(frankly people in remote areas of the UK are screwed anyway, they're going to end up with satellite broadband "ticking the boxes").
I am screwed in one sense, but it all depends on how desperate you are vs how deep you want to put your hand into your pocket. Multiple line bonding works for me beautifully, it's invisible, it simply
costs.
I read an OFCOM-commissioned report into a test study to answer the question "is satellite even an option, or just an expensive horrible con?". The answer was surprisingly, that it worked well for some applications, and users didn't even whine as they expected to. Obviously for interactive applications and anything that requires low latency it is and always will be an utter nightmare. And as for usability for auntie reading Facebook, whether that is bearable or not depends on the funny black boxes in the system that muck about with the operation of TCP, prefetch web content, and all kinds of vital tricks, which work well to conceal the horribleness of the thing. Unless of course in cases where those techniques are unavailable, because of encryption, VPNs or whatever.
Satellite will get a bit better, but I just can't see it being sustainable, and the gap between the haves and have-nots will only widen if the government adopts this cop-out as a way of pretending they have done the necessary to help the last 5%. Give rural users RF, or better still, just bite the bullet, ditch copper and give FTTP to those in greatest need. Then let economies of scale bring the costs of true fibre down. Shared rate-limited FTTP services might be a nice option for users who don't need mega speeds, don't do TV or movies over the Internet, the just want something half decent that can't support the needs of a multi-user household.
The government shouldn't even think about using the satellite con as a get-out to say they have a viable answer. Even though the Ofcom study said it is not as unusable as users expected and is fine for a very limited number of applications, there needs to be a realisation imho that multiple-user households or, god-forbid, small businesses are out of reach, and the satellite ridiculous costs for feeble performance and scary traffic-shaping are not going to go away. I think as the word gets out, if the government start talking too much about this, people will find out what a nightmare it is that is on offer and word will get around and then the con will evaporate as users I've satellite a bad name.
Unless someone comes up with a split land-line plus satellite architecture that works on VPNs, gives a fast low latency channel together with a bulk load booster channel, then imho satellite is going to shrink to a niche market, like satellite phones versus 4G phones.
The government should simply wake up and say real fibre plus long range RF and to hell with the cost, it's only like electrification of a country or building roads or railways. It's time to upgrade national infrastructure and give everyone 50Mbps if they want it, over real FTTP, or else RF that is not permitted to be ridiculously oversold, and has strong minimum performance limits despite the shared nature of the services.
Whatever needs to be done to force both the price of fibre per metre and the installation costs down, let's make it happen. It shouldn't be up to the whims of commercial companies whose decisions don't and can't align with the national interest. Treat it like electrification and the network owner(s) need to be like the national grid and the electricity utilities, coordinated and with a requirement to deliver a minimum guaranteed service to the nation never mind what they would prefer to spend.
A final thought. The cost _savings_ that fibre brings need to be considered. Copper is so ridiculously unreliable, users are stuck with zero performance guarantees, a service that works when it feels like it because it so vulnerable, and network operators are having to employ thousands of engineer just to keep mending the stupid thing. Fibre is fit for purpose, last-century phone wiring is not, yet BT cleverly keeps on pushing and pushing and tending the life of this obsolete medium, simply because the copper network is one of its three core monopoly assets, something that it owns and which no one else can build. Let anyone start laying local loop FTTP and require Openreach to terminate it as needed at controlled standard costs which are regulated and with requirements for future-proofing that are mandatory. There are a lot of costs to be saved in not having to continuously mend the thing and not having to deal with grumbling confused customers worrying about why on earth performance has gone bad again because of an attack by DLM having a bad day.
Phew, I feel better now. Truly apologise for the ridiculous length of this post.
[Moderator edited to fix the broken quotation link.]
