From the BBC:
British Telecom has been accused by a businessman of being unfair to rural areas after quoting more than £56,000 to install broadband at his farmhouse. Tony Simkin, of Beulah, Ceredigion, who has a jewellers in Somerset, wanted to file his VAT returns online. ..
Right. So although he is described as 'a businessman', he is in fact asking for broadband for his remote farmhouse. Why doesn't he get online at his jeweller's shop and file his VAT returns from there? What sort of insane commute does he do every day?
He added: "I believe it is grossly unfair of BT to ignore people in rural areas so that they can maximise their profits in cities and well populated areas."
Does anybody force him to live in remote farmhouse, miles from where his business is? Wherever you live, there's a trade-off. You prefer fresh air and trees to broadband? Move to the countryside. You like having broadband and a shorter commute? Move to the suburbs.
Is there any reason to assume that BT are trying to make an unconscionable profit on this? Maybe they are, in which case he simply declines their offer. Why is he whining about ignoring people in rural areas? Is he happy to put his stock in a van and drive round the countryside offering his wares to 'people in rural areas' for below cost? Or would he rather 'maximise his profits' by running his actual shop in a town-centre?
Twat.
Wednesday 24 March 2010
Whiney moany of the day
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21 comments:
Land values. Would be higher in his area if there was broadband. Would he moan about that too?
RS, indeedy, but having broadband can't possibly add £56,000 to the value of a single farmhouse, can it? Maybe £5,000 or even £10,000 but surely no more than that?
Having LVT would enlarge the area in which installing broadband would make commercial sense (i.e. some of the consumer surplus would be recycled as subsidy to the installers), but it still would not cover the whole country.
I am surprised in France in rural areas they install a satellite type device to each house that is as cheap as chips to receive broad band. Hasn't the UK caught up on this technology yet? What's going on here?
It's not hypocrisy. His neighbours (400 yards away) have broadband and the only reason he can't is because BT have shared his line (which isn't his fault). He is perfectly within his rights to expect similar treatment as that received by his neighbours.
Surely a motorway should be extended to the end of his driveway to shorten this poor soul's commute. Or a rail company should build a station near his home.
Bruce, yup, and a GP's surgery and a shopping parade and so on. But Heaven forfend that anybody else be allowed to build a house there to take advantage of these facilities, for that would be "concreting over The Hallowed Greenbelt".
So you think it's reasonable for somebody to be charged £57k to be hooked up to the internet, because they live in a remote area and run a business?
"To do his VAT return"? Bullshit. You don't need anything but dial-up to do a VAT return, because it's mostly text. The images are well optimised and the browser will cache them anyway after the 1st page.
Most likely, it's actually his holiday home that he rents out and he wants to offer broadband as a service and can't, so some people are going elsewhere.
So, in order to compete, he wants the taxpayer or BT to put in the investment, while he seeks the rewards.
The whole "rural broadband" thing is basically welfare to the rich.
He wants broadband, he should pay the cost of installing it.
I can see the logic in BT paying something towards it (assuming they'd have monopoly rights on selling services through the line - which isn't all that likely these days) based on the fact that they can make a profit by selling services through the line - but there's no way it makes any economic sense for them to pay the whole cost of a line into the middle of nowhere for the benefit of a single household...
@ Anonymous 12.11; BT shared his line (or more correctly the cabling) because of the cost of re-cabling from the exchange, I'd think, which goes back to it being a rural area. It used to be a common device for houses well away from the exchange, so you could argue it's not BT's fault either.
BT don't warrant delivery of broadband. Their universal service mandate covers voice only. If our "businessman" was desperate for broadband, and yet so dumb as to pay for a house without checking whether broadband was available, then he's too dumb to benefit from other people's money AFAIAC.
@Joseph Tagaki: The whole "rural broadband" thing is basically welfare to the rich.
No, in most circumstances. To the extent it's welfare, it would tend to be to the lower paid - lower pay being a defining characteristic of rural life in areas remote enough to have trouble with broadband.
Generally, this is a non-story because if it's that important he could have a satellite system several times quicker than BT broadband both up- and down-stream quickly and easily.
Anon, but he doesn't run his business from home.
JT, excellent point.
RA, FT, thanks for back-up.
Anytime anyone makes a complaint that is essentially "I want something but I want someone else to pay for it" I shift my default position to be "they are tosspots until proven otherwise".
The world abounds in rent-seekers and value-takers
I'd like to live in the country in a big house. I can't afford it.
It's. Not. Fair. Bwaa.
This twat had better shut the fuck up.
Why should the rest of BT's customers essentially subsidise someone who's chosen to live miles from anywhere?
If he doesnt like the cost of the work then he should sort out his own solution.....e.g. if he has line of sight to his neighbour's house and it's less than 1km build a WiFi bridge between the two properties and share the cost of the broadband.
I live in the city and have broadband. I don't have a paddock though and I'd like to ride horses. Land around here is £m's per acre, it's outrageous, something must be done.
Satellite broadband, as used anywhere in Oz that is too remote to get broadband and where dial up isn't good enough. Expensive compared to ADSL but fucking cheap compared to dropping £56K on getting cable laid. You can probably get a few decades worth of satellite broadband for that. If that wasn't good enough for him then he could almost certainly get a mobile broadband dongle for even less. Fuck him.
Cheers for comments. He's not won many friends so far, has he?
Anonymous 24 March 2010 12:11 said...
"It's not hypocrisy. His neighbours (400 yards away) have broadband and the only reason he can't is because BT have shared his line (which isn't his fault). He is perfectly within his rights to expect similar treatment as that received by his neighbours."
Err - presumption alert.
Until confirmed otherwise, it is equally likely that the original cabling was to his neighbour, and they, generously, allowed it to be extended to his house. In which case, he's already a parasitic leech.
It's mind-bogglingly expensive to lay cable. The hardware itself is cheap, but paying blokes in hi-vis jackets to dig the road up, install the ducting, reinstate the tarmac etc. is not (three figures quid per metre). Far, far cheaper is to use the cable TV infrastructure to deliver broadband by stringing it from poles (I get 3 Mbps down the same wire that I get my TV signal). But because the provision of TV outside terrestrial UHF was dominated by satellite, the UK never got a cable network.
DG, that's another good point. Why didn't they just string up his broadband from telegraph poles? That would have only cost £5,000 or something.
Ofcom is aiming to get 2mbps as a broadband USO - 2mbps because the rent seeking mobile industry persuaded them (Mandelson) that that was all that was needed and they could deliver and therefore should get lots of tax payers cash. Whilst this hasn't yet been signed off in Parliament is there is no evidence that I'm aware of that it won't be.
So, the subject of our ire needs to go out and see if he can get a mobile dongle service. If he can't he then needs to start looking at the problems of building mobile towers in rural areas - very expensive and everyone objects to them.
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