'Tech' City hasn't got proper broadband and it's like BT doesn't CARE

Only £54k? That must be an area with competition.

Because we wanted diversity, BT tacked £220k on their most recent quote for us.

Re: Revenue !=Profit...

She said revenue, so I think it's fair to say she meant revenue, she will have used that instead of profit because it's a bigger number, not because she doesn't know the difference. Politics, like marketing, always goes for the biggest number that's vaguely relevant.

Can't be bothered digging further for the current figure, but the first Google result says that Openreach made 711million euros profit off of 5.2billion euros revenue in 2013, which is a pretty decent ratio.

Re: Well that was well thought out.

That's what comes of using the overcrowded rat infested shithole of London to do business in.

I have a FTTP mini cab on the telephone pole that is outside my house, it has been there for months. We are still waiting for any sign that fibre broadband will be available any time soon.

if you knew what you where talking about you'd understand why it took so long. i'd be pretty pissed if some telco yanked my fibre to give to you because of congestion. to uncongest they need to re route which requires planning and potential outages to customers that might not be in your geographic location but some where on the ring that services your cab/exchange. providing reliable comms is not as easy as just plugging a cable in, the reliability comes from careful methodical planning & despite the fashion for bashing BT, considering the traffic they transit for essentially all uk ISP's (yes even VM) the system on a whole is very reliable and resilient.

If these guys wanted faster internet access they should have ponied up for a proper business dedicated internet connection (MPLS over something service) instead of relying on a cheap as chips residential or small business broadband connection.

If you want a resilient connection go dual carrier with diverse routes. It costs a fortune, requires careful methodical planning & you'll need some skilled network engineers to ensure it runs smoothly all of which costs.

Good ol' Emily

Commercial viability - probably not a phrase that the vacuous tub of lard is familiar with.

Trying to get back onto the front bench?

Sort out existing problems? Nah, that's too difficult, better go for a nice soundbite to release to the press. Maybe 'weird Ed' will forgive me for being a hypocritical champagne socialist.

Emily! Look! It's a white van, with a cross of St. George on it!

Re: THE INTERNET IS TUBES

I'm with BT on this one.

I'm not. BT has lots and lots more tubes, it just won't let anyone play with them.

Re: BT in GB and AT&T in the US

@William

"They want to suck out every penny they can from existing infrastructure and accounts. The only way to force the issue is to remove their lucrative subsidies from the government and penalize them when they don't work on improving the infrastructure and speed of service to the premises."

Basic infrastructure with a natural monopoly (you can't have 56 different companies tearing up roads and hanging spaghetti from poles) should never have been privatised in the first place. Unfortunately, with the exception of roads, Politicos live in some bizarre alternate universe where private monopolies are a good thing (rail, water, gas, electricity).

Re-nationalise OpenReach and run it on a not for profit" basis. The GPO put in half the sub surface trunking at public expense anyway. No need for debating special subsidies or handing out £3000 grants to companies (as a pass through subsidy to OR) who happen to be based in one of 22 marginal constituencies special priority areas.

Re: BT in GB and AT&T in the US

Of course they want to suck every penny out of the infrastructure, it cost them (or in BT's case the British taxpayer) hundreds of millions if not billions of pounds to implement that infrastructure and will now cost billions to upgrade it. The whole purpose of capitalism is to maximise the return from an investment in order to earn a profit and create the capital needed for future investments. Dumping an infrastructure before it has paid for itself or created the capital to replace it is a dumb idea.

In fact it is almost as dumb as a politician demanding that BT provide a service to their constituents. Why should BT have to be told what to do, if it believes it can maximise its profits by providing services elsewhere then that is its right as a private (although shareholder owned) company. If the politician really wants to be able to dictate where business invests its cash and seeks its profits then nationalise the company so that you have the right to make that demand.

Re: Business class...

2.5 minute video taking 9 hours? Even a 2 Mbps line would cope with that.

So BT isn't even providing that much speed to an average customer?

Is 2.5 minutes of video a high bandwidth usage customer?

Re: We cannot spare the money to hook you up...

"although we sold the one we had"

Not even that. It was demerged as a separate company, AFAIK because BT didn't like the amount of money paid in the spectrum auction.

