I use to do DSL customer tech support for bellsouth.net, we got a call from a frustrated but amazingly calm customer in North Carolina who was only getting 256K down but paying for 1.5mbps. After we talked with the line engineers they found that he shouldn't of been installed considering his distance from the Central Office. He decided to keep the service because 256K was better than 33.6K.

A month later we get a call from the same customer wondering why all of a sudden get was getting 1.5mbps. We got the line engineers on the phone to see why.

The reason: A VP of operations for Bellsouth moved into the neighborhood and had a repeater installed.

Lessons learned: A whole community of a telecoms' customers means absolutely nothing in comparison to one VP.

I simply can't understand why any area of Britain, apart perhaps from some isolated Herbridean settlements, are without broadband. ADSL is SO 20th Century. As pointed out by one respondent, there is always satellite broadband for the truly isolated. For all others, broadband can be delivered over cable television lines (mine is a 20 mbit down, 6 mbit up), as well as 2g/3g/4g cell towers (I have a 3G/4G connection -for when I travel, that ranges from 5 mbit to 7.5 mbit - more than sufficient). Most small towns in England surely have both cable and cell phone recepyion. Why is broadband availability such a problem?

I don't think you are personally experienced about the USA, moldywart. We don't have an unnecessary stratification in our attorney ranks. They are are all simply lawyers.

In the US, barristers and lobbyists commonly beg upon judges and officials they plead before the favour of rigorous, multi-year, expert evaluation - without remuneration of any kind whatsoever - the latest showroom prototypes from Mercedes and BMW. For example.

Kinda makes one go all teary-like it's so bloody magnanimous.

I don't know why people are making such a fuse. I have worked for BT for over 5 years and each and every product is trailed exclusively by BT employees.

Reason they don't kick off when it goes down, system needs to retrain, bandwidth limitations and other problems. But also if the public trial they would slate off the service before it gets to the general public giving it a bad reputation.

Also they use it mostly for working from home and have a back up connection most times but also just use it to check email and surf.

Give it to Joe blogs who’s never had a broadband connection and they will take full advantage of it and expect it to just work, they will heavily load the connection with downloading and will in turn make the trial last much longer with the connection dropping out.

Give it to old people to trial and they will use it once in a blue moon so they can't monitor it and how effective it is. They start with long activity times with light use then build up from there.

If he'd paid for a non-ADSL line himself (say fibre) it would have cost him a lot. If BT had provided it that way his tax declaration would have involved a huge benefit in kind. So they fudged it into the trial - presumably at higher expense as HE'S THE ONLY ONE IN THE VILLAGE - and so his benefit in kind is reduced if they bothered to declare it at all.

Those of you with company broadband should remember its a benefit-in-kind if you EVER use it privately.

PS: It cannot make real engineering sense to have only one trialist in the village as all the kit except his own line will be ridiculously lightly loaded, since it ought to be designed to support bulk access in the 10s or 100s of customers. (Unlike 21CN voice ;) ).

http://www.btplc.com/news/articles/showarticle.cfm?articleid={4d8e3f48-3e81-42b0-9f4a-427cd6bdfa00}

It isn't, and probably will never be, viable for consumers.

New (expensive) router. Multiple lines required. Different line for PSTN voice calls. Pricing will be way above what consumers are willing to pay.

(Let's estimate : 100-300 quid for a router. 120 x 3 for BT line installation. 40 quid x 3 every three months line rental. Probably SDSL like ISP fees - 300 quid a month for 2Mb, plus installation (300 quid or so)).

1,300 quid in the first month - over 100 times a cheap ADSL MAX installation!

Nick, next time, can you please spend a minute and a half and actually research your article? It's the first hit on google, for fuck's sake.

BT often use employees as trialists for new technology, how is this a problem? Believe it or not, in a trial, sometimes the tech. doesn't work perfectly and the quality of service is poor. That's why employees are used to volunteer first.

I'm sure if the "normal" residents were taking part they would whinge about the quality anyway. Seems you can't win with some people.

I don't see why they said it was 'a trial'. There are plenty of ways it could have been provided that don't involve extending it to anyone other than the chairman.

Any of those methods could also be provided to the residents if they had enough money. Only the ignorant would complain if the rich chap down the road had a leased line and they could barely afford ADSL MAX.

Sadly, it doesn't work that way. Check your internets-contract. It should have a section about realiability, something like 99% availability or 3 days of outage per year. Consumer-grade wifi is way too unreliable to guarantee that. You also can't send your technicians to repair the boxes several times per month or replace the thing altogether every year (we're talking about outdoor-stuff, right?). You also need a license to send wifi signals at a power high enough to cover some distance.
If there was a cheap, reliable way to sell internets to everyone, the telcos would do it, don't you think?

Beam the connection from somewhere else using the super-duper 2.4 & 5 Ghz technology and a 29+ dBi dish...

Get 4-5 P3 boxes (4PCI slots, 3 for wifi, 1xLAN), 4-5 omni antennas, ~8 grid antennas, here you go.
Internet and bred to the masses !!

BT are a private company whose job it is to make money for their shareholders, not to subsidise people who choose to live in the arse end of nowhere.

If they choose to provide one of their employees with a piece of equipment to help him do his job, then what's the problem?

Heck, my employer gives me a blackberry, 3G card, laptop and will even pay for broadband if I ask dead nicely.

There's such a thing as satellite broadband ... or the city if you can't get ADSL in your neck of the woods.

If BT were a branch of the government, and their chairman a public servant, I can see how this could be construed as corruption. It isn't.

Is Hambleden stuck 25 years in the past, or something, are the residents not aware that it's now a privately-owned company?

What BT are doing may be insensitive and and bit selfish, but corrupt it is not.

You all thought this was 2009 (almost 2010), but you were all wrong.... this is 1984 and we're all living in the animal farm. Unfortunately the pigs are more equal than the others....

(Yeah, I woke up all Orwellanian today....)