back to article Colour us shocked: ISPs not that keen to sign up for Universal Service Obligation

Telco regulator Ofcom has admitted that internet service providers are not particularly eager to sign up to the government's Universal Service Obligation. The USO is intended to give everyone the legal right to request 10Mbps by 2018. However, in its summary of responses for its call for input to the plans earlier this year, …

  1. Roopee Bronze badge

    I suggest that ISPs and telcos should not be allowed to install any fibre (or other >10Mbs) upgrades or any related infrastructure until all their customers have a working 10Mbs connection. That would focus their efforts like nothing else.

    1. Tom_

      That'd certainly focus their efforts on ditching those customers on slow connections.

      1. Roopee Bronze badge

        Re: ditching those customers on slow connections

        That could be made illegal too, in a way that gives the ISP an incentive to hurry up, e.g. Give consumers the right to extend the current contract indefinitely at a yearly-decreasing price, reaching nil in say 5 years, until the connection is improved to 10 Mbs+. And the same deal to be offered to new sign ups too.

        It just needs a bit of creative thinking and a regulator with real purpose and real teeth. OK that's 3 requirements, none of which is going to happen (in the UK at least).

      2. Alan Brown Silver badge

        "That'd certainly focus their efforts on ditching those customers on slow connections."

        Yup, in the same way that certain NHS trusts have eliminated waiting lists by simply refusing to do certain classes of operation.

        1. evilhippo

          Indeed, when perverse incentives are provided, people act perversely. That is why so much "well meaning" regulation ends up having the opposite effect to that imagined by the people who propose it, or at least assorted other highly undesirable effects.

    2. Commswonk

      I suggest that ISPs and telcos should not be allowed to install any fibre (or other >10Mbs) upgrades or any related infrastructure until all their customers have a working 10Mbs connection.

      And how do you propose that they provide 10 Mb/s without using fibre? Until FTTC came along here our immediate locality had < 2 Mb/s ADSL on about 4 route miles of telephone pair between the exchange and the various cabinets. It was only the provision of fibre that got us anywhere near 10 Mb/s, never mind more than that.

      So please clarify the modus operandum that the ISPs should be using.

    3. Tom Wood

      Upgrading to fibre is going to be one major way that customers will get a connection > 10 Mbps. Are you saying that if a customer has a 6 Mbps ASDL connection they can't be upgraded to a 50 Mbps FTTC connection until they and all of their neighbours has first been upgraded to a FTTC connection that has been throttled to exactly 10 Mbps?

      1. Roopee Bronze badge

        throttled

        @TomWood Who mentioned anything about throttling?

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: throttled

          You still haven't answered the question. How, without fibre, do they get a 10meg connection out to all their customers?

      2. theblackhand

        Are there any last mile providers other than Openreach providing less than 10Mbps downstream? My experience with Virgin or other alternative last mile providers is that they provide at least 10Mbps and usually more.

        If the UK is serious about improving residential/SMB Internet access, more investment is needed rather than pretend obligations from ISPs when the majority of them use a common last mile provider - the investment via BT Openreach doesn't appear to have produced great results compared to other countries efforts over similar time frames.

        1. Alan Brown Silver badge

          "the investment via BT Openreach doesn't appear to have produced great results compared to other countries efforts over similar time frames."

          That's because thanks to the miracles of creative accounting, BT have mostly taken the broadband funding allocated for rollouts and spent it elsewhere.

          This is why when New Zealand regulators looked at what was being done here, they refused to play along and made it a condition of getting any more broadband funding that the telco and the linesco be completely split up into 2 companies with separate (unshared) boards, C-level staff and shares.

          The "spectacularly unprofitable" linesco turned out to be doing quite well after all, once the dead hand and vampire squid of the telco head office was removed from it. It's also extremely responsive (Openreach is _deliberately_ setup to be hard to deal with - as an independent company it has to be easy to work with or go bust)

  2. barstewardsquad
    Flame

    So "up to" is OK but "at least" isn't? Guess they don't want to share their cake.

  3. Warm Braw

    The simple solution is to remove the constraints for those who are willing to provide a service - for example by providing free access to Openreach's existing wires and poles in poorly-served areas and wayleaves to cross roads.No universal service then no monopoly.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      "The simple solution is to remove the constraints for those who are willing to provide a service - for example by providing free access to Openreach's existing wires and poles in poorly-served areas"

      Those will be the areas that they'd left poorly served in the years when BT wasn't even allowed to provide fibre? They cherry-picked the areas they wanted to cable up and now the argument seems to be that they should be allowed to piggy-back on somebody else's investment to do what they weren't prepared to do themselves.

  4. Roopee Bronze badge

    @commswonk

    I meant no upgrades to connections that are already at 10+ - putting fibre where it's actually needed just to get a reasonable connection, instead of where BT thinks it can sell most sports, is what BT should have been doing with all that government subsidy...

  5. Mystic Megabyte
    FAIL

    BBC

    In my case it's the BBC who'll be losing. I'm one of the freetards without a TV but who uses iPlayer. That is I used to use it because these days my internet is too slow to stream it. So I won't be buying a TV licence, sorry!

    BTW, BT is my least favourite company, they are total ***********!

    1. P. Lee

      Re: BBC

      >my internet is too slow to stream it.

