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British Broadband (Finally) Jumps
seldo writes: "The BBC is reporting that BT's previously-announced cuts in broadband prices are having a rapid effect, and demand for broadband in the UK is suddenly taking off. Finally!"
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Broadband in belgium also experienced heavy price cuts, with increasing subscribers as result, but decreasing bandwidth and increasing problems also.
I have 2 DSL connections from different providers, and both of them are worsening rapidly as theyr user base is growing : I used to have Q3 ping times around 40 to most uk and nl servers, but this has dropped to 130 in the past few months. After some HW upgrades, things are back to 75, which is still a shame for a 38EUR/month subscription.
Cable modem is a whole other story, with some clusters experiencing insane drops ( ping times over 300, ftp speeds below 25KB/sec) for months and months. Depending on the block and city one lives in, speeds range from the above mentioned 25KB/sec to a whopping 750KB/sec (KB yes indeeed !!) but with outages varying from monthly to daily and peaks of hourly !
The customers are ready for it now that the price is dropping, but are the telcos ? Belgacom (the belgian telco) is definitely not : their servers are cracking every day (last month the user webserver, the month before the SMTP server...) and telenet (biggest cable provider) has administration issues (my neigbour didn't pay the first 6 months because they forgot him. Then he received an invoice for 2 years)
Both have customer tech support that I wouldn't even let my dog piss at.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
... is a little less optimistic (and a lot more realistic :)
BT to launch cheaper 'no frills' ADSL service followed by BT goes for broadband broke
Being handled by huge monopolies doesn't help...
-- No sig today
And BT is to release a 'no-frills' service as well: BT to release basic serices
Now all I have to worry about is DSL being rolled out in Ireland - I live 300m from an exchange on a fiber backbone, but the telco will not be rolling dsl out for another 2 years :-/
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
As you can see by the hundreds of people rushing to post on this topic (not), we're not excited or really interested in this story.
Why? Because BT, Cable & Wireless, NTL, and all of the other British telcos have spewed bullsh*t like this in the past without actually delivering.
It's nice that BT is dropping the wholesale price of DSL, but that doesn't actually mean their installations will get any quicker, that the DSL will remain reliable, or even that large swathes of the country will ever get DSL.
In the mid 90's, we were told that cable modems were a 'year away'. Funnily, we were told this in 96, 97, 98, and 99, when the trials started to roll out. A similar thing occured with DSL.
But let's face it, BT is a lumbering giant, and not particularly interested in 'broadband for all'. Unlike Canada, our government won't fork in some $$ to help them out, so we're stuck with their patethetic inefficiency. The UK is a tiny country, but even places like Finland, Sweden, and Canada have better coverage than us.
Wi-Fi = Non Existant
To compound these problems, WiFi is not taking off in the UK at all. I know of a few trials around London, and they want to hook some stuff up in Wales, but as a whole, it's not available. Unlike in the US, we don't have any small local WiFi providers.. why not? Because in remote areas that would benefit from WiFi.. the ISP can't get the affordable bandwidth to hook all of the customers onto the Internet anyway!!
So, Broadband Britain is a sham, and I fear it will remain that way for some time. Move on from this story. Nothing to see here.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Even compared to European prices from other ex-state owned Telcos the price is up to 40% more.
http://www.broadband4britain.com and the ever useful 'reg give the full story.
For a real usable service (I have 2Mb with static IP) you are looking at over $300 per month..
My own experience is that you are encouraged to move to the most appropriate access method - I was urged that a move to a full leased line (at $30k per year!) was ideal for me...
Looks like the BBC is re-posting the BT press releases.. :)
Evil ZEN Scientist
Please note that BT Ignite (wholesale broadband), which has made price cuts is not the same as BT Openworld (Retail DSL/Dialup ISP)...
You can get your DSL from any number of UK ISPs, letting you choose who provides your upstream.
Blimey - it appears that now the moron Bonfield has been forced to resign, his successor MIGHT have actually grasped the concept that people want lower broadband prices and not pathetic 'extras' like classical music services.
They lower the price and more people take it up - genius.
It's just a shame they don't offer more upstream bandwidth at a higher price, as I (and quite a few other people I know) would be willing to pay an extra £10-15/month for 512kbps upstream.
This basically happened because of simple competition. Here in australia, We basically have one option: Telstra, every single provider except optus goes through them on the wholesale level, so they basically control the marketplace, (there plans btw are a stupidly expensive 89 dollars a month for 3 gig of traffic per MONTH, why even bother having broadband?)
With stuff like this in england, hopefully our goverment will open its eyes and realise how stiffling a monopoly for a telco can really be, its about damn time we started to open up this vital service structure a little more, let some competition in.
Nerv
Microsoft IIS is to webserving as KFC is to healthy eating
You mean to say that it wasn't the lack of legally downloadable movies and songs that was holding up broadband access and was instead some bizarre and esoteric reason like "It cost too much"? Now who would ever have imagined that?
Dyolf Knip
Don't think this is BT being generous though they're just trying extend their mononoply position over the local loop into the broadband area.
BT's competitors buy access to the network through BT, so when BT cuts their prices they price their charges so that the minnows can only compete on wafer thin margins.
BT has competition from the cable co's for sure, Telewest and NTL mainly but they are both heavily in debt and have not spent the resources upgrading their networks for broadband access.
For example, I've got a cable phone line and for I live in Parkstone on the Poole/Bournmeouth border and for over 5 years NTL have been promising broadband is coming soon.
