Btw: My ‘line rental’ is 3 * £12 per month which I pay to AA direct, well that’s what AA charge for an additional copper pair, with no voice service on it, so that’s possibly not the same as the usual ‘line rental’ to someone like BT Retail, for which you get voice service? I'm pretty pleased with the additional monthly cost of one more copper pair.
@ejs, @gt94sss2 - I hear you about putting up costs for everyone else, this indeed would be a showstopper if it really affected other people’s charges by a noticeable amount. Buut as for extra capacity, that’s why I used the word ‘dark’. I was wondering if it would cost much more to supply drop cables with more pairs in them either by default or as an option, with only one pair initially connected. Anything that would reduce differential costs, saving on labour.
And as for FTTP, indeed no one wants encourage more copper at the expense of FTTP, but there's no foreseeable chance of me getting FTTP in this political climate. I can't afford to lay 4.6 miles of fibre, and I'm not even sure if the exchange could handle it.
It just seems that there is something wrong in a system where I have to pay BT for something and then I don't even own it afterwards, they do, and then they charge me every month for something that I've already paid for?
And it still just feels wrong that ISPs are trapped in the middle over this, that they are effectively at the mercy of BT as far as being able to offer customers room for expansion. I'm not saying I have the answer, I don't, but I wonder if some better plan could be found, and as the guys have said it would have to be without hurting other users noticeably.
(Lots of local users around here used to have two lines, one for a dial-up modem and one for voice. One local person had three lines, a voice line, fax line and one for a dial-up modem! I tried to persuade her to go DSL and get rid of all the line rentals and use an internet-based fax-to-email gateway service that another local user was familiar with.)