USO Expectations ! 174000 out of 190000 will have to pay

The latestConnected Nations report from OFCOM has an interesting paragraph on the USO that will bring a lot of people up short on their USO expectations.

The universal broadband service is helping some people unable to get decent broadband.
Factoring in coverage from both fixed and fixed-wireless networks, we estimate that around
190,000 homes and businesses (0.6%) are still without access to a decent broadband connection.
These properties may be eligible for a connection under the universal service, with no costs to
the customer unless these exceed £3,400. We expect around 16,000 properties could receive a
universal service connection, without additional costs needing to be met by the customer.

So OFCOM expect that ONLY 16k out of 190k properties will be provided with a 'Free' (standard cost) USO service and 174k will have some sort of charge if they are prepared to pay it.

Edited by kitcat (Thu 17-Dec-20 14:24:19)

Should be noted that the 190,000 is the number after they've allowed for 4G coverage to full fill USO obligation.

If memory from the quick read today, there is around 500,000 via 4G or fixed wireless services.

Andrew
Yes, 583k in total

393K access by Fixed wireless access ( Mobile or WISP) leaving 190k for the fixed USO.

Figure 8 in the report.

The whole thing was interesting reading but took a little while to completely read.

My main issue with the USO is the lack of options or flexibility.

My personal journey down this route started off my trying to get an explaination out of Openreach as to why my neighbour can get FTTC and I can't despite sharing the same cable down the road. Having failed to get this I took the USO route and found that my EE coverage isn't good enough to qualify which leaves FTTP as the only option.
Openreach gave me a rough price of £70-80k to start with which then went up to £112k after they thought about it a while. I fully accept that installing stuff costs money but to add a bit of context I live 150m down the lane from the last house they enabled for FTTP so it seems a bit expensive.

At this point the option is pay the £112k or live with a 0.5MBit/s ADSL service. I opted to sort the problem myself and 4G router with a Vodafone sim which is working well enough but I'm still convinced that for a very small amount of money Openreach could get me a copper connection that would get me out of that 0.6%. Yes I'd love FTTP but a 30MBit FTTC connection would tick the box and do me for now and I'd be very surprised if there weren't more easy wins on that list if engineers were given a bit of freedom to think about them.

FarmerStuart

Sounds like you are one of the many unlucky ones.

You need to know what speed your neighbour can get if it is under 15Mb the extra 150m will make your speed too low to meet the 10Mb minimum.

Your best bet is better 4G coverage. You may want to check the other operators because sometimes they have better coverage in an area than EE. ( BT will only offer you EE) .See what you best mobile coverage outside the house including any close high points.

Hi kitcat,

As with everything the situation isn't as straight forward as it could be! For me and my next door neighbour the copper comes from the bottom of the lane on poles so his FTTC enabled line goes past me to get to him so I'm approx 100m closer to the cab than him. 50m up the road past him the next house is fed from the other end of the lane via a duct and that has FTTP. We're in between 2 exchanges and one postcode covers 3 houses served by 3 technologies via 2 exchanges!
If they ran about 160m more duct from the village end they could make the copper line going the other way redundant saving 500m of cable. Even the dig would be easy, 1 tarmac drive to reinstate and the rest is soft verge plus the water main runs down the other side of the road so there is nothing to hit!

EE coverage comes in max 6MBit/s round here, 3 and O2 are even worse but I can get 20MBit/s each way off the local Vodafone mast using a Mikrotik router fairly consistantly. To be honest it is good enough I'm just frustrated that it wouldn't take a huge amouth of effort and money to make things much better.

For now my best hope is to dust off my point to point wireless kit and make friends with the guy that has just bought the FTTP enabled house...