One in five UK households cannot afford to be online • Hacker News Board

Re: One in five UK households cannot afford to be online

#21

Post by nine_k » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 1:36 AM UTC

wiredearp wrote: post #13

adaml_623 wrote: post #9

Is there a term from economics where a portion of the population do less and less because they can't afford to travel, properly eat or heat their homes? And who have no chance of educating themselves due to their circumstances? People talk about the UK productivity gap and I wonder when society realises that people who can't afford to eat are not going make great workers.

Capitalism?

Capitalism wants customers to run their capitalist businesses. Capitalism is more about making people consume mindlessly than preventing then from consumption.

But a society is not completely defined by its economic system. Other parts of the culture influence this a lot. It helps that the majority of the population can vote. But it's also about daily interactions, who is seen as undesirable where, etc.

Re: One in five UK households cannot afford to be online

#22

Post by woleium » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 3:56 AM UTC

lapser wrote: post #2

FWIW I used to be a Community Fibre customer (I left them because I moved somewhere outside of their network) and their service was great. It was cheaper than the competition, and worked. Customer support was great too. Their only con is that they're not available in more places (they run their own infrastructure), but I guess you can't expand at the speed of light.

I believe community fiber is a for profit private company, despite what their marketing may imply.

Re: One in five UK households cannot afford to be online

#23

Post by MattPalmer1086 » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 6:21 AM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #17

Severe conflation of mobile data allowance and wired broadband. This looks meaningless.

The article is talking about restricted access to internet. Families who can't afford wired broadband rely on their mobile data allowance. They have phones at least.

Re: One in five UK households cannot afford to be online

#24

Post by Markoff » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 7:14 AM UTC

joromero wrote: post #7

googlryas wrote: post #4

> Thee in ten (29%) will have no choice but to cut back on data to save money What is the marginal cost of 1 MB of cellular data? If the government outlawed usurious data caps/excess fees/throttling, I think that would go a long way to helping more people stay online.

Here in Chile the government forced carriers to allow easy switching between them and banned selling phones locked to one carrier. This was really effective at bringing the prices down. Now I can get 200GB a month for ~15USD including 5G from almost any carrier.

hahaha, here in Czechia you will get at best like 6GB for that price, with 200GB I could use it as my main connection instead broadband

Re: One in five UK households cannot afford to be online

#25

Post by rvieira » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 7:32 AM UTC

deergomoo wrote: post #14

adaml_623 wrote: post #9

Is there a term from economics where a portion of the population do less and less because they can't afford to travel, properly eat or heat their homes? And who have no chance of educating themselves due to their circumstances? People talk about the UK productivity gap and I wonder when society realises that people who can't afford to eat are not going make great workers.

> I wonder when society realises that people who can't afford to eat are not going make great workers Society knows and has always known. This government does not care. I’m quite well off (at least relative to the area I live) and yet I genuinely despair because it feels as though every form of social good is at breaking point.

I second that. Perhaps it's a perfect storm of COVID (NHS degraded), international economic problems (inflation, fuel, food prices), Brexit (bankrupcies, universal shortage of staff, Horizon science funding, etc), fatigue of a decade+ Tory government, sometimes all bundled in one (travel chaos, no staff at airports due to Brexit and COVID), and a "fill your pockets while you can" atmosphere (billions of taxpayers money wasted on PR stunts, alleged fraud, etc), slow erosion of democratic institutions (lowering of standards laws, bonfire of enviromental and worker protection laws, losing trust in the police) but there's this gloomy atmosphere that things will get a lot worse before they get better.

Re: One in five UK households cannot afford to be online

#26

Post by lapser » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 8:59 AM UTC

woleium wrote: post #22

lapser wrote: post #2

FWIW I used to be a Community Fibre customer (I left them because I moved somewhere outside of their network) and their service was great. It was cheaper than the competition, and worked. Customer support was great too. Their only con is that they're not available in more places (they run their own infrastructure), but I guess you can't expand at the speed of light.

I believe community fiber is a for profit private company, despite what their marketing may imply.

Yep, I'm aware. I wasn't implying that they're not. They're on the same level as Hyperoptic, but I feel like Hyperoptic has been trying to expand for a long time, but hasn't done much expanding until Community Fibre came along.