Brits Rejecting Superfast Broadband 247
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."
Not too surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)
First things I'd look at are price, getting screwed over by the incumbents, then I'd look to see the current state of the country along with Europe, and wondering whether or not I'd have a job next week. Superfast is all good and fine, but if what you have works. It'll work until things get better.
No shit, sherlock (Score:5, Insightful)
Price is clearly a major factor, too. Virgin’s 100Mbits/sec service costs £35 a month (when taken with a Virgin phone line), but its cheapest 10Mbits/sec package costs only £13.50 – almost a third of the price. And while BT does indeed match the price of its top-end ADSL and fibre packages, you can get BT’s up to 20Mbits/sec ADSL for as little as £13 (plus line rental), compared to the minimum £28 per month outlay for fibre. When the whole country’s looking after the pennies, people need a pretty good reason to upgrade.
PC Pro has just discovered that if you increase prices, fewer people will want to pay. They must be on to something.
Upstream! (Score:5, Insightful)
What Virgin Media offers me on the more expensive tariffs is more downstream and a tiny bit more upstream. So I've gone from subscribing to their most expensive plan in 2003 to subscribing to their least expensive one in 2011.
Re:Not too surprised... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not too surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention, why buy a superfast connection whose main usages are going to be things that are more and more likely to get you sued. I say this because it appears that the main leading adopters are families with teenage children...who don't have all that much money themselves. So what are they downloading faster? It's just like the constant marketing of bigger capacity mp3 players....no one has the money to fill them legitimately...so what exactly are these companies expecting to happen?
I know the answer. They want you to buy the service, but not actually use it. It's worked really well for gym memberships for decades.
Catch 22 (Score:3, Insightful)
To some extent, there isn't much of a reason to have a fast connection until there are services that exploit it. But then, who's going to develop services that exploit fast connections when most people don't have them?
If you build it, they will come.
Super fast with a cap? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why bother with 'superfast' if all its going to do is get you to your monthly cap faster ( and potentially overage charges ) ?
People Don't Care (Score:3, Insightful)
Most people in cities will hardly notice the difference between 20Mbit and 50Mbit. It is the people who are out in the middle of nowhere who struggle to get 2Mbit who actually need these upgrades.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Virgin to sell 1.5 gigabit Internet to cocks (Score:2, Insightful)
So now other sites are spamming the /. comments sections with their own drivel?
Re:Upstream! (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. If we want to use all these funky cloud-based services and run automated off-site back-ups, we can't keep pretending that the asymmetry in ADSL can stay at a 10:1 ratio.
Of course, many places will offer you SDSL, as long as you're prepared to pay an order of magnitude more to have it.
Re:No shit, sherlock (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. As a Brit, can I petition the editors to change the title to "Brits rejecting superpricey broadband"?
How about 'superpricey broadband only has 600% annual growth rate', or 'only trebled market penetration in a year'? People don't generally queue up to pay a premium to be early adopters, unless it has an Apple logo on it.
Re:Catch 22 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not too surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got 10 Mbit/s from Virgin, and it's ample to watch two high resolution video streams at once (the most pressure it is usually put under in our two person household). I've considered upgrading (50Mbps is available in my area)- but what's the point? It's never been a limiting factor for me, and the 50Mbps would up my monthly bill by more than 50%.
And not to put too fine a point on it, if you can't convince me (an iPlayer-watching, PC-gaming, large-file-downloading Slashdot reader) that it's worth the money, what hope of convincing a Joe Bloggs, my-computer-is-an-appliance, user?