[rescue] wire my house!

[Peter]

Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 05:26:27PM +0000, Peter wrote:
>> It's still a bargain. I'm paying 30 quid (USD50-ish) a month for
>> 1024/256, but Zen are considered once of the best providers.
> Wow. I'm paying $45/month (US) for 8 megabits down, 512 kilobits up.

There's various reasons for the discrepancy:

The USA was traditionally where the content was, and the apportioning
of the costs for international transit between the endpoints still
reflect this obsolete notion.

ISPs typically have a single PoP and have BT provide DSLAMs for their
customers across the UK and backhaul IP back to that PoP. For example,
BT have to move my packets between these points:

  http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=from%3A+B807PX+to%3A+OL165EA

BT also have monopoly pricing on that service. The DSLAM port and last
mile copper is around #13/month, backhaul works out at about #400 per
Mb/s per month, and the ISP head end is hundreds of thousands of
pounds.

You can currently only go faster than 2048/256 if you install your own
kit in the exchange. It was 2004 before BT got round to installing a
DSLAM in the Studley exchange, because it's so small with just 2,000
lines. I expect nobody else will bother because unlike BT they don't
have any sort of universal service obligation. BT will soon be
offering faster speeds, but it'll probably take a while to trickle
down to the smaller exchanges.

-- 
You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire,
and drop into your grave.
								- Quentin Crisp