free broadband

suppose this means that free broadband is not going to happen now............................................................

I am not convinced it ever really would have done, but the party in power appears to have no plans to follow that route. Seems sensible to me to not give free broadband as I can't see how it stands out as more important that electricity or water so why wouldn't they be free as well?

The cost of that "free broadband" might have been higher than you'd like...

In reply to a post by billford:

The cost of that "free broadband" might have been higher than you'd like...

+100

I don't think there was a might about it.

I guess the notion is that it does not actually consume resource (yeah I know it does, but not in the same way) like water, gas and electricity. That is once your FTTP network is built there is a small (and it would be small) electricity cost to run it with some maintenance but generally the costs are rather low and somewhat fixed.

However don't get me wrong it was a crackpot idea. Though if you listened in the past by now electricity is supposed to be too cheap to meter

Hmm, pretty sure there are costs for the interconnects, all the active hardware that has to be maintained and refreshed (routers/switches, core network services, servers that run things like DNS, DHCP, login services, filtering, etc), support staff for when there are any problems, the staff to support the support staff (HR, IT, etc), patch management for all those servers and routers, etc.

Running an Internet service isn't just a matter of paying for the electricity to run the components. The cost I suspect would be rather more than you think.

In reply to a post by billford:

The cost of that "free broadband" might have been higher than you'd like...

And Would state owned broadband free or not be such a good idea ? Would you want to only browse websites that they the state deemed ok for you to view? What about your privacy online? Time taken to repair a fault? And that is regardless of if it was a commie or Marxist government or not, leave the Internet alone it doesn't belong to anyone, and i want choice

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

I guess the notion is that it does not actually consume resource (yeah I know it does, but not in the same way) like water, gas and electricity. That is once your FTTP network is built there is a small (and it would be small) electricity cost to run it with some maintenance but generally the costs are rather low and somewhat fixed.

However don't get me wrong it was a crackpot idea. Though if you listened in the past by now electricity is supposed to be too cheap to meter

He, selected BB because 1, he was after the youth vote, 2, the utility companies are non British owned so off limits to ever being state owned via force like he planed to seize BT's assets

Edited by tommy45 (Fri 13-Dec-19 16:51:17)

The plan was to nationalise Openreach and parts of BT

Rights for other FTTP networks would also be acquired, but what that meant was never explained.

Likely that others who have invested large sums in new startups would have challenged, bogging things down in the courts.

The running costs given for after build was finished suggested a much smaller workforce than Openreach has today, and given there would still be a need for support, new build, repairs that was the area that looked wrong in the costs.