Should people pay for broadband based on speed?

Cornucopia

Colin_Maybe wrote: »

The upload speed on fibre will be 9Mbps plus, on my fibre I get 37/9.

I am getting a similar 38/9. I think (stand to be corrected) that the ISPs served by Openreach upgraded upload speeds some while ago.

Ever since the days of 1200/75 baud, though, it has always been the case that download speed is more important to end user experience than upload.

My experience on price is similar to that above: I was with Talktalk for several years, and every time they put the prices up, I would phone them and negotiate a lower price than I'd had before. The lowest price I have ever had for Fibre BB (or indeed any BB) was £20pm (including LR) with Now TV, which has recently finished.

Browntoa

Speed is not always king , it's the backbone away from your cab . You could have 300mb but with no adequate capacity from the cab you could get the equivalent of 2meg and buffering

mnbvcxz

Perverse economics (from the telephone companies perspective.) The slower your internet connection the longer and probably more remote your telephone line. So the people with the slowest speeds ultimately cost the phone company the most to supply. The people getting 80mbps on fibre probably live in dense clusters right next to the telephone exchange/box and so cost the least to supply a line too. So be careful what you wish for, it might not go the way you wish.

I do agree that while a dead phone line gets fixed its far to hard to get a partly degraded phone line fixed to its full potential, or even to find out what that is. And as mentioned knowing what backend capacity your isp has is very opaque too.

Prices? I would say prices have actually fallen lately. Its worrying how the headline prices keep announcing rises yet the prices you can get keeps slowly falling. My monthly phone bill including basic fibre, calls and line rental came out at about £25 a month. Which is probably the cheapest its been in 25 years or so. (Not that I wouldn't mind it being cheaper).

I certainly emphasise though. It is infuriating not to have an easy way to get faster internet like everyone else.

JJ_Egan

My last up to 52 meg fibre cost £3 pm can hardly be termed expensive .

My line currently only capable of 35 meg without dropouts .
No way are OR going to dig up and replace cables for just one user .
Personally i would like to see a surcharge circa £100 PA on each account to go to a nationwide rollout of optical FTTP .

Cornucopia

mnbvcxz wrote: »

Perverse economics (from the telephone companies perspective.) The slower your internet connection the longer and probably more remote your telephone line...

I wonder what the correlation between remoteness and "need" for very high speeds is?

prowla

rajeshk4u wrote: »

How will that solve anything?. It does not matter if I switch from TalkTalk, Sky, BT... they will all use the same physical phone line to my house.

It just happens my line, has more 'noise' on it, so the internet I can get limited, so say to my neighbours, who happen to have a better line. There are spare lines, but they are worse, then what I have.

Well, if the speed of the line was the only factor...

rajeshk4u

BT are advertising regular broadband for up to 10MB. When I enter my postcode the speed goes down to 1-3MB. Yet the price they quote is the same.

They should grade phone lines:
A - good quality
B - average
C - poor

People should pay according to the quality

On Fibre I am getting 26MB download and 0.6MB upload.

So they can focus on people with Grade C phone lines to improve them to get them on to Grade A.

Mister_G

rajeshk4u wrote: »

BT are advertising regular broadband for up to 10MB. When I enter my postcode the speed goes down to 1-3MB. Yet the price they quote is the same.

They should grade phone lines:
A - good quality
B - average
C - poor

People should pay according to the quality

On Fibre I am getting 26MB download and 0.6MB upload.

So they can focus on people with Grade C phone lines to improve them to get them on to Grade A.

You need to understand the laws of physics to appreciate that both ADSL and VDSL (FTTC) speed are determined by the length of copper cable from either the exchange (ADSL) or the local cabinet (VDSL).

The longer the line length, the slower the speed that can be achieved.

Only with FTTP can this be overcome.

Takmon

rajeshk4u wrote: »

BT are advertising regular broadband for up to 10MB. When I enter my postcode the speed goes down to 1-3MB. Yet the price they quote is the same.

They should grade phone lines:
A - good quality
B - average
C - poor

People should pay according to the quality

On Fibre I am getting 26MB download and 0.6MB upload.

So they can focus on people with Grade C phone lines to improve them to get them on to Grade A.

If your getting 26Mbps (Not "MB") then that is a perfectly acceptable speed. I'm surprised that your only getting 0.6Mbps upload; are you doing this speedtest on a device that is wired in using an Ethernet cable because Wi-Fi is too unreliable for speed tests?.

The fact that you can get FTTC at your premises then the slow ADSL speed is irrelevant because you can get faster for a similar price on a FTTC connection.

littleboo

rajeshk4u wrote: »

BT are advertising regular broadband for up to 10MB. When I enter my postcode the speed goes down to 1-3MB. Yet the price they quote is the same.

They should grade phone lines:
A - good quality
B - average
C - poor

People should pay according to the quality

On Fibre I am getting 26MB download and 0.6MB upload.

So they can focus on people with Grade C phone lines to improve them to get them on to Grade A.

You talk about line quality but for copper lines, in the majority of cases its line length that limits the speed. Digging up the road to fix the network as you suggest can't change the line length.