Re: To be honest no worse than the 1mb I get at the moment
Um... let's say you get 25Mbps each.
That's a 100 * 25 * some factor (probably 1/10 for standard contention). That's a 250Mbps leased line. They don't really do those so realisitically you're looking at a 1Gbps leased line, instead of a 100Mbps leased line.
That, on it's own, would cost more than £24000 to install if it involves digging up even one road. And then something like £1000 a month ongoing.
Not all 100 people would sign up.
The people installing it (Openreach as opposed to BT) would see much less than £20 of it.
Likely you'll give them £5-6000 a year. They wouldn't be able to afford to keep a leased line up.
On top of that, they'd have to provide you all with service from that cabinet, which means VDSL etc. modems in it, which means an upgrade costing probably about £10k or more again. Then they'd have to handle the other end of the leased line to give you several hundred megs of extra capacity.
And that's assuming they don't have to:
- Dig over a lot of other people's land, run a new cable ANYWHERE back to an exchange with gigabit+ connectivity, rent other people's ducting or install any new capacity.
- Rent out that pipe to another company on a fair an reasonable basis on demand from any of their customers.
- Pay anything at all for ongoing ground rent for the cabinets, ongoing maintenance, equipment, cables, ducts or access routes.
I despite BT/Openreach and have done my utmost to make them lose every piece of custom I can (including leased lines and dozens of telephone lines in a multitude of schools). But I can't say that it's at all cost-effective to give people the Internet service they desire as a private corporation. There's a reason they used to be nationalised and the costs amortized over decades and over the entire nation. Because that's what is required to do it.
And you're not even CLOSE to being "out in the sticks" where there may be no line at all, no cabinet at all, no existing ductwork at all (for kilometeres!), and no well-served exchange nearby (again, for kilometers).
The numbers don't add up. What we should have is a broadband tax that pays for kitting up locations once and for all. Literally FTTC / FTTH, with capacity (if not equipment) enough to go to 100's of Gbit in the future, that everyone pays for, which funds the rural installs that are otherwise completely non-viable.
Because at the moment, you'd be lucky to convince BT to throw you a leased line to your house for £24k and a couple of grand a month in most places that have inadequate broadband.
Case in point: A school just a few miles from Watford... £12k install costs + £10k own costs (we dug our own trenches across farmer's land and sunk fibre ducts of our own in co-operation to reduce their install costs) and £1k a month ongoing. For a 100Mbps leased line which wouldn't serve a street of people on VDSL let alone a town. Total distance - about 500 yards to connect to a cabinet that already existed on a major road with major links back to a central exchange.
The numbers rarely add up. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be making them happen anyway, once, well and for a long time, much like we did copper telephone lines at one time. The cost reductions of then everyone have VoIP capability, online government services, reduced reliance on broadcast TV/radio, etc. etc. would pay for itself eventually. But nobody is going to stump up billions to wire in people who have 1Mbps already, and go bankrupt in the process. That's how NTL's cables all ended up forming Virgin Media's cable network - the costs were already sunk into a bankrupt business.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
