News Ofcom releases Infrastructure Report 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/12/bt-broadband-scam

Done a bit of google gymnastics and found this.

 

Thanks for digging that out, i always had suspicions that BT was a law unto its own.
Many years ago when the government allowed cable companies to start laying fiber i had hopes we would finally get better broadband across the UK, at the time all we had was dial up and ISDN, it turned out BT has mostly maintained it's strangle hold on the communications infrastructure of the UK as the cable companies were only allowed to lay cables in very limited areas.

 

No problem. Well finding the thing was quite tricky and its not even the piece I was after, but trying to find it proved a bit harder than I imagined as it was a while ago. At least it had the £1.2b figure in it, and the money for getting BT Sport running with all it's sports contracts came to somewhere close to that figure definitely over £1b. The fact that we paid that to get BT to roll out broadband to rural areas and in 2016, 5% will still only get 2Mb should call for a refund.

 

Its was the goverment's decision to offer money to speed up the rollout of 'superfast broadband', the failures of the BDUK process left the BT group as the only option.
95% of UK households superfast by 2017 and the remaining 5% on the USC with further improvements depending who wins the next election, is not a bad return.

Yet if the goverment did not offer the gap funding, Openreach would be 66% coverage, VM 48% coverage and the rest stuck on adsl.

 

Where are you getting those figures ? I only ask because the figures i have read suggest it's more like 70% coverage, rather than the 114% you suggest.

 

You only have to look at what other countries have spent government/private with similar geographic areas to realise we spent too much, got too little and it's all happening way too late.

 

The figures are for the individual network coverage of UK households, i should have made that more clear.

Comparisons are fine but its what happens in our own market but thats down to the companies and what the regulator allows.
The spending by central goverment on broadband is less then a billion as the 1.2 contains funding for other parts ie £150 million for mobile masts and £150 million for city fibre vounchers.

This is the first goverment to put actual funding in place to improve broadband- why did the previous goverment do nothing?

Have a read of this thread as it explains the issues with the UK market.

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/fi...ings-differently-since-2000.html?page=14&vc=1

 

I'd guess Rupert Murdoch intervened from the 80's keeping pressure until the Government could not stop it any more.

It's always Politicians and Corporations that stop advancement in the UK and US.

Oh whats this just popping up on the news "BT attempting to buy EE for £12.5b", I suppose it helps when you overcharge on your contracts. The next few weeks will be interesting.

 

Attempting to buy EE seems awfully fishy to me, maybe I'm just not wise to the world of business.
Let's see if I've got this straight, BT and governments refuse to invest in super fast BB, new government decides to "invest" £500 million odd to persuade BT to roll out super fast BB to less profitable areas, BT then want's to "invest" £12.5b into buying EE.

If they had the money why did we just hand them £500 million odd on a plate ?

 

It was about £1b all told. The fishy thing is

"One of the biggest worries, I am told, is over what is known as "backhaul" services.

That's the vital bit of the telecoms infrastructure that links mobile transmission masts with the mobile operator's network.

It's run by BT Wholesale.

Now, if there is a deal, that could raise concerns as BT would then be running its own mobile business through the "piping" that is also owns."

Wasn't this at least part of the reason why, BT Cellnet was spun off from the main company and rebranded and sold as O2?

 

The BT group spent £2.5 Billion to build a FTTC/P network to 66% of UK households from 2009/2014, the current goverment decided to speed up the rollout and offer funding through BDUK to upgrade the remaining third (All compnaies aside from BT withdrew from BDUK), which was deemed economically unviable according to the market. (The return beyond 66% coverage is too long without gap funding)

BT/Sky etc want to offer quad play to their customers (phone/tv/broadband/mobile) so they are looking at buying mobile companies.

 

Maybe if the government didn't allow a monopoly on these services we could see the startup of some new companies, if happily lay fiber in my road or town and charge people to use it