
Originally Posted by
RobL
Well - to tie you in for 12-18 months Sky and BT will offer it "free", but with line rental at £16.99(ish) per month. That line rental tax will be around as long as BT Openreach infrastructure is the only way to get cost effective broadband to us rural folk. The real cost, once they've given you the intro-offer, is £30/month usually. Line rental plus whatever they decide to charge you.
It's the BDUK £1.2b public money giveaway that worries me, on dead-end copper infrastructure. It's just "wrong". Our government is ensuring the copper remains the only cost effective way, by not supporting community initiatives like B4RN and B4RS, and making it a fair playing field. We're watching the KCC/BDUK project carefully, and measuring their performance as best we can, so that B4RS can fix the problem properly, the right way, once they're done spending our money on it.
I'm lucky enough to get ADSL2+ with 18Mbps to me, and 1.2Mbps back to the internet. I struggle with that, when downloading the next Microsoft Server ISO which is 3+ Gigabytes in size, or when the kids want to watch a movie while I do a conference call using VoIP. We shouldn't be worrying about measly amounts of bandwidth - the technology exists to make it irrelevant. Our government and the incumbent don't want the status quo to change. That's the real problem.