The news has a say on UK Broadband!

deed02392 · 07-12-2007, 14:12

http://tech.uk.msn.com/features/arti...mentid=6913783

Check this link out. It may be something of a good read for those of you that are sick of your internet speeds. Enjoy

foreverwar · 07-12-2007, 15:32

From the article:-
"Indeed, when many people were asked in a survey by broadbandchoices.co.uk if they were willing to pay extra for an enhanced service, 60% said no or that they didn’t know."

07-12-2007, 15:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by foreverwar

From the article:-
"Indeed, when many people were asked in a survey by broadbandchoices.co.uk if they were willing to pay extra for an enhanced service, 60% said no or that they didn’t know."

And therein lies the problem.

Everyone wants everything for free, we live in a country full of tight gits

That ,and they ask people who only use the net for lookin at emails and the odd download.

Bengie · 07-12-2007, 15:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by foreverwar

From the article:-
"Indeed, when many people were asked in a survey by broadbandchoices.co.uk if they were willing to pay extra for an enhanced service, 60% said no or that they didn’t know."

And if the question was "Would you pay extra to guarantee you got what you already pay for", I wonder what the answer would have been.

v0id · 07-12-2007, 16:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by TraxData

And therein lies the problem.

Everyone wants everything for free, we live in a country full of tight gits

Or, it's because we live in rip off Britain and don't want to pay even more than our European neighbours for broadband

foreverwar · 07-12-2007, 16:23

Or, their Governments subsidise the Infrastructure, as they see it as a business enabler.

Help!!! · 07-12-2007, 16:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by v0id

Or, it's because we live in rip off Britain and don't want to pay even more than our European neighbours for broadband

Agreed, its not a nation of tight fists, we live in a rip off country and I don't see why we pay more than our neighbour and don't get the same service, for example Sweden that have an amazing BB network and pay less than we do.

djchapple · 07-12-2007, 16:55

I think both are true. We are in a rip off Britain but we are mainly a people not prepared to pay for what we receive. We want everything free and are not willing to pay those who provide the service.

Consider music - most believe that it is their right to exchange music for free and that the artists etc have no right to receive any form of payment for their music.

We are just a guilty of ripping off others as we are of being ripped off.

deed02392 · 07-12-2007, 17:12

Both ARE true, but not only are we tight and get ripped off anyway, but our government is tight too! :P

themelon · 07-12-2007, 18:24

Our infastructure has sufferred from many years of a lack of investment. Its the same in all sectors in the UK, Roads, Rail, Telecoms we are still using systems which the victorians designed and havent bother to upgrade them like other countries have.

deed02392 · 07-12-2007, 19:41

It really makes me angry to think that this is the case... does anyone know any government website to see what money is invested in what segments of our countries economy, that would be really interesting.

tvout · 08-12-2007, 20:37

Has anyone else participated in the gadget show test and opinion poll about broadband speed?
www.five.tv/gadgetshow

They interviewed a high up person in VM about broadband speeds. VM was the only broadband company willing to be interviewed.

I know the test on the site is the well known one from www.speedtest.net but thought it worth adding some comments about the speed of my service...

deed02392 · 08-12-2007, 21:47

Unfortunately their speed test is incredibly unreliable, as their service doesn't have enough bandwidth the handle the amount of people testing their speeds.

Morden · 08-12-2007, 23:56

"for example Sweden that have an amazing BB network and pay less than we do"

Perhaps that is because Sweden has one of the highest tax rates in the world at 60%, so answer they do pay more than we do.

The old adage you get what you pay for works well here. Every one moans about tax, but how can the government even fund current services let alone subsidise broadband rollout without raising the top tax rate, which is currently too low.

This is not just the current government, but the Conservatives as well, they started the whole cut tax and budgets. truth is governments think we dont want to pay more, so if they think we want a cost cutters government thats what we will get.

Google is a wonderful thing for seeing how much the government currently spends :-

http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/budget...ud07_index.cfm

Nilrem · 09-12-2007, 00:39

Isn't the swedish BB network heavily subsidised by their government?

From what I can remember we're actually doing pretty well for BB considering the population density, and lack of government subsidies - the likes of Tokyo and South Korea get higher speeds largely because it's cheap to provide very high speeds in a high density high rise (IIRC they have taken to running a fibre optic line rather than normal copper cables, then put a mini phone exchange in the building, as works out cheaper/easier than hundreds of phonelines to the building).

In the end, VM for all their faults are the only company in a position at the moment to actually have the ability to offer truly high speeds to most of it's customers without the need to replace massive amounts of cabling (at least for the cable ones) - if only they had the money to invest in upgrading the central equipment, it's a silly situation in many ways, they've got the most advanced overall cabling to customers but not the money to make best use of it at the moment (hence the speed problems customers are having).