One in five UK households cannot afford to be online(communityfibre.co.uk) |
One in five UK households cannot afford to be online(communityfibre.co.uk) |
People talk about the UK productivity gap and I wonder when society realises that people who can't afford to eat are not going make great workers.
Society knows and has always known. This government does not care.
I’m quite well off (at least relative to the area I live) and yet I genuinely despair because it feels as though every form of social good is at breaking point.
But a society is not completely defined by its economic system. Other parts of the culture influence this a lot. It helps that the majority of the population can vote. But it's also about daily interactions, who is seen as undesirable where, etc.
Their only con is that they're not available in more places (they run their own infrastructure), but I guess you can't expand at the speed of light.
And I suspect communityfibre will be more of the same generally honest proposition (or better). Plus they're promising last mile fibre and 3gbps. So I have high hopes for these guys.
I can't help but notice the disconnect between that commercial proposition and this article's tone. I've been primarily been receiving 3gbps ads from these guys. Not quite on the same mental wavelength as connect the poor so rather surprised to see this...let alone on hn
edit: One area where community fibre will need to up their game is static IP. Hyper has static ipv4 at ~6USD and you get a ipv6 block by default. When you consider that the 1gbps is symetric that static ip starts looking pretty good
What is the marginal cost of 1 MB of cellular data?
If the government outlawed usurious data caps/excess fees/throttling, I think that would go a long way to helping more people stay online.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/itandinterne....
92% of adults in the UK were recent internet users in 2020, up from 91% in 2019.
Almost all adults aged 16 to 44 years in the UK were recent internet users (99%), compared with 54% of adults aged 75 years and over.
Cellular networks have enormous upfront costs.
They also aren't particularly profitable (at least by GAAP standards with how they do depreciation).
It's almost like asking what the marginal cost of wind power is, and asking why poor people don't get free electricity.
It doesn't matter. You're mostly paying for the windmill...
Cell companies are just using it to take easy profits, which ultimately impacts the poorest. Similar to how some banks in the US were using overdraft fees as a profit taking exercise, even structuring transactions to increase overdraft fees.
[0] All numbers are real, and from BT's sim only plan:
https://www.bt.com/products/mobile/sim-only-deals
https://www.bt.com/help/mobile/manage-service/how-can-i-mana...
I also like how, on the second link, they tell you you can "order extra data and minutes" to bridge the gap. You're paying 11.47p/MB, but if you just fill out a form instantaneously the price drops substantially, which is even more evidence that this is usury far above and beyond the reasonable economics of running the network. And finally, the best part, the link for actually filling out that form is broken.
Not to mention, the billing model of charging per GB per month is predatory and doesn't actually address congestion very well. Charging for allocated bandwidth would reduce congestion much better while still giving people unlimited data in non-congested areas (making good use of the radio equipment & airtime since it's already there & paid for regardless of whether it's being used or not) which would open up plenty of new & innovative use-cases.
Absolutely agree with you, but the reason for that predatory price is to scare people into signing up for a base plan with more data than they need thus paying for more than what they'd actually use. This is coupled with contracts so they can't downgrade once they realize they use nowhere near that, even though it's a fully automated service that has no set-up nor termination costs that would otherwise justify a long-term contract.