On the day the BT iPlate (a little gadget that's supposed to improve your ADSL performance by an average 1.5 Mbps) goes on sale, my connection is playing up big time. Spent most of the morning so far just checking and restarting my router, repeatedly trying to get key websites to appear in my browser, and generally harumphing around out of sheer frustration.
OK, I get my broadband connection from the ethically sound Phone Co-op (who buy wholesale from Fused Networks or somesuch), and not from BT, but the dark mysteries of Openreach presumably sit behind it all.
Roll on fibre! I don't know about you, but is it not time that UK consumers and SMEs took the bull by the horns and took control of the shambles that is telecoms in the UK. 100Mbps up and down is what I want for my monthly fee please, and I really don't see why I can't have it. Increasingly other places in Europe have it, so why not here in the UK? BT (the incumbent) seems quite happy sweating the copper network for every last drop of profit it can extract from it, and is not keen on getting fibre deployment moving (and looking at it from their perspective you can see why), but that does not help us users one jot. BT needs to take care, else it will find itself surrounded by small "Islands of Fibre" springing up all over the country, and hey presto! no more monopoly. I can't wait.
In fact I've been developing the notion of community owned fibre for my locality over at ColneValleyFibre.net. Sign up there if you're local and keen to get involved, or interested in investing in a profitable community owned utility cooperative.
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