      And here's the problem. Everyone is obsessed with real-time streaming. An official BBC torrent system would make those problems go away. The tech is quite capable, but so many organisations are intent on making everything difficult.

      1. FlossyThePig

        Re: BBC

        >An official BBC torrent system would make those problems go away

        Didn't the original iPlayer work that way or is my memory clouded by rose tinted specs?

      2. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: BBC

        "An official BBC torrent system would make those problems go away."

        No, an official BBC torrent system would reduce server load.

        If the enduser line is so crappy that it won't allow enough throughput to stream the data from a server it's not going to magically have any more bandwidth if you try and transfer it by torrent.

        The fundamental problem with the UK market is that you have a single monolithic company acting as retailer and wholesaler, getting away with margin squeeze anticompetitive tactics and a regulator loathe to do the logical thing.

        Which is the same thing that happened in New Zealand. The regulator which forced the split was the ministry of commerce (the UK equivalent would be the competitions and markets authority) on the basis of the damage that was being done to the national economy (it was estimated to be affecting GDP significantly to the tune of 8-9% in NZ thanks to the telco's blatent behaviour, but the MoC estimated that BT's behaviour was costing the UK economy about 2-3% of GDP in the current "chinese wall" setup.

        Whilst the end expedient was making further broadband funding conditional on breaking up the company, if they had refused to do so there were plans in hand to pass legislation to force it i(Ie, "we can do this the nice way or the nasty way")

  6. Herby

    Welcome to...

    Net Neutrality!

    You get what you pay for!

    Awaiting the assault of down votes......

  7. BongoJoe

    At the moment I already pay more for being in the sticks because I am not in some sort of cheaper rate zone, i.e. a city. So, I pay more for my broadband and I only get 1Mb/s.

  8. hoola Silver badge

    Universal Service

    Simple, just force everyone to provide the service using their own infrastructure. At that point all the whingers like Virgin will suddenly discover how much it actually costs to provide a service where there isn't a connection every 20 feet. This obsession that BT/Open Reach are the root cause of all problems is unfair. They have invested heavily within the regulatory constraints that bind them. Do you see BT burying fibre 6" underground along the pavement? No because it is too vulnerable. If you live in the middle of bugger all they will provide a phone, there maybe some extra costs but they will do it.

    This is the same as the mobile operators and coverage. We need working 4G before ruching to provide 5G in London.

    1. Warm Braw

      Re: Universal Service

      >Do you see BT burying fibre 6" underground along the pavement?

      No, but I frequently see people with intermittent broadband problems and noisy telephones because of BT cabinets standing in water when it rains. BT has used the "higher engineering standards" and "safety" arguments as a proxy for "rent seeking" right back to the days when you weren't allowed to own your own telephone.

    2. hplasm
      Devil

      Re: Universal Service

      "Do you see BT burying fibre 6" underground along the pavement?"

      No, I usually see them sitting on a little stool in a little stripy tent scratching their head because a week ago they were driving a delivery van.

  9. Pinballdave

    Stop the ISPs from charging full rates for a crippled line.

    Simple solution for the government. Create a 'Legacy' option for all lines that are not capable of supporting the bandwidth required by the universal service obligation, then put a very low cap on the maximum line rental and service charges for those lines.

    If Openreach is only allowed to charge £1 per month line rental, and ISPs can only charge a pro-rata amount of their advertised 'up to' bandwidths for any line failing to meet the obligated minimum, then there will soon be a real effort to upgrade these sub-standard lines.

    1. Down not across

      Re: Stop the ISPs from charging full rates for a crippled line.

      I suppose if "up to X Mbit/s" would suddendly become "up to £Y/mo" instead of flat £Y/mo that might prove some incentive.

      I suspect if that was to happen Y would become higher than it is currently, if Y suddendly became £(real_speed/X)*Y

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Stop the ISPs from charging full rates for a crippled line.

        Down not across

        "I suppose if "up to X Mbit/s" would suddendly become "up to £Y/mo" instead of flat £Y/mo that might prove some incentive.

        I suspect if that was to happen Y would become higher than it is currently, if Y suddendly became £(real_speed/X)*Y"

        You teach algebra to school kids don't you?

        ;-)

  10. hellwig

    Public Option

    "However, the majority of industry and some consumer and business groups argued that public funding would be more appropriate," it said.

    Yeah... make the public pay a corporate entity to upgrade the company's services so that the customers can then pay for those better services. </sarcasm>

    I agree with some others, institute financial penalties for not meeting certain criteria. Don't give the companies a dime. If they want to stay in business and stay competitive, they'll have to invest in their own infrastructure.

    If a store doesn't have the product you want, you don't give the store the money to stock that product, and then buy it off the shelf at retail price.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I suggest imposition of free line rental / internet access / phone call for customers with lines incapable of supporting the a 30Mb limit, with a clause forbidding the telco from dumping the connection / customer, That way fibre would be rolled-out universally & Virgin would be on the hook too. The country would benefit fro a modern infrastructure & maximum prices charged to customers could be capped to prevent these shirker providers from milking the public to cover their enormous under investment in non-city centre areas

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I like your suggestion - of course it would never see the light of day under the elitist tory regime!

      But I like it all the same.

      It conjures up a mental image of a highwayman of old who pounces on traveller at the roadside, drags his target into the trees...

      and then proceeds to get robbed by his target.

      Makes me feel all warm and tingly :-)

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