MSE Collective Switch???

you_llneverwalkalone

Question for MSE Admin....


With the cost of phone & broadband getting out of hand these days & it seems Ofcom are not interested and just give the phone company,s a licence to print money.

Do you think that MSE could try to negotiate a collective switch as they do with the energy company,s?

linni

What a good idea. The only thing is, some would want TV, some would want mobile, some phone calls etc but if it was possible, I'd be interested.

jas88

I seem to remember it was tried last year sometime - the only taker was somebody like Talktalk offering a little bit off their standard package for anyone signing up through that scheme rather than directly, no bargain.

Remember broadband is very different from electricity or gas, where price is the only variable! If I switch to a cheaper (or indeed more expensive) electricity/gas "supplier", I still get exactly the same service from the same company - I just pay a different price for it via a different middleman.

With broadband, though, although everyone except Virgin (and one or two niche cases, like the local fibre service in York) just resells a BT line as far as the exchange, there are major differences in performance and service offered, not just the price.

Right now, I pay £40 a month for broadband. Could I pay half that to get it from TalkTalk instead? Of course - but that wouldn't get me a static IP address, permission to run servers on the connection, IPv6 service or a guarantee of full speed 24x7: my ISP had, back when BT revealed those details, the highest bandwidth allocation per user of any ISP using BT infrastructure. Last week, I had my full 78.9 Mbps (no, it's not "up to 76", it's 78.9Mbps) available 99.67% of the time.

When I had a fault two years ago - packet loss reducing performance slightly - after six Openreach engineer visits, it was escalated and tracked down to a faulty backbone router component within BT's core network, and fixed. How many ISPs offer that level of service?

Offer something on that level more cheaply, I'll be interested. Offer TalkTalk's "web pages load OK most of the time, so what's the problem?" - forget it.

JJ_Egan

MSE collective .
This forum will be flooded with posts asking Martin to fix my broadband .

pmduk

It sounds a good idea in theory. In practice it could become a nightmare, the user base of this site is so huge I doubt there's a provider that could physically cope with the task, remember, just mentioning offers will often bring other websites to their knees. Sorry to bring reality into it!

JRH79

Don't kill collective bargaining on this issue. 10 years ago you'd of never said it was possible with energy but it was achieved. All is required is the consumer power. I'm no tech when it comes to minimum requirements for a decent deal but I'd imagine the UK has a mass market of families accessing the internet for similar reasons and can easily be profiled to offer a package that would meet most requirements in terms of speed, fibre, unlimited data, bandwith etc subject to infrastructure limitations.
Big companies are monopolising deals making you believe you can only get their TVphone addons at a decent price, if at all, if you only buy their broadband. It sounds like MSE need to get the bit between their teeth to start to break up these non negotiable services by starting with a great fibre unlimited data etc deal without the extra TV phone deals. It's about time consumers exercised our power in this area also with MSE's support. The future is shopping around for the extras at a great deal or lots of freebies on top of the basics. Remember, without consumers buying their services they are fodder for shareholders to devour!

brewerdave

.... I've generally found that broadband/phone rental deals can be had without an enormous amount of effort - for instance,I've currently got unlimited ADSL2+ broadband (@ ~16Mb downloads) for nothing for 18 months (having had it free for the previous 2 years!)and by paying up front I've got a year's phone rental for ~ £15.49 per month including a legacy package for free evening and weekend calls, plus I can use 18185 during daytime hours. Can't see any collective deal getting near that.:T I've steered clear of tieing in the TV !
I suspect none of the major ISPs would offer up a "collective" deal for broadband only nowadays.

blink18

is it really any different to what they currently do with things like talktalk, plusnet and sky vouchers as incentives.

or last year with the £5 or so a year line rental / broadband.

I'd call that a collective switch, because i'm sure many thousands of people take up these offers.

and all these 'switchers' will be coming up for renewal at the same time, and there will be other offers around because the competitor broadband providers know this

blink18

jas88 wrote: »

I seem to remember it was tried last year sometime - the only taker was somebody like Talktalk offering a little bit off their standard package for anyone signing up through that scheme rather than directly, no bargain.

Remember broadband is very different from electricity or gas, where price is the only variable! If I switch to a cheaper (or indeed more expensive) electricity/gas "supplier", I still get exactly the same service from the same company - I just pay a different price for it via a different middleman.

With broadband, though, although everyone except Virgin (and one or two niche cases, like the local fibre service in York) just resells a BT line as far as the exchange, there are major differences in performance and service offered, not just the price.

Right now, I pay £40 a month for broadband. Could I pay half that to get it from TalkTalk instead? Of course - but that wouldn't get me a static IP address, permission to run servers on the connection, IPv6 service or a guarantee of full speed 24x7: my ISP had, back when BT revealed those details, the highest bandwidth allocation per user of any ISP using BT infrastructure. Last week, I had my full 78.9 Mbps (no, it's not "up to 76", it's 78.9Mbps) available 99.67% of the time.

When I had a fault two years ago - packet loss reducing performance slightly - after six Openreach engineer visits, it was escalated and tracked down to a faulty backbone router component within BT's core network, and fixed. How many ISPs offer that level of service?

Offer something on that level more cheaply, I'll be interested. Offer TalkTalk's "web pages load OK most of the time, so what's the problem?" - forget it.

but you're in the minority with the needs for your connection, so there would be nobody to have a collective switch with.