What consumer can afford 8 line rental and FTTC products?

Also when buying that sort of connection the expectation from many is they have paid for the bandwidth so will use it, thus usually sold with a lower contention or guaranteed performance level, i.e. more like a leased line.

If people had to pay per Mbps for their bandwidth on top of a basic physical connection fee, willing to be 90% would opt for just 2 to 3 Mbps due to the cost involved.

What consumer can afford 8 line rental and FTTC products?

I suspect there are many who could afford it but few who could justify it. I could afford FTTPoD but couldn't justify the large increased costs for the extra bandwidth/certainty.

In reply to a post by Icaras:

EFM can use multiple (up to 8 I think) FTTC connections that all go into one special router. Couldn't they just tweak that for the residential market?

EFM doesn't use FTTC; it's SHDSL and not an Openreach product, it just consumes line rental in the same way as everything else.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

What consumer can afford 8 line rental and FTTC products?

This is kinda the problem. As of right now Openreach are required to charge line rental on 2 loops which is unlikely to go down well with customers being bonded as a 'range extender'.

It would require an entirely new product and even then is problematic as Openreach either have to charge more which would make people unhappy or deliver something for free which would make their competition unhappy.

It's only really of use as a speed booster with that in mind, and Openreach have little interest historically in delivering more than is absolutely required - it costs money.

I also suspect that there is a shortage of lines in a lot of areas, so BT wouldn't want to promote line bonding.

Post deleted by Icaras

then add the "lucky dip" problem with the pairs.

the initial line might be a good pair, and say 65mbit. The 2nd one might be [censored] and say 40mbit, Customer expects 130mbit and gets 105mbit instead. Cue complaints, engineer callouts etc.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 10-Jul-14 06:35:41)