Originally Posted by neo_wales:
“ "in fact the majority of people I know says they would not have a landline if it was not required for broadband" Hardly representative of the population though?”
Maybe not, but I bet there are a hell of a lot of people who would not have a landline if they did not have broadband and Telcoms like BT and Talk knows it.
Quote:
“Your not in most cases paying extra for your landline, it thrown in with your BB package
”
Of cause you are. Sure providers like Tallk Talk, Sky and even Bt now may give you a cut price broadband compared to others, because you pay them around £12 or more in line rental., but then they expect you to make calls to get that money back or charge you for some thing else you may or may not need.
Remember when Talk Talk first started their broadband service and said if you have a international package you get free broadband? i wonder how many people was paying for something they did not need to get their free broadband, which no doubt was more expensive than just paying for broadband.
Quote:
“ so I really can't see why I'd dump it to go over to some 'wireless' fly by night provider. The landline is more reliable even in the event of a major ISP outage or grid failure.”
Who said they are fly by night? some of these wireless services are run by ISps, like Vispa for instance. sure the one I use was started by a payment company, but they was the only ones and still are the only ones that can offer a decent service to people who would not get one, because Bt don't find it cost affective to give broadband to a couple of hundred.
As for reliability, sure a farmer could go into his barn and switch the access point off or in my case the Dean could go into the cathedral and switch my access point off. i heard that only happened once when a farmer just switched every thing off in a barn, but they got UPS to keep them running. Barn access points for country side and also on churches. We could have a power cut or there could be a power cut at the main base.
But with ADSL it is not the most reliable service either, water in cables, cables being cut, exchange problems. Even fibre have the same problems, plus with the further problem of power fail, I presume they go some back up system, but for how long?
Nothing is 100%, sure I only been on this new service for a couple of weeks, but it have been reliable, ok I will not lie i have had a couple of speed problems, but that is now sorted and next month the bandwidth is being upgraded.
i think they service grew faster than they thought it would and now need a upgrade. As long as I can browse the net, watch netflix, that is all I need.
Don't forget this is my choice, in the next month or so FTTC will be here, the cabinets was put in place late last week, still got a load of barriers around them. So I could have waited and got 40 megabits or more via FTTC soon, but as I have told you many many times, I don't want it, I don't need 40 megabits.
You was so sure that I would go to FTTC as soon as it was available, but it is not going to happen.
some people don't have that choice and these so called fly by night wireless services are the only way these people can get a decent broadband.
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“I might go back to skype for vid calls when I move out to Gran Canaria though.”
Never been that impressed with Skype to be honest, i have used it and do use it still now and again, but the voice quality is iffy .