Ofcom proposes access to BT's fibre

Strange really,

Cornwall, Falmouth particularly, was one of the first places in the UK to get ADSL. It was funded by Objective One.

I was one of the first takers of the offering in Falmouth, they even paid for it! It was awesome moving from a 128kb ISDN line to the 1mb ADSL I got then. Moved away from the area recently but was on 4 - 5 meg when I left.

Regards,

Simpic
 
Truros not too badly served atm, got a 13MB llu service and for some reason my TL in St Just has a faster connection there than she has in central London. not sure HOW fast either are tho.
 
I think unfortunately, there are lots of areas all other England where BT and Virgin are neglecting, just because of the population density. This is where we really needed a 50p tax. Because as you say, BT are rolling out FTTC when there are thousands of exchanges they still have upgraded to ADSL2+ Surely you should use all your efforts and resources to get everyone on 24mb.
I'm sorry to say, but this is when the government really need to intervene. Can you imagine not having electricity in your area because it wasn't economical viable, all the villages around you have it.
 
I don't see the issue. If you choose to live in the country then you have to accept that their are some downsides. Forcing telecoms companies to invest in areas where they will never see a return is an archaic idea.
 
seekdestroy said:
I think unfortunately, there are lots of areas all other England where BT and Virgin are neglecting, just because of the population density. This is where we really needed a 50p tax. Because as you say, BT are rolling out FTTC when there are thousands of exchanges they still have upgraded to ADSL2+ Surely you should use all your efforts and resources to get everyone on 24mb.
I'm sorry to say, but this is when the government really need to intervene. Can you imagine not having electricity in your area because it wasn't economical viable, all the villages around you have it.
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Why should people who choose not to live in the middle of nowhere, pay for someone who chooses to do so? London gets milked for taxation and receives pretty poor services in return.

Internet access hasn't been established as a human right in the UK yet. If it is then making the case for funding will be much easier.
 
Caged said:
I don't see the issue. If you choose to live in the country then you have to accept that their are some downsides.
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Totally agree.

Forcing telecoms companies to invest in areas where they will never see a return is an archaic idea.
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Then they should charge less for internet access? I can't tell you how much it annoys me that I pay the same as someone who can get 24Mb ADSL on Be*, when I get a fraction of the speed .
 
In my opinion the Govt needs to properly invest in FTTH for everyone, Once businesses can guarantee that pretty much every UK home has an awesome connection new services can spring up to take advantage of it. Think things like the On-Live gaming service, decent hi-def streaming TV, Desktop Virtualisation and lots of other cloud oriented services. The UK could become a world leader here.
If we leave it to market forces people will upgrade in dribs and drabs, and it will be decades before prices on the fast services drop enough for a significant enough part of the population to provide a justifiable market for these sorts of things. Economies of scale mean that these services will cost more than they have to as well.

I think it should be paid for from our TV license fee, And our TV spectrum could be eventually sold off to Mobile operators to make a decent chunk of the fibre cost back. TV over IP is the way things are going.
 
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Caged said:
I don't see the issue. If you choose to live in the country then you have to accept that their are some downsides. Forcing telecoms companies to invest in areas where they will never see a return is an archaic idea.
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Except that the electricity argument mentioned previously is perhaps a good one, internet access is the next essential utility and it has (in theory) a massive pay off once there's universal access available.

That said I don't think the government should do it, they're no good at anything within a million miles of technology (look at virtually any government IT project) and I don't think BT should do it (look at 21CN, yes it's an improvement but show it to an ISP and they'll laugh at the design).

Collecting a tax (and doing so on telephone lines or similar seems reasonable) and making that fund available in some way (tax relief sounds logical to me) to companies implementing NGA in rural areas is fairly logical.

No they should expect the same speeds as in central London for the same price but they should see a minimum level of service which is far greater than that currently available.

I also don't agree with the TV bit, yes it's technically possible and has nie new features but TV over IP is a waste of limited bandwidth for rural areas, OTA transmission is far more efficient and logical for rural areas.
 
spudbynight said:
Eh, have you even seen some of the other Telcos out there? Crikey, even Eircom in Ireland is worse (and that is our nearest country)
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I've worked with just about every incumbent telco in western europe (and a fair few elsewhere) and BT rank as about the worst in my opinion, they're unhelpful, they're technically incompetent and spend vast amounts of money for very poor results. As for Eircom, well aren't perfect but they're technically more able than some and have better products than BT as a starting point.
 
bigredshark said:
Except that the electricity argument mentioned previously is perhaps a good one, internet access is the next essential utility and it has (in theory) a massive pay off once there's universal access available.
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Electricity supplies have varying levels of quality as well, and in the country it is generally worse (more spikes, outages etc.)
 
Caged said:
Electricity supplies have varying levels of quality as well, and in the country it is generally worse (more spikes, outages etc.)
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Indeed, but (and I don't like getting into analogies) we're not talking about more outages here, we're talking about the equivalent of having a supply which can run the lights but not the washing machine here. It's particularly relevant as education and the like becomes more reliant on the internet...
 
Oh I agree completely, but I think any major improvements will have to come from regional development funding awarded to local companies after they've had a chance to put a proposal in. Trying to push 2Mb to everyone via a phone line won't work for all the regions - some may be really well suited to a wireless solution, while for others it might be amazingly easy to fibre the lot compared to patching up a phone network.

Making everyone pay 50p on each copper line they have, whether it carries DSL or not, to fund a pitiful 2Mb target was a terrible cop out.
 
The way I see it is that it's inevitable that FTTH is universal, and the cost to lay cables isn't going to change significantly. Given that it makes sense for the country to invest in it as soon as possible to reap the benefits.
If the Infrastructure is there, we will find ways to use it - Google is already looking into what we could do with Gb/s net access.

As it is in a decades time we're going to be looking at countries like Australia and Japan and all the new companies and business models their infrastructure investment enabled and thinking "****, we should have done that" as we play catch up.

There is an opportunity here to be a technological leader. The potential pay-offs far outweigh those of similarly large investments like high speed rail.

Relying on market forces isn't going to cut it, the penetration is limited and the cost of decent service levels is too prohibitive to provide a decent market size for emerging businesses.
 
I disagree with the unhelpful fixation on FTTP (or FTTC for that matter), there are going to be big chunks of the country where FTTx isn't and never will be viable and wireless technologies will make more sense (4G and WiMax will help in reducing latency and increasing bandwidth to bring it on a par with wired broadband, though the UKs 3G networks are rubbish as it stands anyway, just take a look at what you can get in countries like Denmark where it's close to matching our DSL in most respects). Or you can look at where virgin are at with coax, their ridiculous advertising aside, their network isn't really any more fibre optic than anybody else's.

I think the investment should be made by the private sector myself (as the government is rubbish at technology and has yet to show any common sense regarding the internet in general) with suitable assistance to enable access provision in less economically justifiable areas (I'd say tax breaks rather than money for free upfront but that's just me).

State funding and management of telecoms rollouts got us BT last time round, I'd rather not see it happen again...
 
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