My FTTC services from Plusnet and Vodafone have beem fine and they are amoungst the cheapest.

Many suppliers sell their products for as much as they can get. I suspect BT get away with charging more because some customers are reluctant to change.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

It makes me rather sad, peoples ceaseless search for the cheapest. You can bet your bottom dollar that these are the same folk shouting the loudest when they receive poor service, or a lesser quality product. These things are cause and effect.

While I partly agree, I have been with Plusnet for FTTC for the past 6 years and have had no issues with the service they provide and they are one of the cheaper providers. I have had several issues with my connection and these are Openreach issues with cabling and just the long line length.

Paying someone like Zen for a premium service won't have changed the way the issues with the cabling were dealt with for me.

For FTTP, cabling issues are likely to be far less of a problem (although a local CFP project has had village wide issues due to cars hitting the telegraph poles, promptly dealt with by Openreach!), so paying a premium for a service is not really all that worthwhile for a 'regular' user. IMO.

I personally just want to see good value. Even with money in my pocket I cannot justify spending £60pm for a gigabit service. £40pm I feel is around the right price point for this type of service and to create more uptake.

In reply to a post by slimj:

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

It makes me rather sad, peoples ceaseless search for the cheapest. You can bet your bottom dollar that these are the same folk shouting the loudest when they receive poor service, or a lesser quality product. These things are cause and effect.

While I partly agree, I have been with Plusnet for FTTC for the past 6 years and have had no issues with the service they provide and they are one of the cheaper providers. I have had several issues with my connection and these are Openreach issues with cabling and just the long line length.

Paying someone like Zen for a premium service won't have changed the way the issues with the cabling were dealt with for me.

For FTTP, cabling issues are likely to be far less of a problem (although a local CFP project has had village wide issues due to cars hitting the telegraph poles, promptly dealt with by Openreach!), so paying a premium for a service is not really all that worthwhile for a 'regular' user. IMO.

I personally just want to see good value. Even with money in my pocket I cannot justify spending £60pm for a gigabit service. £40pm I feel is around the right price point for this type of service and to create more uptake.

Completely agree. In the olden days if you paid for a faster connection the chances are you would be utilising that bandwidth much more. When you are talking 900mbps there aren't many people who will be fully utilising that constantly, its just nice to know its there when you need it. But its not £20 more worth it.

In reply to a post by slimj:

I personally just want to see good value. Even with money in my pocket I cannot justify spending £60pm for a gigabit service. £40pm I feel is around the right price point for this type of service and to create more uptake.

£40pm today can get you 300/50, or even 500/70 (Talktalk).

I'd say that's fast enough for almost any home. Real-world downloads are likely to be limited by wifi capacity, remote server limitations and/or local device speed anyway. With 300/50 I can download a 2GB update in under a minute; if it takes 5 minutes to install it, then a faster download wouldn't make much difference overall.

Where FTTP makes a huge difference is for those on sub-10Mbps ADSL, for whom 80/20 or even 40/10 would be like night and day.