Quote:
“It's an educated guess, on the basis that a decent urban broadband connection is cheaper than a mobile on the One Plan whereas the opposite is true in rural areas.”
Pretty Much. at least from an infrastructure point of view. In fact the London School of Economics actually put it forward to the Government as being a viable and cheaper option for Rural areas
http://www.rsnonline.org.uk/services...-too-expensive
After five years of Campaigning with the help of MP's and various Rural Broadband Projects our area was told that anything above the speeds that we are getting at the moment was not going to happen in the forseeable future, we were also told that our area would also be likely to be amongst the 1 - 2% of Rural UK that would never benefit from any form of Fibre connection.
So in other words its a choice, made between 10mbps Mobile Broadband, or 512k - 1mbps ADSL, with frequent disconnections caused by power line interference. (Rebooting a modem every 15 minutes or so loses its appeal and novelty value after the first year or two, and makes streaming any form of media, Sky Go or Catch Up Tv impossible, even if you actually had the speed to do it in the first place!)
Suffice to say that BT don't offer any discount, despite throwing in the towel and admitting that they would be unable to improve this flaky, unreliable 2001-era ADSL speed, and we still have to pay the same £15+ monthly line rental, which is exactly the same price as those with 16mbps ADSL and 40 / 80mbps Fibre Connections pay.
So when you rip out the landline en masse out of disgust, protest and principle and the fact that without a decent ADSL connection having a landline is pretty pointless, and take that £15 a month line rental out of the equation and put it towards your Mobile Broadband subscription, it gives you a little bit more to spend on a dedicated Mobile / Tethering package, but of course that package, and a realistic data allowance has to exist in the first place!.
To get down to the basics, if I lived in a town I would be paying £15.99 a month for line rental and then £20 for a Fibre Package. I wouldn't at all be against paying that same total of £35.99 for a Mobile Broadband Package, provided it gave decent speeds (as Three does consistantly in this area) and came with the same 40GB allowance that lower end Fibre / ADSL packages offer.