BTw based services but the congestion is evident and some protocols are way below 0.5mbit during peak so are actually less than 11 years ago. Which isnt surprising because the ultimate important figure which is bandwidth allocated per customer is still the same as was 11 years ago, it hasnt changed.

Edited by Chrysalis (Tue 12-Apr-11 10:31:26)

Do we really need to define superfast?

Does the customer actually care whether broadband is called:-

Slow
Fast
Superfast
Ultrafast
Copper/Fibre Broadband
Coax/Fibre Broadband
Pure Fibre Broadband

I doubt the average joe cares, they are more bothered about the speed it will deliver and price

In reply to a post by GMAN98:

I doubt the average joe cares, they are more bothered about the speed it will deliver and price

In the opposite order

The £40 was Openworld and was actually sold at below wholesale price in the first year or so.
Demon did £35 a month for triallists, but £50 was not uncommon for non Openworld providers.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/i/26.html

The USB appeared in summer 2000, I was on the ethernet 3 box system in April 2000.
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/i/81.html was not all unlimited back in 2000.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/i/193.html Offers were a bit different then, half price was £30 a month.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/03/28/uk_has_most_...

First LLU seems to be Jan 2001.

Add to that list:
- People who have {fairly,very} long copper distances to the exchange and get slow ADSL(2+) speeds, but have an FTTC-enabled cabinet nearby.

they get it before they've forgotten why they downloaded it in the first place.

BDUK have defined "superfast broadband" already.

In reply to a post by yarwell:

they get it before they've forgotten why they downloaded it in the first place.

Some truth in that

In reply to a post by GMAN98:

People want faster speeds, no caps or throttling all for what they pay now, I don't believe the posts above stating people will pay more, not many people. If its a choice between bumbling on with what they have now or paying an extra 20-30 a month they'll put up with whatever service they have now.

The only people I know who would be prepared to pay more are techies and geeks. Even then it depends on age. I'm part of a software development team and most of us are geeks. The youngest of us is 35 and all except me have started a family(*). The only one prepared to pay more is me - and my problem is that I struggle to see why I need more than my current 14Mb/s sync.

I simply don't believe that the vast majority of the UK population are clammering for higher speeds. For most people it's just another utility and the cheaper they can get it the better.

The only people who seem to be clammering for more speed are students and niche interest groups (such as subscribers to this site). Even then very few people are openly advocating price rises. The most you usually encounter is someone pointing out that paying more gets you a better service.

(*)I don't intend to either

There is a demand for HS Broadband and people will happilly pay up to £40 a month some people will go for a cheap product thats why they offer them but the cheap product will have retrictions such as very limited amount of downloads and you may have to pay for suport and support may not be that good. So Broadaband like any other business has a range of products to suit the market.

For some people to try to claim that because there is a £10 product that is all they will pay is daft

The big issue holding things back is not price but lack of availability. Currently the UK has only about 250,000 users with Brodband at 25Mbs or over.

We are not going to see service & games etc appear whilst there is no customer bae for it

Virgin is making good progress with improving the take up of HS Broadband unlike BT of those 250,000 a 144.000 are Virgin customers and Virgin has only recently been rooling out the 30MB & 100Mb service its previous offering being 20Mb which is not included in the above as it is below the minimum figure to qualify as HS Broadband