Watch out, Openreach: CityFibre swallows Redcentric's network for £5m Plucky Openreach challenger CityFibre has gobbled £5m worth of service provider Redcentric’s network - adding 137km of fibre to the upstart’s network. The deal will extend CityFibre’s growth by three more cities to 40, a move it reckons positions it as an "increasingly powerful national competitor to BT Openreach.” The biz …
Infrastructure will (almost) always be better in a city than in the sticks. There will be better transport links, better communications, better leccy and gas supplies, more jobs etc. This is both why and because there are more people. On the flip side, living in the sticks will (almost) always be more pleasant than living in a city.
This doesn't mean, of course, that the country side should be neglected. There should be a reasonable amount of investment to ensure a reasonable level of service. However, those in the country side should not expect the same standard of service as those in a city for the same cost at the same time. It is much more expensive to supply those services, so they should accept either higher costs or lower level of service, and probably later than in the cities either way.
Expecting super-ultra-fast broadband to be available as early as in the cities for the same cost is rather pie-in-the sky thinking.
"Expecting super-ultra-fast broadband to be available as early as in the cities for the same cost is rather pie-in-the sky thinking."
The problem is that when countryside groups get together to sort this stuff out, BT suddenly decides that an area's viable after all and runs an aggressive doorknocking campaign to get people signed up, thus nobbling the upstart (in some cases after the equipment's been put in but before it's activated).
They then usually take 2-4 years to actually roll out the promised service - the sooner the upstart folds, the longer it'll take to get the BT broadband.
This is blatent anticompetitive behaviour, yet ofcom don't give a monkey's.
I find it a constant source of amusement that there are so many people who live in the middle of nowhere but set up a web based business or just generally bitch about bad internet.
You moved there, I grew up there and the lack of internet taught me to live in cities if you want netflix and online businesses.
You don't hear complaints from city folk about the lack of green space and countryside, we already get the trade off.
Pay for satellite or move, I don't care cry me a river.
so you want all those farmers who sell direct to the public to move into the Cities? (ok, so I'm being simplistic)
What happens to your organic lavender rub then?
I know some small businesses that work perfectly well running their business from out in the sticks. They adapt and eveolve their methods to cater for slow BB speeds.
One of these has been managing very well since that days of Dial-up/ Remember them? He never got more than 19.2Kbits from his home. That didn't stop him and not having 20Mbits now is not stopping him from making shed loads of money.
It can be done. People can adapt and innovate.
so you want all those farmers who sell direct to the public to move into the Cities? (ok, so I'm being simplistic)
I know this was tongue in cheek, but there is a very valid point to be made.
As I mentioned above, reasonable investment needs to be made in rural areas to provide reasonable speeds. When starting out, this farmer will be a small scale operator, and a 4-8Mbit pipe would be more than adequate (heck, 1-2 would do). His website will be hosted elsewhere, and other things can be done to allow more work to be done over a limited pipe.
If he gains traction, he has options. He can pay for satellite internet, for instance. Or he can open a small office and/or warehouse closer to a city. As he starts to grow the business, more options open to him.
So, for a small start-up, a relatively modest connection will do. As the business grows, he will have to ensure he exploits the best available options to keep up. But nothing is held back, as long as a reasonable basic service exists from the start.
Let's face it, the only reasons he would need "super-fast broadband" from the start are:
* He has lots of staff from day 1, which most wouldn't,
* He is self-hosting, which would be insane,
* He want's to stream Netflix, which really has nothing to do with the business.
You're saying it's right that a company should have a monopoly on the the market so it enables them to make as much profit as they like.....so a tiny amount can be used to rollout the service to the uneconomical areas ?. I take it everyone should also be paying double their car tax because there are pot holes that need filling on a barely used road in rural Scotland?...
Claiming to be a competitor to BT Openreach is nonsense as CityFibre does not serve residential properties as there is hardly any profit in it.
Also CityFibre pre-tax loss widens; Chairman to leave and said that to date it has seen no changes in customer behaviour or demand since the U.K. vote to exit the European Union.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cityfibre-pretax-loss-widens-chairman-to-leave-2016-09-26
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