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New 4G at home broadband provider: Relish
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[Deleted User]
Posts: 15 Forum Member
Hi guys,
Haven't seen any discussion as yet on the London based Relish (relish.net) provider. Do you think it'll work?
They're saying fiber like speeds of 60mbit (I'd be surprised if I squeezed more than 20-30mbit on a shared 4G platform) for £20/month, contract free, and with no phone line required.
Thoughts?
Haven't seen any discussion as yet on the London based Relish (relish.net) provider. Do you think it'll work?
They're saying fiber like speeds of 60mbit (I'd be surprised if I squeezed more than 20-30mbit on a shared 4G platform) for £20/month, contract free, and with no phone line required.
Thoughts?
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Hopefully it will come to Essex got another 12 months left on BT but they are OK just a bit pricey.
A great idea which I hope succeeds.
Look forward to your review. Relish is a very interesting new player and I'm very curious to see how it works in reality. I'm sure if you have a good signal it will be fine, and probably a great option for a lot of people who want something simple and without the landline. However, for gamers, I doubt that the pings time will be good enough for games like COD, but we will see!
+1 to that, though my line rental is nearer £16 than £10.
The moment Relish comes to my area, I'm dumping my fixed line FTTC service.
Dumping a quality wired broadband service to a flaky wireless one seems a bit strange. You'll save an amount in line rental but you'll have to deal with the possible issues of wireless, for example congestion leading to slow speeds.
Because this service is intended for heavier internet users, whereas companies like 3 didn't intend for people to buy the One Plan and permanently tether. The network will be better built to handle the demand. You also get a proper router and don't have to use a phone.
Really? If it's not utter cack, I'll get the same service for £16 a month less. I don't call that at all strange.
I'm with plusnet. My line has 'failed' at least a dozen times (usually when downloading something crucial). PN offered no explanation other than 'network issues'. I object to paying £15.95 a month (lower if I extend my contract with PN......no thanks) for a line which incurs very little actual annual cost to the provider. Line rental is almost all pure profit. Too little of it goes where it should, on maintaining and improving the network.
Most of it goes on maintaining and improving the network. Do you have any idea how much behind-the-scenes maintenance and repair work goes on, 365 days a year, to keep a phone network running? Not to mention the need to invest in new network equipment so that when the old stuff finally wears out there's a replacemenmt available.
If line rental was pure profit then:
1. Ofcom would be on their neck
2. They'd have lots of competing companies doing it for less.
Just HOW can anyone complete on line rental???? It is the ONE component that no operator can escape from! Sky , for example, use LLU for both Voice and Broadband and so use NONE of BT's network or investment. They are still forced to pay "bare wires" line rental to OpenReach.
The only company that COULD have much lower Line Rental is Virgin Media. They charge no line rental for either their TV service or Broadband - but they seem to find it convenient (and profitable!!!!) to charge much the same as others for their phone service! To be 100% logical the VM coax (used for TV and Broadband) should cost them FAR more to maintain than the phone cable!
Of course they use BT's network and investment! Think about what you're saying there for a minute.
All of the equipment in the exchange maintains itself does it? How about the outside infrastructure?
I'm not sure I'd agree with that. A twisted copper pair is more likely to go wrong than coax. And you can't get away with as much either before the customer notices either, just a bit of corrosion on one of the wires in the twisted pair and the customer will hear a lot of noise. If one of the wires snaps, they lose all hone service entirely.
Just HOW is this "using BT equipment"????????
All they use of OpenReach is the "bare wires" as I explained.
Anyway this is off the point. There is no way that maintaining this copper wire justifies the current ridiculous levels of Line Rental!
1. Ofcom - never knowingly competent since 2003
2. There is no real competition in this country. BT offers wholesale services to over 1400 ISPs. BT still rakes in most of what we pay in line rental, whether we are a BT customer or not. The chances are, beyond the ISP name, the service is run and maintained by BT.
BT's annual report (2013) states that it has around 9.9m consumer fixed lines - it's unclear if they include Plusnet customers in that number. It says around 9.7m are active, in that customers take a phone or broadband service or both. Take an average line rental (saver at £159.84 a year and non-saver at £15.99 a month or £191.88 a year) - £175.86 a year. BT alone rakes in £1.7bn in line rental income from its 9.7m active fixed lines.
BT offers Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) so other ISPs can offer own-brand products which are, in reality, all run and maintained by BT. What does WLR amount to? It doesn't say in BT's annual report, but do you think it is anywhere even close to £15.99 a month? So what are the real costs? How many 3rd party/CP lines does BT look after? Another 3-5-7-9m lines and how much of the line rental imposed will BT get a large slice of? How much do 3rd party companies keep if they are not actually having to maintain the lines or exchanges themselves?
