Brits Rejecting Superfast Broadband

Barence writes "Britain's biggest ISPs are struggling to convince customers to upgrade to superfast broadband. Of the six million customers who can get fiber broadband from BT, Britain's biggest ISP, only 300,000 have done so — a conversion rate of only 5%. Only 2.3% of Virgin Media customers, meanwhile, have upgraded to 50Mbits/sec or 100Mbits/sec connections. The chief of Ofcom, Britain's telecoms regulator, admits that take-up is 'still low' and says only families with teenage children are bothering to upgrade to fiber."

Cost?

[NNUfergs]

If it's like any other British technology commodities, it costs more than it's worth. After the promotional pricing ended I pay $70 a month for 40x5Mb/s. ISPs charge WAY to much for their services.

Re:Super fast with a cap?

[wjh31]

Cant speak for BT, but virgin use throttling instead of a cap If you get through more than some amount (typically a few GB's) during peak times your speeds will be throttled to 25% for a few hours, beyond that you can do what you want. And the top end services mentioned here dont even have that throttling....

Re:Not too surprised...

[Anonymous Coward]

When they quote the £35 price, they don't usually include the 'hidden extras'.
I found it impossible to get service at the price, as they wouldn't offer me the service unless I also took out a phone line (yes, even with Virgin cable), at around £15 a month.
The end result is that my 30Mbps broadband is listed at £8.50 per month on the website, but I find myself paying £28.50 per month in reality.

Re:Super fast with a cap?

[TheRaven64]

Virgin's 50Mb/s and 100Mb/s connections have no caps. Their slower connections don't have monthly caps, but they have peak amounts (which generally total something like 5-10GB/day) that will result in your connection being throttled to 25% speed if you exceed them.

Re:Not too surprised...

[PReDiToR]

I suggest that both you and the GP should probably take a look at the Virgin Throttling [virginmedia.com] for higher speed lines.

I'm on the M service and I can raep (oops, my ED side is showing) torrents like they're ... free, as long as I do it at the right time.
Knowing when those times are and having a decent aftermarket firmware on my router which I can set cron jobs in means that I can throttle up and down at the right times so I don't get 5 hours of shit slow service twice a day.

Re:Not too surprised...

[MrNemesis]

Same here - central London and just moved into a house without a phone line and a virgin 50Mb pipe. We got rid of Virgin when we noticed that pings to most servers in europe were 100-150ms and that sites like iPlayer and youtube appeared to be throttled down to 1-2Mb/s download. The Virgin-supplied hardware was also complete and utter dross (two or three reboots a day if you used wireless, and you weren't allowed to replace it with your own kit). People I know on BT have the exact same experience.

Switched to ADSL via BeThere, "only" 24Mb/s (line actually syncs at about 21Mb/s) but pings are in the 20-30ms range and there's no capping going on so it feels much faster.

In summary, people aren't going for these "fast" connections because most people tech-savvy enough to utilise a >25Mb/s pipe are also tech savvy enough to know that service through BT or Virgin is going to be piss-poor throttled arsebiscuits. As soon as the fibre is leased out to competent providers you'll start to see more of a groundswell.

Re:That's what happens...

[TMW2N]

That's odd, since virgin don't limit download with the 50 meg service, and only throttle upload in areas with faster uploads

Re:Not too surprised...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is bullshit. A 200k jpeg will never print at anything above postcard resolution without blurring and artifacts everywhere. It'll look like shit.

If you never intend to print or recrop then sure 200k will do for you. But then what's the point, really?