In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

Very few. Many might say that but would not actually do so. These people would happily pay £40 a month for a mobile phone. They might shop around to try to find a sub £20 product but in the end 95% of them would pay it. THere are not even that many sub £20 offering on the market those that are ther bargain baement cheap and cheerful type

People can see the value in a mobile phone. Be it functionality or just 'pose factor'. I notice that no-one has been able to come up with the range of 'services and games' in answer to my question. So 'pie in the sky' and 'castles in the air' as it always has been then.

So 'pie in the sky' and 'castles in the air' as it always has been then.

Largely yes, I can see the point of working towards better technical solutions, but the cost of some is such that as long as something better is available in a reasonable timeframe then not losing sleep over it.

When one looks at other countries that have the vastly superior networks, then to be honest it is just more of what people are doing in the UK. I do see issues where people believe the marketing and buy what they think is the best product based on marketing/comparison engines, but then discover that at peak times there is congestion, but most of us know how to choose and avoid this.

I suspect a big driver is IPTV and VoD abroad, particularly where cable and satellite was never a big player, or it has from analogue cable to full FTTH skipping digital cable.

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

I did not say there was no rollout elsewhere but it is very heavily focussed on London & the South East with very limited rollout elsewhere

Yeah that four Greater London exchanges on the list out of the over 100 within the city, clearly heavily focussed compared with the 5 from Greater Manchester, the 3 from Edinburgh with another nearby, etc.

Edited by deleted (Tue 12-Apr-11 21:08:10)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Hands up who has seen the state of US cable TV? Picture quality is so poor that I can imagine people jumping on FiOS and the cable providers who've gone for a digital setup.

Another issue in the US is the choice of retail provider which is very limited, and helps to flatten firms, which might actually reduce their costs.

Most cable is digital now, basic analogue is being switched off as soon as possible and people are getting STBs or cable cards to replace them.

Retail provider choice is indeed very limited, which leads to many areas being served by a cable company - incumbent telco duopoly.

This said as noted we remain really, really cheap in terms of price per Mbps when normalised with purchasing power parity.

http://www.upc.ie/broadband/
http://www.comhem.se/comhem/bredband/-/5622/5622/-/i...
http://www.upc.pl/internet/
http://www.upc.nl/internet/

Note that the only one that's similar or cheaper than our own cable company is Poland. Convert that into purchasing power parity and it's far more expensive.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

simple question I want to ask you.

if all sub £20 products dissapeared tommorow, how many do you think would drop broadband altogether vs keep it at the higher price.

Good question. I think a fair number would drop it altogether.

thanks for answering, we disagree on the answer but glad you made your point clear.

Now days broadband is more a utility than a luxury, parents wouldnt cancel as kids use for schoolwork etc., people without kids more likely to ditch it but probably used to having it around so I think some will drop but I think it would be under 10%. Its like people when they ring up retentions at an isp they usually just bluffing for discounts with no intention of leaving.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

In reply to a post by Andrue:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

simple question I want to ask you.

if all sub £20 products dissapeared tommorow, how many do you think would drop broadband altogether vs keep it at the higher price.

Good question. I think a fair number would drop it altogether.

thanks for answering, we disagree on the answer but glad you made your point clear.

Now days broadband is more a utility than a luxury, parents wouldnt cancel as kids use for schoolwork etc., people without kids more likely to ditch it but probably used to having it around so I think some will drop but I think it would be under 10%. Its like people when they ring up retentions at an isp they usually just bluffing for discounts with no intention of leaving.

I do broadly agree with this. However, I'm not sure that "the wider public" does, on the specific point that it's a utility rather than a luxury. I think a lot depends on your age; my parents don't use online banking for instance, they use email, and do browse a bit, but it wouldn't be the end of the world if they couldn't have that. Not to them, anyway.

What would happen is that the "poor" in our society would be the first to drop broadband, thus denying them potential job opportunities, and all the socialists would be screaming about this. But let's not go there...

Is electricity a utility or a luxury? Sounds like an amusing question to ask. But how long, from after the invention of electricity and consumers being able to actually get it piped into their houses, did it take before people came to regard it as a utility? (That's a rhetorical question, though I'm sure an answer could be found to that)

Consider if electricity worked like broadband does. You move in to your new home and notice that every time you turn on the kettle, the fridge goes off. You call the private electricity company which is backed by a private largely unregulated infrastructure provider.

After being warned you could face huge bills for a call out, you take the plunge, an engineer arrives, and concludes that there's no fault.

