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One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

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Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#81

Post by drumhead »

leoedin wrote: post #64
drumhead wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not that bad at all. There's a lot of fud. The whole world is struggling at the moment, you won't find a single country that isn't affected by high interest rates or inflation or some other crisis or issue. We're real doomers in the UK so everything is the end of the world.

It's interesting - I follow various UK and Canadian subreddits, and you get almost the same rhetoric in both. "This country is much worse than it used to be, I'm going to emigrate soon" Except in the UK, they're going to emigrate to Canada. The UK does have some uniquely local problems to deal with, but they're overlayed with a global downturn as well. It's easy to attribute the whole thing to local problems, when in…

Every country in Europe feels the same way. Things are worse and the country is going to the dogs. That's not really the case though. High inflation and the post COVID, Ukraine war situation has caused problems that people haven't seen in a while. On the whole though, things are way better than they have ever been.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#82

Post by cudgy »

rektide wrote: post #75
rlpb wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you have is already the case - that's "OpenReach", owned by the incumbent and required to provide wholesale access to ISPs for the "last mile". Independent ISPs then provide the Internet connectivity. But they have to provide nationwide coverage at uniform pricing. So private companies can provide parallel service in dense urban areas for less.

Here in the US, the courts piece by piece courts took apart Section 271 of Telecommunications Act of 1996 that guarantees unbundled network elements (UNE)/local loop unbundling (LLU). By 2003, the FCC basically gave up. They ignored Congress & said, yeah, fine, broadband is exempt, because it's kind of expensive. Their Trienniel review dismantled UNE/LLU. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-03-36A1.pdf So now…

The new 5G wireless providers are changing this some, at least in urban areas. I’m currently using one and get around 500mbits download rate. Cost is about $25 per month.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#83

Post by cudgy »

Symbiote wrote: post #68
zpeti wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are right on the symptoms, and some of the causes, but let me add some from the other side, as I think left and right both make good points and you have to be intellectually honest if you want to move forward. There are some multinationals who escape taxation, but even if that were perfectly addressed it wouldn't solve the UK's issues. Tax receipts are already close to 40% of GDP, these are record highs,…

I found the same link as the other reply, and I notice the UK's net migration is broadly in line with other wealthier European countries and the USA. You absolutely can have this level of migration, but you need to build the infrastructure to support it (homes, schools, hospitals etc). Relevant statistics on number of dwellings are here [1], and they seem to fit the population increase, but I don't have time to find…

> you need to build the infrastructure to support it (homes, schools, hospitals etc).

Isn’t that the point the above poster was making? If you don’t build the support, then you cannot handle the influx of people.

Immigration without augmentation results in lamentation.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#84

Post by justrealist »

nologic01 wrote: post #42

Exactly the opposite of what should be happening. Homes should be connected with permanent, reliable, high capacity fiber optic networks. Mobile connectivity plays an important role but it should be complementary, an add-on to the backbone not a substitute. Given how the costs of digital technology are generally on a collapsing trend this suggests significant dysfunction. Reducing the computing experience of the enti…

> Mobile connectivity plays an important role but it should be complementary, an add-on to the backbone not a substitute.

Why?

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#85

Post by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn »

bnastic wrote: post #65
Nextgrid wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you have multiple companies each running their own physical network (through the same ducts, no less!) is absolutely wasteful - imagine if we did the same for the electric grid, water or gas. The physical network should be government-managed and any providers can pay for layer-2 access between any 2 points. This will prevent wasteful, redundant infrastructure.

UK government bodies are not known for speedy infrastructure installations/upgrades, which is why the UK has always been at the arse end of broadband speeds in Europe (let alone compared to the rest of world).

Sort of true, but comment suggests UK is much worse, which is sort of not true:

  Country       Mean Mbps

  France          120.01
  Spain           115.61
  Netherlands     113.98
  Malta           107.70
  Monaco          100.26
  Belgium          91.74
  Portugal         91.61
  Norway           88.80
  Sweden           86.76
  Germany          72.95
  United Kingdom   72.06
  Ireland          70.42
  Switzerland      63.20
  Finland          56.28
  Denmark          52.57
  Italy            46.77
  Austria          45.56
source: (xlsx) https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/worldwide-speed-league/202...

