And at 26Mb per customer assuming BT-like contention ratios you'll only get around 70 or so customers on your £50,000pa ATM. Try making a profit with those overheads.

 

So how do the Japanese manage it then Rev?

 

Because presumably they also have a decent pricing structure for their backbone links? Of course, unless you're in Telehouse/Telecity et al, you're totally reliant on BT's base prices for connectivity.

 

Last quarter, BT were making £64.50 pre-tax profit every second.

 

ChrisB you don't need a 150MPH car but you still have one.

 

B20 hit the nail on the head there it is down to the share holders???

The company I work for put Shareholders 1st Customers 2nd and employees 3rd.

Personnaly I think it should be reversed

Employees
Customers
Shareholders

ok without customers there would be no employees but without employees doing the work there would be nothing to sell so no customers and no shareholders.

Corperations are so fixated with appeasing shareholders that they forget about all the other things that make the circle of life work.

My opinion only.

 

If you work for a PLC, then sharholders always come first - no choice.

A lot of these things are driven by demand. If no one is hammering down BT's door (or any other supplier for that matter), then they won't be supplying it.

The infrastructure to support this kind of rollout is massively expensive. Working for a telecom / data supplier, I know that we've been pumping in roughly $500 million a year for the last 5 years to make sure that our global backbone has the capacity to cope with demand.

You can't blame all this on BT. They are handicapped by an inept government who have really only caught onto the idea of the Internet in the last few years (christ, it's been in existance for more than 30).

Having 12 - 24 meg available is fine, but that also assumes that every backbone router and connection on the Internet has the capacity and bandwidth to use it - it doesn't. Even companies the size of Microsoft don't provide that kind of bandwidth to access their websites (I should know, we host a lot of them in the States!). Your downloads are only as fast the slowest link - where ever that may be.

Some of this does smack of 'my line's faster than yours' - so what? As ChrisB says, at this point in time - do we need it? It would be interesting to see some stats on throughput, connection times and download speeds and compare them to some of the domestic services available in this country.

Chris