Actually, it's your fault for living 3km away from the substation. You cannot seriously expect to get the same current at that distance, surely. You'll just have to put up with it. Your options are to pay for another electricity pipe into the house and have them bonded together, or to pay thousands of pounds for a custom one-off installation.

You have electricity, end of. Shut your moaning. If you want decent electricity, go live in the narrow strip of land nearest to the sub-station.

Do you see where I'm going with this

How far would we have got, as a country, with that approach?

Could we have rolled out sewers, electricity, gas and so on, entirely in the private sector and have near 100% coverage? No.

Of course, electricity is regulated. Current/voltage has to be within certain defined limits. Transco, or whatever it's called, isn't allowed to leave gas pumping out in the street from a broken main for months because they sacked half their engineers last year.

Could we regulate broadband, that is to say, any supplier has to supply a minimum of 4Mbps? Yes, we could. Bye bye 3G, and along with it, about half the ADSL connections.

But, we could regulate what can be called broadband.

The conclusion I repeatedly reach, with which not everyone agrees, is that the infrastructural side of broadband is too important to be left in the private sector.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

So 'pie in the sky' and 'castles in the air' as it always has been then.

Largely yes, I can see the point of working towards better technical solutions, but the cost of some is such that as long as something better is available in a reasonable timeframe then not losing sleep over it.

What timeframe, though? Where's the plan? Where's the co-ordination?

I still think, with respect, this is an extremely narrow way of looking at this.

About 48% of the country has a reasonably future proof broadband network which will suffice for the medium term.

The other 52% doesn't have any broadband network at all for the medium term. Of that group of people, probably about half only have access to what I'd call narrowband, with no access to broadband that's reasonably fit for today, let alone the future.

We've barely started building it yet, BT's FTTC efforts, about ten years overdue, still lack any transparency, any co-ordination, any real plan, any guaranteed quality of service.

I don't think we're in the place that you think we are.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

We've barely started building it yet, BT's FTTC efforts, about ten years overdue, still lack any transparency, any co-ordination, any real plan, any guaranteed quality of service.

The mention of ten years got me thinking.

Ten years ago I was on 56k (quite fast for dial-up, I was getting a sync of 50,666 or something like that). So now I'm getting around 6350 according to speed tests. That's 125 times faster. So if we look ahead ten years, can I expect 800 Meg? Gigabit connections and overheads allowing...who knows. Uploads have gone from 28k up to 400k...not so good.

I've moved house from the city centre flat to a semi-rural location, so and while my BB speeds are good for non-urban, the lack of commercial premises dictates the lack of roll-out of ADSL2 / ADSL2+ / FTTx etc.

As far as I can see, unles you're in an area with a decent proportion of commercial premises or are living in a fairly affluent area, there's no likelihood of faster connection this side of 2012. What I can't understand is why BT think that a product with little increase in monthly cost should not be rolled out in poorer areas. Unless of course the trends are that said areas are more likely to take up broadband en masse than the areas with less cash. Maybe BT finds it hard to penetrate areas where Sky TV usage is high : Sky Broadband is doing well here? I've seen quite a few houses where the people don't use Broadband, but do have Sky. Maybe Sky can corner that market with combined deals.

My own exchange managed 50 out of 3000 lines in the race to Infinity, while the ones near the bottom of the list seem to be mostly places that one would associate with unemployment and a lack of affluence (my limited knowledge, so no offence to anyone intended). Maybe BT are going with trends rather than being snobbish in their selections. Certainly, BT are selecting big city exchanges too. Far more uptake from commercial premises too.

The Broadband Market is really no different to the Mobile phone market.The key difference is the mobile phone market is about a 100 times better at marketing and selling. In the end a mobile phone is just a basic tool for making calls & sending text but they manage to sell al sorts of add ons that mosr people really dont need and get them to pay a premium price

Broadband is as much an essential need nowadays but the marketing is no where near as good as for the mobile market just look at how many will now take up Broadband on a mobile phone. Broadband on a mobile phone is very much a comprimise and commands a premium price yet people will pay for it.

I disagree with doing away with the £10 Broadband. That targets a different market to higher end products. They will be making a profit on it. Supermarkets do the same thing they will have a Basic Range at low prices to cater for the low end of the market

The business angle of Broadband is very much overplayed ADSL in all its varities is basically a residential product and about 90% of its market is residential so unless you can command a very big price premium for business use it should not figure highly in the roll out in fact in areas with high levels of businesses take up is generally low as there are fwer homes in the area