I could go to BT but that would mean changing my phone line, and paying BT's higher prices, as for cheap broadband NTL offer a basic 128k service for £15 a month, which would be good if they actually provided across the country (yeah I know 1 meg would be better, but try getting the wife to agree !)
NTL took over the old C&W franchise and have dragged their feet over introducing broadband to all us C&W customers.
The only competition in the sector is really from the small indepedents biting at BT's ankles.
Better stop before I go into rant mode!
BT's ADSL service gives you 256kbps upstream, which is twice that offered by Telewest and NTL, and at only £5/month more
From tomorrow (coincidentally enough) 256kbps upstream will be available. I think it's 50 GBP per month though.
I've been using BT's DSL since last October, when I first got it was VERY lousy with huge ping spikes in online games, and very variable download bandwidth...
:)
sometime around the middle of January, it stopped sucked, lets hope it doesn't slip back to it's previous state
Broadband access in the UK is pretty much limited to these options:
1. ADSL. The "last mile" is monopolised by BT, but there are several ISPs which repackage BT's service. This is the most widely-available option, but I believe only about 50% of the country can get it. BT's exchange upgrades have been very slow in many areas.
BT's wholesale price drop by £10/month (which this article is really about) has only really had a significant effect on the bog standard 512/256Kbps ADSL service, which people have been signing up to in droves. Anything faster is still ludicrously expensive.
2. NTL/Telewest cable. Priced fairly reasonably, but very limited availability. NTL only offer broadband in some of their cabled areas, and in most of these areas they force you to take their awful phone and digital TV package as well.
3. ISDN, which is hugely overpriced and slow compared with other options.
4. Leased lines, which are far outside the price range of most home users.
5. Tele2 wireless. Also quite limited coverage, but they aim to cover areas without other broadband options. Good service, and can offer asymmetric connections (which cable/ADSL can't) up to 2Mbps. But, like all the options, a rip-off compared with what's available in other countries.
I can only hope that the increased uptake will make all the providers drop their prices further. At the moment the UK is a laughing stock in the broadband world.
Um... If access to 802.11b is illegal here, how come so many places in the City do it? Then again, given the pathetic levels of security they seem to have in place, perhaps it should be illegal there, if only so the big banks don't wind up losing all our money to crackers...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I've had NTL broadband (600 up,128 down) for nearly a year now. I've enthused repeatedly to friends how great it is but they didnt take the plunge. The big change is as the article points out the wires only install, no longer do you have to pay BT anywhere in the region of £150 to come and plug in a DSL modem and the monthly rental is significantly cheaper (previously it included the DSL modem rental). So now you can buy a POS £50 DSL modem and for £25/month you have a 512k download. Compare this to over a year ago when I was desperately trying to get broadband and signed up to a contract that was £250 Installation and something like £79/month for the same thing!
The numbers speak for themselves, two of my mates signed up to Pipex within a couple of weeks.
no sig.
Best place to check out what is happening in the UK for ADSL and to talk about the different providers is at www.adslguide.org.uk
it's funny how the rest of the world insists on calling this 'belgian' waffles. There's nothing typically belgian about it : the rest of the world makes them exactly the same way for ages...
Same thing with brussels sprouts
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
From reading many of the replies, I can only offer sympathy to these people. Our provision's been getting better every year though; in 99 I just had a 56K modem to myself with unmetered access after 6pm or on weekends (which was the only time I could ever use it, horrible to imagine now isn't it?). Sept 2000 saw us getting ISDN on surftime via Demon; this set us back 80gbp a month or so but it was fantastic - a real permanent internet connection! with a static IP as well! ISDN is just a digital phone service but if it's unmetered and Demon has no qualms about you being connected 24/7 then why bother hanging up. I even ran a webserver off this system. Now, whilst on holiday in August I idly checked the BT rollout page and it told me that I finally could get DSL. One month later we had a 512/256kbit link, 5 static ip's and this was for 100gbp/mo. Now they've lowered the cost too. I agree this is probably peanuts bandwidthwise compared to what the yanks are getting, but come on how many of you have more bandwidth than that AND still have unlimited use w/static IP and a green card for running servers? probably quite a few but a priviledged few nonetheless.
While Europe is quickly getting reliable and cheap broadband, US-Americans are about to be relegated to second-class internet citizens as our broadband providers roll out their "per megabyte" pricing plans. For shame!
http://milkshake.dexy.org
heres a map of the U.K. now really do you think that broadband can reach most of us ?
http://www.btopenworld.com/broadband/ava61/
really BT need to sort their exchanges out before they offer video on demand via ADSL
(which is their plan after all)
regards
john jones
Now all those Brits can go online and file for their unemployment checks!
Honestly, I think they have some other problems to deal with before broadband internet is the top story, really...
And NTHell are going down the toilet, big-style. See this BBC news announcement here.
;-)
You can hear the sound of the flush, it's only bcos NTHell are such a big turd that they're putting up resistance.
Grab.
I keyed in my post code on BT's availability checker page, and it replied with this helpful message:
BT has no plans to upgrade your exchange in the near term.
BT is working on partnerships with local and national government bodies to evaluate the possibilities of bringing broadband to your area in a cost effective way.
We are also investigating alternative technologies, such as, Satellite Services. We will be providing you with more information on this site at the end of June.
Alternatively you may be receiving service from another telecomms supplier.
It's clear to me that they have no plans to offer DSL in the small town where I live. Ever. They will just cherry-pick the big cities. Small surprise really, as they are in pretty bad shape financially. Good thing that national highways and railroads weren't built like this...
There might be an excuse for this sort of dribbling geographic coverage in the US or Canada, where the distance between cities is enormous. There is little excuse for it here in the UK.