In reply to a post by fiddler:

Really?

Surely if anyone is being subsidised it's the urban areas.

I know I'm being pedantic here but the total taxes paid by those living in London, which hasn't seen a penny of BDUK funding and has many thousands with no access to NGA, is just a little more than any rural area.

In reply to a post by fiddler:

Surely if anyone is being subsidised it's the urban areas.

Nope. Urban areas are profitable. Rural areas often aren't(*). Thus some of the money paid by urban dwellers is being used to cover the losses of rural areas. This is true of most services and why urban areas generally have better facilities.

(*)A simplistic view but broadly correct. It's down to population density and, fundamentally, is why Homo Sapiens invented urbanisation thousands of years ago. It's always cheaper to provide a service to a large densely packed population.

If paying more for ADSL than fibre suggests you are in the 4% of properties NOT connected to an exchange TalkTalk have unbundled.

96% of UK homes have access to the FULL LLU from TalkTalk at £2.50 + voice line rental

Outside this footprint Ofcom has operated to keep the BT Wholesale pricing high, so that firms like TalkTalk and Sky are encouraged to roll-out further and can undercut the monopoly provider. There is a fight going on by BT to stop this and a fight by the other side to continue it and force fibre pricing down at the wholesale level in the areas its available.

To be even more simplistic, if we don't have fibre then we're not being subsidised.

In reply to a post by fiddler:

To be even more simplistic, if we don't have fibre then we're not being subsidised.

Your ADSL was subsidised. Your telecoms have probably always been subsidised.

Everyone's or just those in rural areas?

I'd had four years of ADSL in London before moving back here to dial-up, only having ADSL in '05 [SWCOO].

yeah by coincidence watching a treasure movie on sky disney movie channel, sky obviously transmit their premium channels at a decent bitrate, this movie was from 1950 and it looks very good quality and I dont think they had HD cameras then

its as if they deliberatly transmitting SD channels at low bitrates to promote HD

Transponder bandwidth allocation is shocking for some channels.
Even freeview suffered a little but not to the same extent.
The perfect example was trying to broadcast football matches on ITV 4 SD, a blurry (pixelated) mess most of the time.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

yeah by coincidence watching a treasure movie on sky disney movie channel, sky obviously transmit their premium channels at a decent bitrate, this movie was from 1950 and it looks very good quality and I dont think they had HD cameras then

No. They used film which has an even higher resolution. Quite a lot of film based media has been resampled in HD now. Consequently you can see a lot of Columbo episodes in HD. Even some Doctor Who. Basically anything recorded on film can now be resampled in HD to get an improved picture.

They also upscale SD, but obviously use broadcast quality equipment, and as you say a lot of popular old films/shows have been digitally remastered. We could of had much better TV quality but the UK went for more channels over quality.