WYP
News Guru
Gigabit broadband should reach half of UK homes by 2025.
Read more about BT's Gigabit Internet plans.
Read more about BT's Gigabit Internet plans.
BT announces its plans to deliver Gigabit broadband across the UK
- Thread starter WYP
- Start date
Dicehunter
Resident Newb
Friend of mine on the European mainland pays £20 a month for Gigabit internet, The prices in the UK are disgusting.
NeverBackDown
AMD Enthusiast
US is worse... 95% of us don't have any other company we can use either. They charge what they want
AlienALX
Well-known member
Nothing like it.
The USA is enormous, and getting broadband everywhere costs a fortune. Remember, our entire country is smaller than most of your lower 48 dude.
You also have to agree to an 18/24 month contract here as well, where as in the USA I could get broadband any time I wanted to buy a modem and just call up Comcast/Roadrunner etc and have it connected that day. Then have it disconnected whenever I felt like it.
UK is greedy dude. Real greedy, given we are so tiny.
None of that costs anything for the private companies that run US or UK ISPs, almost all of the physical infrastructure in both countries has been either fully tax payer funded or heavily government subsidised depending on which tech where.
The issue in both countries essentially comes down to the fact that you're having private companies operating without any real competition, whether that's because they're the only operator in a given area as in some of the worst affected areas of the US, or because they're all fundamentally competing on the same underlying infrastructure, so they have minimal real opportunity to innovate or differentiate their profit and mostly rely on competing by using backhand tricks to raise their profit then just buy up their competitors, similar to the concentration of media ownership in general.
A lot of countries manage to band aid the problems with this franchising model with state enforced broadband universal services, but these in the UK and US these are so weak that they're basically non existent.
Important to remember who funded the development of fibre optic tech from the get go, the UK & US govt's (And therefore tax payers), and how we got to a state where media companies are selling state tech back to us at insane prices, with an example of the UK's path; believing that privatisation could drive deliver benefits without actual competition or risk, to such an extreme Thatcher was willing to sell off the most innovative tech of the time.
Dr Cochrane said:
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NeverBackDown
AMD Enthusiast
US is awful for the exact reason you gave. Our size. You're not correct on your idea of how easy it is to get internet nor anything else you said. No idea where you get these ideas from. Most people only have access to 1 ISP. They have 0 options. They can't cancel. Otherwise they have no internet. Nobody is going to do that.
That is almost the same here in Norway. Depending on where you live and which apartment block. Often the block committee sign a deal with an ISP so when you move in, regardless of renting or buying. You have to connect your internet up to the ISP that the committee have the deal with.
Luckily for us, while we are expensive, or speeds and quality are pretty good. I am currently paying £13 for 60mb/s. I can upgrade to 600 if I want for £75 to which my company will pay £45 of it.
For those in rural areas however, oh boy do they have it bad. Norway outside major cities I guess is like wild country in places. Your nearest neighbout being 5miles away, surrounding by trees and lucky if you can even connect to the net. Thats where my company comes in, providing mobile broadband. Its still a long way to go but we at least can provide LTE with 98% of the country. Although thats not good enough. We need ISPs to reach further. Problem is there is no money in it for them to spending millions for the sake of a handful of residents in the middle of no where.
The pricing to me isn't that bad, but I have an understanding of why it cost's what it does, having designed Residential Fibre/Coax networks and dealing with pricing it up from civils, cabling, splicing, hardware etc etc.
The price for 1Gb internet today may seem high to some because they have to go with BT or others that use the BT network, and because of that most of the times it's a EAD product which is a Business product costing quite a bit of money.
If you can get VM the price is reasonable, it's less than Business customers pay but you don't get the same level of service because you are paying much less.
The thing people have to remember is that it's not cheap in slightest to build a Fibre/Coax or Copper network in the streets, when you take in to account all the ducting, cabling, poles, traffic restrictions, section 51's etc etc.
I remember costing a job, to install a 10Mb Fibre connection that went through a buisness park, the owner of the business wanted full width reinstatment of the footpaths, the distance wasn't to much but I knew before I even went there, that the cost was going to be to much and when I costed it, it came out to over £750,000 for a 10Mb connection and that was just the install cost because of the land owner, needless to say they didn't go ahead with it.
To build the Fibre network with ducting and not poles in the street I live in would cost almost £500,000 if we didn't have the ducting in the ground already, and that even if the whole street signed up would take a fair few years to recover that initial build cost and start making a profit from it.
The larger the area and distance between towns etc, the more it cost's esepcially if you are doing Fibre builds because there is only so much distance you can send data down a Fibre before needing expensive hardware to enable it to go further.
The price for 1Gb internet today may seem high to some because they have to go with BT or others that use the BT network, and because of that most of the times it's a EAD product which is a Business product costing quite a bit of money.
