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[4candles]

In my working days I tried, and usually succeeded, in having a good work/life balance.

Now, with more spare time and more technology, the tech/life balance is harder, I find, to achieve - but I still succeed, most of the time.

Cheers! 

[Weaver]

For me it's option "no choice" for the foreseeable future. No option for an upgrade to a modern FTTP link that is >four miles long as I don't have that kind of cash at the moment.

I might well follow Black Sheep's advice if I were fit. (Haven't been downstairs this week, I'm afraid.)

[willieaames]

Google fiber... 

[niemand]

Regrettably unless Virgin Media come to the rescue I will have precisely zero options beyond either 1.3Mb if I'm lucky ADSL2+ or 60Mb FTTC, so no real choice to be made unless I want to find alternative employment as 1.3Mb is inadequate to work from home.

At some point I'm sure Openreach will see fit to spend the, at most, 400 quid to get fibre in the duct to this property, but in the interim it is what it is and such expenses are reserved for where politically expedient.

[gogeta]

I'm still gonna stick with BT in 2017

[Chrysalis]

ignition how is 60mbit holding you back?

[Bowdon]

I wonder if there will be a time when an ISP's will be able to offer us full fibre for a lump sum up front and a reasonable monthly charge?

[Weaver]

I'm not sure that AA for instance charges any more for FTTP than for VDSL2+copper, iirc - would need to have another dig to recheck.

All AA generally seems to really care about, in the main, is the traffic charges that they themselves get and which they need to pass on to the customer. (Although they now do have an unlimited deal for some business users.) Although there are exceptions.

[ejs]

I don't think ISPs have to pay per MB transferred. But they do have to pay for the total amount of bandwidth (WBC and IPsC separately) which will be available to be shared between all their customers. And that costs over £40 per 1 Mb/s per month.

[Weaver]

@ejs Would it be better if I were to say that an ISP has to pay BT or whoever according to its estimate / forecast of total bandwidth requirement?

[ejs]

Yes, I suppose so. The trouble is there seems to be a total disconnect between those costs and the prices us end users pay. Most people expect to be able to get their full line speed at any time, but if an ISP had to buy that much bandwidth for every end user, they would make a massive loss. So the whole system only works because most people aren't using much bandwidth most of the time, and it's always been like that.

[Weaver]

I've always (perhaps naively) assumed that's exactly what Andrews and Arnold do do, because of their published packet loss and congestion reports, their we are not the bottleneck commitment, the fact that they charge plenty for usage and don't offer all-you-can-eat infinite free deals like many, many ISPs do. They presumably don't make a loss because they charge the customers more and they charge them for what they are actually doing. AA now get bulk purchase deals from TalkTalk Wholesale so they can do their various 1 TB and 10 TB pre-booked per month deals. RevK the boss has talked quite a bit on occasions about costs of purchasing bandwidth or traffic.

I've never ever seen the network slow down, not even for example during the Wimbledon men's final which I watched live streaming because I felt too ill to go downstairs and watch it on TV (via  Sky dish). And even then it didn't wilt. I know that they buy extra bandwidth from BT et al every year before Wimbledon is going to be on.

[Weaver]

[Btw: That wasn't meant to be yet another a sales plug, just an exploration of a hopefully different model, if I have not been misled.    ]