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On Fri, 27 May 2011, Vivi Griffin wrote:
Gordon - would love to help you with your company if it means that we get faster broadband is East Devon (specifically Moreton) :-) However, I am not holding my breath that we will get it here. There has to be enough potential customers to make the investment worthwhile and between Moreton , Chagford and a few villages, I don't think there will be.
Moreton & Chagford? East Devon? I think you mean mid... :-) But I'd have thought that in the towns themselves you ought to be able to get up to 8Mb without much issues. 90% of Buckfast and Buckfastleigh ought to get 8Mb or close to it...
However, I have a customer in the middle of no-where near Moreton - fed off the Bovey Tracey exchange and she barely gets 2Mb/sec... Sometimes I think it's luck of the draw where you are and what service you get...
And I have to say - in places like that, it's really not cost effective at all - the sheer capital cost of it all means you're looking at a long-term investment - even if you use the BT Wholesale network as backhaul, you still need to do a "Rutland" and put your own cabinets in - and if that cabinet feeds 20 houses and you get 10% of the up-take - ie. 2 customers - for an expense of £1000's, then ... Even with 20 customers - at what - £20 a month which is the upper limit for most residential customers, then I think you'd struggle to break even...
ie. £400/month, £4800/year, etc. then you take off overheads, etc...The project I did 8 years back really struggled - the real cost of each install for us was over £250, but we offered punters it for £99, then £25 a month - for a contended backhaul of 10Mb, but as it was delivered over 802.11b Wi-Fi the max possible was 4Mb/sec. We got 50 customers in Buckfastleigh (had over 200 in Cornwall) and it still went titsup. You really can't pay an engineer, accounts staff, sales, office, etc. on that and hope to make anything other than a huge loss )-: (And our minimum standing charges to cover the rental of the fibre, premises to put servers routers, etc. was £1000 a month) 50 punters in BFL barely covered it before staff costs...
Utilising copper to the homes is a sensible approach, but getting access to that copper is expensive, and getting backhaul from your own green cabinet expensive too...
As for other wirelsss on a large scale... Anyone remember Ionica???Add to that the recent offcom ruling that 3-year contracts are now prohibited and it's going to be tight for anyone doing it. (I don't agree with anything more than one month myself, but tieing people into a long-term contract is a way of keeping VCs happy and guaranteeing cash-flow)
Also - Maybe it's just jealousy ;-) but I'm not really in-favour (at present) of "superfast broadband" - it's a gimmick at best with a lot of websites simply not able to keep-up! (Think complex ecommerce sites - some woefully underpowered, or just grossly inefficient) I'd much rather have something at a sensible speed which is reliable and less contended. However I'd put 2Mb/sec as the very lowest speed - that's more than enough to stream iPlayer, etc. or to download a movie for later viewing. One thing that's annoying me now is reading about the people on ADSL2+ and/or FTTC whinging about the throughput - haha - haven't you forgotten it's a contended service? I have a couple of customers now on leased lines - it's the way to go - utterly amazing being on a completely uncontended 10Mb/sec line. Far better than anything DSL wise. (But at £500/month, slightly beyond even my reach!)
I was a bit skeptical of peoples ability to download more than a few 10s of GB a month, but I have a couple of business customers who hit their 90GB limit and one residential customer who goes over 100GB a month, and read about people whinging that they can't get more than 300GB a month - what are they doing with it???
Ah well... Gordon
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