Show me where BT spends £2bn+ a year on the maintenance of its UK exchanges and self-funded improvements to the UK network. The taxpayer is still paying for too much of what BT does. Not too long ago, it had the gall to go cap in hand to UK Gov for £2bn to help pay for a network overhaul. A sign of a well-run company where line rental income is properly used? I don't think so.
When we see truly unlimited 20-30Mb+ services with free evening and weekend calls allowance, for £15 a month all-in, then we can start to talk about value for money. France manages to do it. Look what they can get for €25-€30 (£19.99-23.99?) a month:
http://www.free.fr/adsl/index.html
http://offres.numericable.fr/
All of those prices would be at least an additional £13-17 a month in line rental costs here. French exchanges aren't falling apart. Their network isn't crumbling. They appear far ahead of us on speeds and inclusive offerings, which we are always charged extra for.
It is all due to the income on calls falling due to the rise of mobiles and high-bandwith digital links. Why worry too much about the cost of calls if the bulk of your income comes from something that arrives even if the customer makes no calls at all - aka "Line Rental"!
Sadly, most of Europe is ahead of us. We have to pay out to greedy shareholders with minimal amount spent on infrastructure. It seems the mobile companies are spending more on that area than the likes of BT.
The assumption that it's "just a pair of copper wires" is about 80 years out of date. The "line" is your part of the whole infrastructure, cabinets, exchanges, fibre, cables, all the physical parts that make up the network. It's not cheap to install (have you any idea what it costs to dig up a street and make it good?) or to maintain. I'm sure the equipment used for testing and maintaining it has become much more sophisticated than it was when my colleagues were designing it, I'm also certain that it hasn't become any cheaper or less sophisticated!
I do, but then I've worked in that business, and still work in networking, so I have perhaps a better idea of the real costs of infrastructure.
Ah, the old grass-is-greener error.
Have you ever lived in France, used their systems? I was a Free subscriber for a few years, I gave up when they throttled non-HTTP evening traffic to the point where my SSL email connection was faster on a 56k dialup modem than on my ADSL (that's not an exaggeration, there were evenings when I used my laptop & a modem as the only way to deal with business mail, despite paying 40 euros a month for ADSL). Free denied it, of course, despite a dozen of my colleagues, in just one office, seeing exactly the same behaviour.
I tried SFR. After 8 weeks of excuses, every Monday the same phone call, the same "technical problem" excuse, they finally cancelled the order on the grounds that it "wasn't possible" to have ADSL on my line, despite the fact that they had processed the cancellation of the Free service!
Only France Telecom, the incumbent who actually owned the lines and did the maintenance, just like BT, were actually competent. I signed an order at 11am, and at 7pm the same day I had a solid ADSL connection that was twice as fast as Free had been.
Don't be taken in by the nonsense peddled by Murdoch's tabloid press that Britain is always the worst in Europe, it's far from true. Take trains, everyone says France has wonderful trains, and it's mostly true for the heavily-subsidised TGVs. The regional services, though, they have a worse record for punctionality and overcrowding than the old Network Southeast ever managed. Any they still can't make a profit.
The only odd and irritating thing is BT's seemingly arbitrary deployment plan. I have FTTC, but a nearby road has FTTP. Both have overhead wiring, both are not new build areas, there's an existing copper cabinet so it's not a case of the lines going direct to the exchange. I don't see the difference. If anything, my road would benefit more, as it's quite long and people at the other end of it will be getting piss poor FTTC speeds (the cabinet is where the road starts). As far as I can tell it's the only road in the village that has it.
If a company didn't raise money by selling parts of itself to shareholders, who reasonably expect a dividend in return, it would have to borrow money from a bank.
Would you seriously prefer to see BT paying interest to fatcat bankers, instead of dividends that support your pension funds?
He/she probably means that the government could own the infrastructure again, and could fund investment through raising its own debt, taxes and revenue, similar to how they do things in other areas (like transport)
There's certainly a genuine problem with handing BT a ton of taxpayer money for BT to improve it's own infrastructure, with the taxpayer getting no share of the ownership of whatever it has paid for, no decrease in rental prices to reflect the subsidy to BT, etc. You get to pay BT in taxes and then again to use the service your taxes have partly paid for.
Ah....the 'here's my anecdotal evidence' error.
I have family in Lille, Paris, St Etienne, Tarbes, Oloron and Toulon. So, yes, I have used their systems.