Broadband: One size does not fit all

At least according to bean counters / management consultants PWC at http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/communications/review/featu...

Points to an ongoing digital divide and a lack of appetite for paying for higher speeds.

In reply to a post by yarwell:

At least according to bean counters / management consultants PWC at http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/communications/review/featu...

Points to an ongoing digital divide and a lack of appetite for paying for higher speeds.

"Separate research by Ofcom concluded that 64% of customers were unaware of their service speed. Given the absence of any correlation between advertised bandwidth and the speed customers experienced, it is hardly surprising that advertised bandwidth is not a significant driver of customer demand.

PwC�s own consumer research highlights customer indifference to higher bandwidths. We used conjoint analysis to test the relative importance of different price and product attributes of broadband (see Figure 2). Although customers had a strong preference, at any given price, for an 8 Mbps product over a 2 Mbps product, they were largely indifferent between 8 Mbps and 20 Mbps."

Yeah and telcos are supposed to invest billions of pounds off the back of that

"PwC�s own research for the UK Champion for Digital Inclusion found that the total potential economic benefit from getting everyone in the United Kingdom online is more than £22 billion, far in excess of the scale of benefits from universal voice telephony."

Eh? So the phone isn't of £22 billion benefit?

Given that one of the mods here (MrS I think) said the other day that the average download used in the UK is 10GB per month then I'd say that the indifference is justified. At those download levels there can only be general surfing, email, gaming, and moderate streaming being used and 8Mbps is more than enough for those uses. Come to that 2Mbps would be perfectly adequate for a single user.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Tue 08-Feb-11 10:04:22)

Broadband is entering the age of consumerism. Like cars and PCs, the people want it, they don't care how it works, nor want to know what's under the bonnet. Just as long as it works. If a stream requires two meg, what do they care for eight meg, twenty four meg or forty meg? In some ways I agree completely. There's little point in providing forty meg to the nation just for 1% of them to use it, when four meg can be provided, and the entire nation can enjoy a relatively trouble free experience.

The 10GB estimate was that, seems this research gives me a new figure of 14.9GB.

On the ADSL vs advertised speeds, do any of the people look at the ADSL drop-off charts for distance, and realise that technically 30-40% of advertised speed as an average is pretty spot on for what the charts predict. I guess interpreting data has gone out of the window these days.

The BT Infinity pricing, mmm cannot be used as total evidence that people will not pay for speed. Does it cost BT Total more to provide Infinity? Are they perhaps selling cheaply to ensure early take-up and then creep price over the years later (the Sky TV model). Did BT Total try selling Infinity at another price point and find out it did not sell?

Wonder how much the report cost? It reads like a summary of a lot of the data that has been around for a year or two, and offers perhaps no more insight than could be got from quizzing most broadband commentators for an hour or so.

In summary:
People are using broadband for video, but they get annoyed when it does not play.
Rural areas will need help to get speeds that will keep up with the competition driven urban areas.
Satellite will have a part to play.
Wireless may have a part to play - if costs are low enough.

Edited by MrSaffron (Tue 08-Feb-11 10:19:14)

14.9GB does not significantly alter my conclusion that the general public are quite right to be indifferent to speeds over 8Mbps.

Infinity looks to me to be an excellent technology where ADSL can only deliver a couple of Mbps or less but unless BT start running fibre to rural cabinets it won't serve what would probably be the best use in a public service sense.

I suspect bragging rights are one of the main driving forces for high speed internet rather than need. I have 50Mbps cable - do I need it? - absolutely not but it was available at what I considered a reasonable price - I paid more for 2Mbps a lot less than 10 years ago and the premium was only £5 over 20Mbps (now of course they've just released 30Mbps at the old 20Mbps price and I'd probably have settled for that instead and saved the £5)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The 10GB estimate was that, seems this research gives me a new figure of 14.9GB.

I'd be willing to put a large bet on at least a third, if not a half of that is the result of the mushrooming of website media content and objects, rather than actual informational content.

While I appreciate that the masses want video, audio, and gaming, it would be nice for sites out there to provide low-bandwidth alternatives. We faced this in the 56k era as people moved to broadband. Sites offered low/medium/high bandwidth flavours. If they don't do it this time around, the Internet will become very treacle like for the sub 2 Meg users. Youtube offer most streams in 240/360/480 and then 720/1080 in some cases.

One example is the current BBC news site. Almost 600K of webpage for 12.6K of text. So basically the pertinent news is 2% of the webpage.

What the public is more worried about I suspect is peak versus off peak performance, i.e. does that video stream at 9pm, rather than having to wait till 1am to watch it without stuttering.

With Virgin Media as you go up the tiers the management is generally less harsh, with some other providers it is not so clear.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The 10GB estimate was that, seems this research gives me a new figure of 14.9GB.

Taking some figures from the 2010 OFCom report:

p226:

...Western Europe (7.4PB per million)...

Assuming the UK is typical of Western Europe, has a population around 70 million and there are 20 million broadband lines (link), crunching the numbers around and adding some for mobile internet, the average comes out at around 3GB/month.

I don't think I've got the numbers wrong, but it's a heck of a discrepancy...


edit- add link for BB lines.

Edited by billford (Tue 08-Feb-11 11:05:07)