Is bad broadband affecting your ability to work at home?

If 95% have access to > 10 Mbits/s but only 54% take it up, what might this say about how important the other 41% find it?

If you have fast broadband available you can choose whether or not to use it, but if you need it and it is not available then you are scuppered. When looking at the coverage of fast broadband it’s obviously important to look at what is available rather than what customers choose to pay for.

In my previous home I was happy with 7-8 Mbps because my needs were modest and fibre broadband would have cost more. More than half of my neighbours opted for fibre broadband. Where I live now, a mile out of the centre of a small village, the copper broadband is hopeless, which is why I was very happy to be offered an FTTP service that gives me more than the 50 Mbps I pay for.

One of the reasons that I was happy with my copper broadband was that it was fairly reliable and the speed seemed unaffected by the time of day. I’ve stayed with friends where their speed dropped significantly at peak times.

Five or ten years ago I would have paid for fibre broadband if it had been available because I regularly moved large amounts of data on a regular basis. Fortunately, I could do this at work – a perk of the job, like being able to do unpaid overtime.

There are many uses of fast broadband connections other than watching video on demand and an increasing number of people work in jobs where good broadband is important.

Our housing development was completed in about 2014 and was fully fibred to the premises by BT from the outset in 2012. I noticed the other day that contractors on behalf of Virgin Media were feeding more cables into the ducts, presumably in response to demand and the slow speeds that occasionally occur at certain times. At least it will take the pressure off the BT lines and give the VM subscribers an exclusive service.

The sales drive for TV and other digital services delivered by broadband has put pressure on the service providers to supply a fast and reliable download service without buffering and outages due to capacity shortfalls. This means that they are, at last, having to invest in additional capacity in order to honour their contracts and retain their customers.

That’s very encouraging, John. Maybe the same will happen elsewhere and the taxpayer will have to contribute less towards the cost of providing everyone with decent broadband.

I do hope that fibre to the premises is standard on all new estates – or developments as the marketing men like to call them now.

Good points, Malcolm. I certainly disagree with the methodology – or is that just journalistic licence in the interpretation of the statistical report? Streaming time should not be the determinant of a satisfactory broadband service.

Our previous house had Fibre To The Premises [FTTP] but we did not need to make use of its full capacity so only subscribed to the entry-level broadband service, and that was adequate for our purposes. There were frequently two or three computers in use simultaneously but download speed was never an issue. Here, with underground and overhead copper from the fibre-fitted cabinet, the service is also satisfactory.

The point that we and many others have consistently made about the content providers of on-demand capacity-guzzling entertainment services not making any financial or practical contribution to the high-speed fibre network has never seemed to register with Which? and yet it is the most crucial issue if they are going to continuously attack Openreach or other service providers for the lack of coverage.

Businesses have a completely different tariff structure to residential subscribers and presumably pay their way for the capacity they consume . . . except the ‘back bedroom businesses’ which now make up a substantial part of our economy. Are they making a fair contribution towards the telecommunications infrastructure on which they nearly all depend?

It’s also important to remember that society is adapting rapidly to utilise what is perceived as adequate speed broadband.

At the moment it may well be Netflix hogging the bandwidth but current trends suggest this will not the case for long. In the 1950s a telephone in the home was something of a luxury, and it remained that way until well into the ’60s. By the turn of the century, however, almost every house had at least one landline telephone and one can only imagine the lives that have been saved by that device.

I believe broadband is the new telephone service of the third millennium and is experiencing little short of phenomenal growth, the uses of which will quickly become subsumed into a variety of services – healthcare being perhaps the most important but emergency services in general will also reap the benefits.

Just as we regarded the telephone to be a ‘vital’ piece of equipment in the last century, High Speed BB will become, I believe, just as essential to the health and lives of our society.

I agree that we should all have access to high speed broadband [and ultimately to superfast broadband] if we want it, but an economy version of broadband should remain available to those for whom that is sufficient. I know many people who do not use the internet for anything, do not have a home computer of any kind, and are quite happy with a standard land-line. While the proportions might change I think there will always be people who have opted out of using the internet because of its direct and consequential expense, mental incapacity, or physical impairment. I hope society will continue to be inclusive so that such people are not frozen out of independent participation in normal life; it worries me that many organisations, including public bodies, are making it very difficult for people to engage with them unless they use the internet. Who can say that they will be able to stay on-line until the day they die?

A good summary, Patrick and, in answer to your final line, “yes”. We can never be satisfied. We pay for a mobile phone contract on the basis of data used (well I do), call minutes and so on so I think paying for broadband could be based on a similar model. I presume games and films use up potentially a lot of capacity, to the detriment of those using the internet for more worthwhile pursuits. Until we find a way of giving everyone unlimited speed and capacity there needs to be some means of paying more fairly.

I hope Which will answer my question https://conversation.which.co.uk/technology/broadband-connection-working-from-home/#comment-1537046 about what the “average speed” actually means. I don’t see a link to Colum McGuire so perhaps Alex will help see the question is responded too – she’s always there to help. @awhittle

I am more optimistic. Once we are all using fibre broadband and not the obsolescent FTTC, how much will the usability of services be affected by our neighbours downloading films and playing games?

I’ve no problem with charging for use because this could help the roll-out of proper fibre broadband but it would make more sense to levy charges on those companies that profit from use of high speed broadband. How many years have we been complaining that Amazon does not pay enough tax? We just moan and seem to be no nearer to dealing with the problem.

We seem to agree on charging but it will not, of course, be the company that pays; it will be their customers through their subscriptions.

And rightly so, Malcolm, if I may say so.

Thanks Colum. I do think Which? has to be more careful in understanding what reports or surveys it passes on to Members and consumers. Condemning the UK for an average broadband speed that may actually be significantly down to the choices made by subscribers can be extremely misleading and unhelpful,

It would be far more useful to know what average speed would be likely to be achieved if all subscribers with access to fibre chose FTTC or FTTP.

Will Which? point out the deficiency in the Cable results so readers are not lead astray?