If you can get VM the price is reasonable, it's less than Business customers pay but you don't get the same level of service because you are paying much less.
The thing people have to remember is that it's not cheap in slightest to build a Fibre/Coax or Copper network in the streets, when you take in to account all the ducting, cabling, poles, traffic restrictions, section 51's etc etc.
I remember costing a job, to install a 10Mb Fibre connection that went through a buisness park, the owner of the business wanted full width reinstatment of the footpaths, the distance wasn't to much but I knew before I even went there, that the cost was going to be to much and when I costed it, it came out to over £750,000 for a 10Mb connection and that was just the install cost because of the land owner, needless to say they didn't go ahead with it.
To build the Fibre network with ducting and not poles in the street I live in would cost almost £500,000 if we didn't have the ducting in the ground already, and that even if the whole street signed up would take a fair few years to recover that initial build cost and start making a profit from it.
The larger the area and distance between towns etc, the more it cost's esepcially if you are doing Fibre builds because there is only so much distance you can send data down a Fibre before needing expensive hardware to enable it to go further.
@Damien c
The issue is that we should never have had stop-start rollouts in the first place, even in the 80's BT had developed the tech to a point where they could produce and install fibre cheaper than copper, but that all relied on them being able to start doing it all at once and replacing the copper as they go, and ofc re-using the physical infrastructure (ducting and so on) for copper as much as possible, the maintenance costs of the current copper lines are so high that the cost of a full fibre rollout would have been paid back in reduced maintenance within 2 decades. (And indeed, if we nationalised OpenReach today and govt. funded a full scale FTTH rollout(Now the Tories have finally accepted Labour were right that govt's spend then tax, not the other way round, and that the whole magic money tree argument is economically illiterate), it would still likely be the cheapest option long term).
In fact after their invention of fibre BT calculated that the *only* way to economically roll out FTTH is to do it en-masse, it has to be produced in the largest quantities possible for the economies of scale to work out, hence why you're seeing the costs you are now for fibre lines (And ofc that assumed it was replacing copper, Not complimenting it, because this whole maintaining copper alongside thing has no technical justification, purely profit)
The issue is that we should never have had stop-start rollouts in the first place, even in the 80's BT had developed the tech to a point where they could produce and install fibre cheaper than copper, but that all relied on them being able to start doing it all at once and replacing the copper as they go, and ofc re-using the physical infrastructure (ducting and so on) for copper as much as possible, the maintenance costs of the current copper lines are so high that the cost of a full fibre rollout would have been paid back in reduced maintenance within 2 decades. (And indeed, if we nationalised OpenReach today and govt. funded a full scale FTTH rollout(Now the Tories have finally accepted Labour were right that govt's spend then tax, not the other way round, and that the whole magic money tree argument is economically illiterate), it would still likely be the cheapest option long term).
In fact after their invention of fibre BT calculated that the *only* way to economically roll out FTTH is to do it en-masse, it has to be produced in the largest quantities possible for the economies of scale to work out, hence why you're seeing the costs you are now for fibre lines (And ofc that assumed it was replacing copper, Not complimenting it, because this whole maintaining copper alongside thing has no technical justification, purely profit)
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AlienALX
Well-known member
Didn't know that, cheers for the info.
Kinda ironic that the whole of my county has never seen any sort of cable TV then lol.
Makes the UK even worse
Big issue now is that we're in the age of subsidising private companies for infrastructure rather than just laying it out under nationalised services, so while we give these companies(For the UK, Virgin & OpenReach, a legally separate but BT owned company) billions to lay down the fibre, often the money gets sat on for as long as possible to gain interest so we end up with slow to non existent rollouts from govt money.Didn't know that, cheers for the info.
Kinda ironic that the whole of my county has never seen any sort of cable TV then lol.
Makes the UK even worse
For the US this is much the same:
Americans Taxed $400 Billion For Fiber Optic Internet That Doesn’t Exist: https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2017/11/27/americans-fiber-optic-internet/
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Not sure if I am reading that wrong, but Virgin is not owned by BT.
Virgin are owned by Liberty Global and if I remember correctly do not receive money from the government to build there network, but it's been 5 years since I worked there so they may have received some since but typically the money they spent was what they earned or was given to them by, the parent company Liberty Global.
Yep, you've just read my message wrong, maybe a comma between the two would have cleared things up.
They are indeed separate networks, and for some time it's true that OpenReach/BT got almost all of the funding (Which VM famously got upset about 10 years ago), but they do indeed both receive tax exemptions and also now both heavy subsidies, particularly for this Gigabit rollout (Usually if VM didn't use subsidies it was really because EU laws didn't allow them; You can't use them to build networks in areas already covered by another "SuperFast" broadband service, which is where most of VM's building occurred)
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