In reply to a post by Andrue:

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

"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?

I also found it a little difficult to see where those benefits would come from or why high speed broadband was needed. The government cost savings and public finding discounts are surely possible using ADSL. Surely you don't need a FTTx just to file a tax return.

try to think out of the box, maybe people use broadband for more than you do.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

£22 billion from getting everyone online at a speed that will make uploading stuff like tax returns easy enough.

Current target is 2Meg for everyone in 2015. Now does it make sense if spending money to meet a 2Meg limit to put that towards a solution that will not need further spending in three years time?

I expect people will shout communism, but currently I see money been wasted.

my argument is if someone can already get 15mbit, then upgrading them to do 40mbit is not very efficient spending.
its far more rewarding as a whole if instead that same money upgrades someone on 1mbit to 40mbit. or even a not spot.

This is a problem of commercial vs state rollout tho, commercial will go on what they consider most financially rewarding whilst state will go on who needs it more.

As it stands there is a strong link between BT's rollout and affluency, so its ironically even going to generate a rich/poor part of the country division of availability of BT based broadband services.

So what I think should be going on is FTTC concentrated first on areas with long cable runs between exchange and cabinet, cabinets near exchanges skipped. When there is no long runs left and only then start FTTP investment, that been prioritised on areas with poorest performance and/or highest population density, linking to affluency should be made illegal because in my view broadband is now a utility, and if the power companies dared to only do improvements to affluent areas there would be an outcry.

Edited by Chrysalis (Tue 08-Feb-11 15:39:50)

If you load up a dozen Beeb site pages a day that's half a GB of data

Really? Are you saying each BBC page, is around 41MB of data?

You must visit a very odd bit of the BBC, or are playing every single piece of audio and video on each page you visit. BBC is pretty good in that a click is needed to play video/audio.

When It comes to broadband, I have a very dim view of the media.

In reply to a post by krazykizza:

You just can't win. Some users will want it cheaper, and some will want more bandwidth. But you are kinda right, 40mbps flat out won't be possible as for that to happen you'd need 1:1 contention ratios.

Not neccessarily - not unless you're suggesting everyone runs their connection flat out.

Right now Be are providing their users with a service that doesn't slow down 24/7/365. They don't sell an uncontended service though. It's all the more impressive given that Be attracts people who want to do a lot of downloading and market their service as being truly unlimited.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

try to think out of the box, maybe people use broadband for more than you do.

Maybe but they've been able to tell me what they are doing. I even started a thread earlier and didn't get many ideas.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

try to think out of the box, maybe people use broadband for more than you do.

Maybe but they've been able to tell me what they are doing. I even started a thread earlier and didn't get many ideas.

I suspect that not many are going to publicly admit the most obvious usage....

whilst state will go on who needs it more

really ? You hope so but have no way of knowing. They are likely to go for most connections per subsidy and end up doing what a commercial operator would do.

Broadband may be a utility in your opinion, yet 30% of houses don't have it and half of Glaswegian houses don't. There isn't a USO it is a "first world problem" not having broadband or having slow broadband.

A city with >50% ethnics and low takeup in ethnic communities isn't going to be attractive to investors, or civil servants.

I suspect that not many are going to publicly admit the most obvious usage....

that'll be where the value to the economy is - more porn.

US annual spend on porn exceeds African national debt.

It's all the more impressive given that Be attracts people

doesn't attract many people though, does it. Is it making any money yet ?

I'm sure it's a wonderful service but it never got anywhere in marketing or business terms. O2 is little better despite throwing money at it.