Re: Urban areas
@ Graham 25
Nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds putting fibre into locations with no return.
I've tried the same argument (perhaps less succinctly expressed) before and it doesn't seem to work.
@ Jaywin
The economics of running fibre to a handful of people simply don't apply in this case. After all, they've already had to run the fibre past these homes to get to the ones outside of the ring road.
An interesting point, but Graham 25's point may still actually apply, but for slightly different reasons. If the subscribers who currently use ADSL and have an FTTC feed passing them by are in fact satisfied with the (ADSL) speeds they get (OK: < 10 Mb/s) then they have no real incentive to migrate to FTTC (or other faster offering) so BT could find themselves going to the expense of providing an additional cabinet with its contents, the AC supply to it and a fibre to it only to find that an insufficient number of subscribers take up the chance; after all additional charges would apply and if they are happy with what they have why would they bother to upgrade?
Speed has become something of an obsession, and I would dearly love to see some figures showing what people actually need to meet their usage and what they think they need. Chateau Commswonk was originally on an ADSL service that never exceeded 1.6 Mb/s so we jumped (OK I jumped) at the chance to upgrade to what was then 38 Mb/s, although a test a few minutes ago at 1948Z gave something altogether more modest (< 10 Mb/s) although the upload speed had not dropped by a similar factor. (Busy period, I expect, or hope.) However, with just Mrs Commswonk and me sharing this PC and no rug-rats guzzling bandwidth this reduced speed is still more than adequate.
I really would be interested in knowing what speeds people actually need as opposed to what they think they need. Perhaps speed - freaks are really a minority, and perhaps BT knows it.
I must remember to check my speed again in the morning when it's quiet...