Just as another example Plusnet, who I used to be with, could not offer me the same price as a city dweller as 'we were outside their low cost area'

If you want to blame someone blame Ofcom who are fixing what BT can charge and this is more on Market A exchanges than those with an LLU presence with the intention of this being an incentive for others to invest and get a return.

Can I ask whereabouts in Scotland you are? I have some interests up there too and am a regular visitor to some very remote parts.

I'm on the Isle of Skye

not strictly true andrew.

Increasing a line's speed costs money, why do you think openreach refuse to do reroutes, pair swaps, replacing copper etc? It costs money.

Was the FTTC rollout free? no, burst speed costs money.

Also with a percentile billing for backhaul burst speed costs money that side also.

Of course if someone uses more data they more likely to be at their line speed for longer periods of time, so usage goes in hand with line speed.

A user pulling 100gig a month but all at midnight to 6am probably doesnt cost the isp anything extra in terms of backhaul due to the nature of percentile billing, so also the time of day has an impact on cost.

Openreach been made to bill based on line speed would break their business model, would never happen. Also would probably be too complex with line speeds changing all the time due to crosstalk etc.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 19-Aug-15 08:22:20)

Was the FTTC rollout free? no, burst speed costs money.

Note: If you read other posts then I have pointed out that ADSL/ADSL2+ is generally cheaper than FTTC so covers your gripe about what I said.

Yes someone pulling data overnight will not contribute to the usual 95th percentile billing.

The UK tried usage billing i.e. limits were a lot more common for a while but then largely disappeared for the reasons you mention billing complexity, believe the ones that exist still are just there so you can advertise 'product xyz from £3.99 per month' and tease people in who then sign-up to unlimited.

The ultimate way that I think some want to go is this:

1. Line installs charged per minute of engineer time with a minimal call out fee
2. You pay per Mbps of line speed available to you
3. You pay per GB of data downloaded
4. You don't use the line at all you don't pay

i.e. those who've never had a fault feel aggrieved at having to pay so much in line rental and other basic charges.

At the other end there is those that want one nationalised Telco where they will provide perfect service on an equal basis no matter whether in the Hebrides or a 20 story block of flats over looking the Thames and FTTP replace all copper within a year or two on all 27 to 30 million lines.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

At the other end there is those that want one nationalised Telco where they will provide perfect service on an equal basis no matter whether in the Hebrides or a 20 story block of flats over looking the Thames and FTTP replace all copper within a year or two on all 27 to 30 million lines.

It amazes me that anyone still thinks nationalisation of anything is a good idea. But nationalising our telco network after RIPA, Echelon and all the rest of it and general eGovernment incompetency seems almost unbelievably silly

But you're right - there are people around who think it's the best way forward :-/

Openreach is far from perfect, but a great many of the faults can be addressed with remedies that

a) Won't tie up time and money in the court system
b) Will allow current work to continue
c) By having a provider with its faults it gives smaller more agile operators a way to carve out niches
d) Cause a lot of confusion to public and providers.

If Openreach was nationalised then it is possible compulsory purchase orders could be made for various alt-net projects and attempts be made to integrate this into a new 'one network' and licensing might be used to stop alternatives from re-occurring. Openreach may be seen as predatory, but they have nothing like the powers a nationalised operator could deploy.

for what its worth I prefer todays situation to that what we had 5 years ago.

5 years ago we had 24mbit adsl2+ been the same price or even cheaper than a 1mbit adsl line, Made me so angry I jumped ship to VM.

At least now there is multiple tiers of FTTC and adsl below that cheaper. So no we do have some speed based premium which is how it should be.

Per gig billing is so backwards, it would take us back to the internet stoneages.

Regarding engineer billing time, per hour yeah, but per minute is silly.

The problem is an end user cannot ring up their isp and say give me a quote for a full check e.g.

junction box
nte5
all joints between home and cabinet/exchange
top of pole

Openreach offer no such service, instead they just offer a service that does an extremely basic check which (in my opinion) is designed to pass faulty lines. They only checking for sin complaince. AAISP posted a pic on a blog of a communications cabinet infested with bees showing an example of something passing sin but not in a good state.