In fact, I wonder what it actually cost BT to do that. Staff TUPEed into O2 at the time would have been in the BT pension scheme. Presumably there would have been a pension scheme with equivalent benefits set up for O2. If the BT scheme hadn't been in deficit it would have been a straight transfer of the appropriate proportion of funds from the BT scheme to the O2 scheme. But as the BT scheme has been in deficit for years did BT have to add in extra to make up for the shortfall?

Re: BT need their money to gain a monopoly...

"BT Retail would suddenly have to compete fairly against the rest and not have £1.2b+ in spare change "

BT Openreach is required to treat all players fairly and equally - but not to make it easy for them to deal with it.

BT Wholesale is not obligated to make a profit when selling to BT retail.

I'll keep pointing to the NZ experience. After several decades of monopoly abuse following on from privatising post office telecoms, NZ looked closely at the Openreach setup in the UK - and forced Telecom NZ to demerge its lines operations. The transformation of the lines side (Chorus NZ) after having been released from the shackles of the incumbent's determined anticompetitive behaviour is nothing short of startling.

Re: Sympathetic - to a point

Yeah if I was buying a house one of the first things I would ask when taking a look is to run a speedtest.net run from their broadband.

I come across a lot of folks that have bought barn conversions out in the wilds of North Norfolk and then moan to me that they decided to buy a £850,000 property 4 miles from the nearest exchange and didn't bother to think about broadband.

Satellite it is then! They can afford it, I saw a nice oil powered Aga in the kitchen there!

Re: The whole point - encourage new businesses

~2004 the national organisation i was working for was paying £2.5k amortised per month per site for 256 -> 512 kbs atm leased lines across ~20 sites. Its expensive complicated stuff and costs. If you want the cheaper broadband but the isp has no capacity it'll cost them to add capacity which may not be economically viable for broadband but could be for a business leased line. I'm sure the company in question would take the same approach to any of their customers where the cost of doing the work would exceed the rate they could charge for it.

Re: The whole point - encourage new businesses

"Thing is, the whole point of providing cheap, fast internet is to allow small businesses to start up and grow."

That is easily achieved by the owners of a TechHub, contracting for business grade circuits and then offering access to tenants - it's just another office service, companies such as Regus know all about this.

"I know in some areas you can get 100Mbps symmetric leased lines for, what, £4k pa, but those costs are very variable."

Not had to get involved in the details for a while, but from memory the price of a leased line is based on an initial premium plus some variable amount determined by line length.

" for 2 and a half years I have put all of them back in the post marked 'not known at this address'."

Every time I've tried returning stuff with a note attached to say "remove from list or face prosecution under Data Protection legislation", stuff promptly stops arriving. Haven't yet tried it with BT. Want to give it a try?

"MP. Parliament. Fiscal responsibility.

Spot the odd one out :-/"

I read this shortly after reading the story about Margaret Hodge complaining about tax avoidance schemes. ;-)

Re: Tech City Feasibility

I'm not sure that tech City was "considered" at all. All that really occured is that Clerkenwell was the tech start up centre and that overflowed into that Old Street area. Then politicians started calling it "Tech City". I may be wrong, but I don't think there was much of a plan about it

Re: Tech City Feasibility

Oversimplification warning, but:

a quick quote on 200Mbit/s on a 1GBit/s bearer - single, haven't asked it about redundant - to the afore-mentioned Spread Eagle, comes back at £4.5k install and £2k/month. So assuming one is setting up a "tech hub" with at least 10 tenants, that comes out at less than £250/month. Allowing for failures/delinquencies say £275/month. If that's too much, 100Mbit/s Internet on 100Mbit/s bearer (TalkTalk), same end point, works out at £77 a month; again, a bit of rounding, call it £100/month. Or put in both, charge the tenants £300/month. Yes, I know i havent put in anything for tech support: these are supposed to be tech companies.

That's retail pricing. And you don't do this sort of thing for just 10 tenants, all paying the same (and if instead you'd prefer to offer 1GBit/s to a nearby data centre, that backhaul cost looks like less than £70/tenant per month).

So, as has been said, where is the landlord in all this?

Re: While this must be galling for the people concerned

if 38 businesses will all stump up £70-100/month, and Ms Thornberry will put up PGs for their rental as a quid pro quo for trying to make political hay out of them, I'm sure something can be done ....