Where I am a business can get up to 10gb download speed, yet the most they'll over me is up to 77mb. Whereas Virgin offers up to 152mb, likely rising to 300mb in the future if rumours are true.

I'm not saying that they should make 10gb available to residential users but if the capacity is there to beat what a rival (in this case VM) can offer for residential customers, why don't they take it? Even if it means giving residential users 160mb download speed.

As a consumer if one company is offering me 76 and other other 152 and there's not much between the two in price it's a no-brainer. It seems odd to have so much capacity yet to cap residential speeds to around half that of what a rival is offering.

Surely BT with their capacity should be the place to go for ultra-superfast broadband speeds for residential customers. As it is if you're in a VM area (and I know not everyone is) then there's really no competition. Just seems really odd to have the ability to give so much more....yet choose not to.

Business customers pay significantly more per month than most residential customers pay per year. You can have anything you want if you're prepared to pay for it.

Very true. There are some examples on this page

http://business.bt.com/broadband-and.../leased-lines/

Even a 10Mb connection can cost over 300 quid a month if you include VAT!

Specifically, the businesses that want 1Gbit or 10Gbit are going to be paying thousands just in installation fees for BT or a competitor to run a dedicated fibre line to their premises, let alone the monthly costs

That's not to say that BT can't do fibre to the premises for the home, as they can and they do (and IMO should be doing far more of it), but the constraints are different between residential users who often think £15 a month for broadband is "too high" and businesses that think nothing of paying 10 or 100x that.

Google Fibre is a bit different, because it's backed by a company with very deep pockets and they're doing it more to prove a point than to make it a sustainable, profitable business. They are also rolling out very slowly, even in the handful of places they have cherry picked. You can also bet that Google's network wouldn't cope if a good number of their customers actually wanted to use their gigabit connections to their fullest.

Speed is not the be all and end all. One reason to go with BT or one of its competitors, even in an area with Virgin, is that you can choose the ISP you want to go with, you don't have to deal with the limitations of the Virgin network, and you're less likely to see peak time performance drops than with Virgin. There are also large areas of the country that can't get Virgin, and never will, so the BT system is the only choice