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.

Agreed. But the spoiler is the 14Mbps. I think many many people who are stuck on sub 2 meg speeds and a good deal more besides, would pay more. But how much more, for how much more?

As Chrysalis pointed out, given a proper choice, people wont always choose the cheapest. They will choose what best suits their needs.

Of course if you offer them 40meg @ 38quid (ignoring infinity's silly prices at the moment), or up to 24meg for a tenner, then most will pay the tenner. Accordingly if you offer it to people who actually get sub 2 meg speeds on the so called 24 meg connections, then they have to justify paying for such a large increase whe all they probably need is 8meg. Now if you offered them more middle ground, how many more would pay it?

Surely the advent of FTTC creates the opportunity to offer better choices?

I would happily of paid 20 quid a month to guarantee 8 meg. As it is I only have too choices. Sub two meg or 40 meg.

Random number plucking or a source please, or as I did some years ago I will show you the door

FTTC ten years over due - so where had FTTC in 2000?
We are around 2 - 3 years behind France in fibre led roll-outs.

USC is looking to address the narrowband and to be honest while 2Meg looks small to many hear, for most business use and residential it is adequate not fancy but adequate.

Ten years I would expect 40Meg to be making 90% of the UK.

Why does BT need to be transparent? In the next gen market VM is the dominant player at present, so BT keeping its commercial cards close to the chest I see nothing wrong. Unless BT should never be treated as a commercial company.

UK broadband plans last as long as the minister in the post and the next one changes the ships direction, so no matter which government if it is important to you (1) move (2) get a community scheme going.

Anon,

As with most things of this scale, its down to money. BT are self funding this (forget Cornwall etc, its virtually all self funded apart from these other deployments)

Quality of Service? you don't mean that in the literal network sense do you?

Rubbish, DSL is used by many businesses, its used as tail ends of MPLS networks in the UK and across the globe

That's a rather binary way of looking at things. For better or worse there are many shades of grey here. For the most part you can do the same things on slower speeds they just take longer while electricity rationing would be on or off.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

FTTC ten years over due - so where had FTTC in 2000?
We are around 2 - 3 years behind France in fibre led roll-outs.

Ah, but compare with Holland, perhaps. I mean in the sense of rolling out infrastructure the people will need.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

USC is looking to address the narrowband and to be honest while 2Meg looks small to many hear, for most business use and residential it is adequate not fancy but adequate.

Barely adequate. What about all those on half a meg, a quarter of a meg (someone like this seems to pop up and register on here every few days) - all perfectly normal built up areas. If you look at average broadband speeds you might think the situation is improving. But for a large group of people, it's staying exactly the same, if anything, getting worse as BT's old lines deteriorate.

Is that the USC that might or might not "guarantee" 2Mbps and might eventually end up concluding that those people living in WGC need to get a satellite because we, for some reason, just can't reach them with a fixed line? Repeat for whole of the UK. Satellite for the remote Scottish highlands perhaps, yes. For built up areas...

IMO it's a monumental lack of ambition. It's all based around the cost of somehow adapting a telephone network to become a broadband conduit.

Technology is supposed to work for people, not the other way around.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Ten years I would expect 40Meg to be making 90% of the UK.

With what, though? FTTC - not likely. The average will indeed go up, yes. I agree perhaps that FTTC is pragmatic for BT, but it leaves us with the same issue we have now which will be patchy coverage and terminal issues trying to get people real world speeds because they're connected up via a phone line.

Is Alton, Hants, all done now then? Couple of cabinets here and there, tick the exchange as done, move on. That's what I'm alluding to.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Why does BT need to be transparent? In the next gen market VM is the dominant player at present, so BT keeping its commercial cards close to the chest I see nothing wrong. Unless BT should never be treated as a commercial company.

I agree. In fact, that's my main point. BT doesn't need to be transparent at all. Maybe they should tell the people bullying them for broadband to, frankly, go away. it's a private business investing as it wants. This part is absolutely key.