A big part of the problem is the retail isp's, openreach are far from great, but they take all the blame instead of half of the blame. what the isp's dont tell the end users is the modules ordered for engineer visits so e.g. they may have only ordered a basic JDSU test which I assume is the cheapest callout, and then the customer is angry the engineer leaves only doing that test which unknown to them the engineer is doing what the isp asked.

Then of course we have the situation where openreach give a lot of information to the isp's about DLM etc,. and pretty much none of it is passed on to end users. Its all kept in a big shroud of secrecy. An example of how bad this is, is the recent g.inp rollout which came with no warning to end users and broke 100s of thousands of lines. (yes I consider artifically raising latency due to bad configuration a broken service). End users were left blind as all isp's gave statements the secrecy continued, and only when openreach made some comments to the press alongside unofficial leakages did end users get information.

The problem is basically openreach is too far from the "real" customers, the end users. The isp's arent openreach's customer, they just a middle man. Its an artificial business arrangement drawn up by ofcom which is failing. Its my view when an engineer visists they should have paper work with them to show to the end user what exactly has been ordered, and before leaving the end user should sign off the work, and be able to refuse to sign off if the work isnt satisfactory.

Some examples of end users been misled.

1 - isp claims they cannot reset DLM - wrong they can move a line between DLM profiles or openreach products, which will trigger an automated reset, of course this costs the isp's money hence they dont want to do it or let end users know they can do it.
2 - isp claims they have no idea when DLM will recover - wrong, plusnet posted some information (back when they had a good forum support crew still) showing that they can check DLM for individual lines and how long it has to recover, after they were pressed to show this information automatically tho they stopped giving out more info.

Openreach are far from perfect. Look at other countries to see how bad they are, in romania a home user can get the telco out to fix a line the same day without any threat of fee's. Same in belgium, same in holland, same in sweden. The service level of openreach is hideous, I had an engineer here once tell me he was amazed I had a exec escalated fault after one engineer visit in his words "usually its after a dozen or so visits", so he basically considered a dozen visits for a single fault normal, crazy stuff. Openreach also are the company who are bodging up FTTP installations again something other countries have got on top of for many years now, bodged up g.inp, and managed to rollout a ton of cabinets that dont even fit their business plan.

There is something seriously wrong with openreach, that you have to wait 2 months for a line install, wait a week or so for a fault visit and alongside that a threat of a fee if their basic SIN test passes.

The regulatory position is that Openreach prices are cost-based. If that was taken to the extreme, then it would mean that those on the more expensive to provide and support lines would actually pay more. So areas in high density population areas would pay less and those in low density areas would pay more. As it happens, the regulator has decided (for social reasons) that there will be a single wholesale charge for a line, regardless of actual costs.

So, in principle, (for the line at least), if this cost-based principle was carried through, those on longer lines would actually pay more, not less.

As far as broadband speeds go, there is really no cost difference to OR on how fast a line can run. The sole exception (just about) is the amount of fibre bandwidth required from an FTTC cabinet to the hand-over point. There is a partial recognition of this in that the GEA/FTTC product has slightly different costs according to speed.

Where there is a more significant difference if incurred costs, then that's in the realm of the back-haul, peering and other issues and is really a factor for ISPs.

It has to be borne in mind that OR (GEA/FTTC apart in the mass market area), is a provider of basic network infrastructure. That is (mostly) copper pairs plus a small amount of fibre. That (over copper) broadband is being delivered is something of a fortunate accident. If OR was regulated as a provider or BB (rather than basic network), then that would be a different thing, but that is not how it is set up and it also doesn't reflect market conditions.

It's important to remember that OR don't provide ADSL or ADLS2+ products. They are merely providing a metallic path. The idea that OR should be charging less for longer lines is probably diametrically opposite to the costs OR are incurring (a principle of cost-based price regulation). It may seem unfair that a less capable line should actually cost more to provide, but that's an accident of history. As it is, the regulator averages out different line costs for social reasons.

GEA/FTTC is, of course, a rather different matter. OR do provide much more of the "value chain", but here again I suspect the costs incurred for different speed lines are not substantially different. It's the back-haul, peering and other things which are very different, and those are in the realm of ISPs, not OR.