Broadband Tax

[Jim Roper]

I'm not sure I see the logic of making people who own landline telephones pay for other people to have broadband.

 

Haven't you heard of socialism?

[corydoras]

I'm not sure I see the logic of making people who own landline telephones pay for other people to have broadband. If it needs subsidy, pay for it out of general taxation. If there isn't enough money in the pot to pay for it now, is it a luxury we can afford?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8282839.stm

We should be in the first column, not the third one and I don't care how we get there. What happened to this country? We used to be Great Britain; now were content to be One Step In Front of the Cow's Ass Britain.

 

Being behind Japan and South Korea I can live with but being behind Lithuania, Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania is a bit hard to swallow.

[Steve Walker]

Being behind Japan and South Korea I can live with but being behind Lithuania, Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania is a bit hard to swallow.

 

It would be interesting to see how those countries have achieved those figures. There is an EU document on telecoms in Latvia here which does not paint so rosy a picture (see page 3).

 

The report (by Cisco) uses penetration figures in conjunction with speed measurements from speedtest.net - I wonder how much the self-selection of users of that website is skewing the result. The EU document says:

 

"In terms of access speeds, Latvia has a lower share of fixed broadband lines in the 2 to10 Mb/s range, which is the most common in the EU (53.0% compared to 60.8% on average in the EU), and a lower than EU average share of lines in the top range of 10Mb/s and above (8.8% compared to14.1%). The share of low-speed lines (up to 2Mb/s) is accordingly larger than the EU average (38.1% compared to 25.1%)."

 

It does have a smaller group of users with very fast fibre-to-the-home connections - I wonder if that group is skewing the figures on speedtest.net?

 

However dodgy the figures might be for those countries, I agree that it's desirable for the UK to have a forward-looking network infrastructure, but we need to look at where the money to pay for it ought to come from. I'm not sure that a phone tax is the way to go (or that it will raise anywhere near enough money), and the country is broke and up to its ears in debt. It might have been a good thing to spend the 23 billion 3G "windfall" on (not really a windfall, just a tax which will be recouped over time from mobile phone users). Ideally, the people who pay for faster broadband should be the people who use it, but an organic roll-out might take too long, and the chances of borrowing money to speculate on broadband infrastructure must be pretty slim in the current climate.

[chesters1]

probably a clever BT employee gave a backhander to someone to pretend you need a tax but instead its to replace the crap aluminium cables that are now falling apart everywhere!!!

 

BT hmmm looks expensive

clever employee "wait Labour have promised all will have broadband lets exploit Labour to get our cables renewed ,hmmm 50p a month from everyone should just about do it!"

shake of hands all round ,person who knows someone in the cabinet gets on the phone!

 

" hello cabinet chap"

"hello"

" we need everyone to stump up money for new phonelines heres what we suggest"

" whats in it for me"

"free phonecalls ? no thats already free damn ,free broadband NUTS you get that paid for as well! ,bugger its a chairmanship or something somewhere you can get money for"

"fine with me but keep it under your hat ,at the moment just stockpile it and i'l take it when i retire or get fired"

 

the government haven't the brains to think of anything ,they get whispers from self interested parties who "suggest" things that will provide nice things for everyone bar those who elect them ,if theres nothing in it for anyone bar the electors they couldn't give a hoot ,trough trough trough.

the whisperers and the ears they whisper into dont want to help joe public they want to help themselves

Edited October 1, 2009 by chesters1