In reply to a post by GMAN98:

Anon,

As with most things of this scale, its down to money. BT are self funding this (forget Cornwall etc, its virtually all self funded apart from these other deployments)

Quality of Service? you don't mean that in the literal network sense do you?

Of course they're (mostly) self funding it. It's not a co-operative, some form of charity etc and a 2.5bn spend over 27 years doesn't impress me greatly. This is another fundamental issue. In BT's defence, why when we think of bringing broadband to people, do we think of telephone lines as being some form of solution, sit back and asume that "BT will do it". Why should BT do it?

Re: QOS, wrong term. I mean downstream and upstream speeds.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

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?

It may come as a surprise to you, but this is pretty much exactly what happened to electricity as it went from its initial public generation (in the 1880s, with private companies) through to the concept of being a "utility".

The UK electricity market was, at first and of course, fragmented. It had city-based generating plant, with a variety of voltages, frequencies and currents. Because each city was supplied independently, there were frequent overloads and breaksdowns (yes, turning on too many lights would blackout the entire city).

Distance certainly *was* an important factor. At the outset, no-one knew what voltage was best, or whether to supply AC or DC. There was no concept of a national standard, and certainly nothing that could distribute electricity over long distances without losses.

In the time between the 1880s and the 1930s, if you wanted better lighting, then the answer was indeed to choose carefully where you lived, or to be very rich.

It was only in 1925 that agreement was reached on having the high-voltage national grid, that has subsequently come to give us a stable supply. It then took until 1933 for the regional cores of the grid to be constructed, and 1938 for those to be connected together to form one national grid.

It is this grid, and the network of substations feed off it, that gets you away from local dependencies, and lets you start to think of an electricity supply as a ubiquitous, dependable, utility. (Actually, I think it was the creation of all the labour-saving devices - cooking, washing, drying - in the 50's and 60's that turned electricity from being a novel thing in itself, into the ubiquitous enabler of all those tools)

What happened in the UK? The first public generation of power was in 1881. By 1931, 50 years later, 35% of houses had electricity (and most concentrated on just lighting at the time). By 1938 this was 65%, and 85% in 1948.

Funny: A figure of "85%" is about the same as the Ofcom market 3 & market 2 areas we see today - the densely populated cities & towns. I wonder if that is a coincidence???

So stability of supply came about from 1933 onwards, with half the country being added to the supply up to 1948 - when labour's post-war nationalisation took place. In that time, the electricity generation continued to be by private companies, but the grid itself was established as a government body. Private companies with central regulation.

National roll-out of natural gas was even later than this (1970s-1980s), and isn't that still going on?

It seems that the rollout of broadband isn't so very different, after all. Just on a faster timescale - itself made easier (but self-limiting) because the national network of copper has already been rolled out over 100 years for a different service.

In every case, the early impetus comes purely from private companies. This continues through middle life, but central regulation coordinates expansion. Finally, regulation is added to compel supply to the uneconomic parts of the country - but only after there's a majority of the country that can fund it.

Ofcom is now setting price controls to limit the cost of broadband to the least economic exchanges (market 1), and the government will probably set a universal service obligation of 2mbps. From first service in 2000 with a maximum of 2Mbps, to USO where it is the minimum, in 12 years or so. And at about 10% of the price.

I'm not sure how nationalisation is actually going to help this go further.

In fact, I'm struggling to think what large infrastructure projects *have* come from nationalised industry. The only one I can readily think of is the road network.

Sources:
National Trust - a good read
Electricity in the North-East in the late 19th century.
Wikipedia on the National grid

Interesting the Virgin Consortium is far more advanced then was aware of and they have now gone public with it.

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

Interesting the Virgin Consortium is far more advanced then was aware of and they have now gone public with it.

Just read that. And there was me hoping what you wrote was true, but in the back of my mind thinking that it was just to stimulate debate and perhaps flush out some BT shareholders and employees