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#86

Post by CalRobert »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #58
drumhead wrote: post #16

If you only ever use your phone then there's no point in paying for broadband. I think a lot of people have been taking a look at their subscriptions and cancelling things which they seldom use. Do you really need a sub for a 500mbit connection when you use you phone? You can always cancel it and switch to a much cheaper slower connection or just use you allowance. I had a Disney+ sub which I hardly used so I cancell…

I'm surprised more people aren't doing the opposite. There are pay as you go phone plans that cost hardly anything. Meanwhile there is free WiFi almost everywhere, including at home. If you have broadband. So pay the cable company for fast internet and pay half that or less for mobile service, then connect your mobile to WiFi 97% of the time so you hardly use any mobile data. The math gets even more dramatic if you h…

I pay €13 a month for my phone plan with Gomo and if I needed to I could get by fine just tethering off of that for everything. I pay for 500Mb fibre broadband (€30 a month) as a luxury and because I wfh.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#87

Post by aaomidi »

justrealist wrote: post #84
nologic01 wrote: post #42

Exactly the opposite of what should be happening. Homes should be connected with permanent, reliable, high capacity fiber optic networks. Mobile connectivity plays an important role but it should be complementary, an add-on to the backbone not a substitute. Given how the costs of digital technology are generally on a collapsing trend this suggests significant dysfunction. Reducing the computing experience of the enti…

> Mobile connectivity plays an important role but it should be complementary, an add-on to the backbone not a substitute. Why?

It’s expensive to maintain. It’s slow. It doesn’t scale. It depends heavily on weather. It can be interfered with by a bad party pretty easily.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#88

Post by sega_sai »

Also because just this year broadband companies raised the prices by inflation + several percents. I.e. my monthly bill increased by > 10 quid. And in the same time I'm in a contract (till the end of the year), so I can't even switch. It's not surprising that people cancel their contracts if they can.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#89

Post by ta1243 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #58
drumhead wrote: post #16

If you only ever use your phone then there's no point in paying for broadband. I think a lot of people have been taking a look at their subscriptions and cancelling things which they seldom use. Do you really need a sub for a 500mbit connection when you use you phone? You can always cancel it and switch to a much cheaper slower connection or just use you allowance. I had a Disney+ sub which I hardly used so I cancell…

I'm surprised more people aren't doing the opposite. There are pay as you go phone plans that cost hardly anything. Meanwhile there is free WiFi almost everywhere, including at home. If you have broadband. So pay the cable company for fast internet and pay half that or less for mobile service, then connect your mobile to WiFi 97% of the time so you hardly use any mobile data. The math gets even more dramatic if you h…

Three will give me unlimited data on 4g/5g for £25 a month.

Between line rental and dsl costs you'd struggle to get it that cheap through a landline, even ignoring the fact you still need mobile data.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#90

Post by lucb1e »

aaomidi wrote: post #87
justrealist wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mobile connectivity plays an important role but it should be complementary, an add-on to the backbone not a substitute. Why?

It’s expensive to maintain. It’s slow. It doesn’t scale. It depends heavily on weather. It can be interfered with by a bad party pretty easily.

Expensive to maintain: dunno, but I pay Slow: you can watch HD video ever since 3G came out, and 4G reduced latency a lot

Doesn't scale: that's also a thing 4G apparently addressed. I've never run into capacity issues, just range issues

Depends heavily on weather: never noticed it depending even slightly on weather. I've tested this in heavy rain because I indeed heard that 'straalverbindingen' have issues with this ("beam connection", "directional radio"? Not sure how to translate that word) and because microwave ovens seem to work at 2.4 GHz and water adsorbs this very well, but it appeared to make no difference whatsoever for bandwidth or latency tests on mobile data

Malicious third parties interfering: never heard of this happening to an ordinary citizen, and if you're scared of your government putting up an IMSI catcher, maybe use a VPN

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