Quote:
“I wonder why EE (or indeed any) network isn't interested in doing a home broadband offering, with a fixed (but generous) allowance? Is it purely down to capacity issues?”
I think it comes down to Line Rental on conventional ADSL / Fibre. I know quite a few people who have ADSL / Fibre at home, but thanks to copious minutes and texts offered by mobile service providers they rarely, if ever use their landline for calls, and so really begrudge paying their service provider £16+ / month line rental, just to get broadband.
If EE, or any other mobile provider offered a reasonably priced alternative to ADSL / Fibre they would be swamped with people, who want a line rental free internet connection at home cheerfully cancelling their landlines, and signing up.
The only way it would work, would be for them to offer it only to subscribers in Postcodes known to have poor / no ADSL but I suspect the cost and logistics of a 'look up' system to check the ADSL speeds of the customers' postcode at sign up would make that prohibitive.
A lot of people in our area used Mobile Broadband as an alternative to rural 512k ADSL, in fact it was thinly suggested to us at a local meeting when the BT rep admitted they were unlikely to bring decent ADSL speeds to the area ("decent" being set at 2mbps!!), and 12 months later, when most households here were using 3G, the speeds from 3 and EE held up fine and I never saw less than 10mbps tethered on the One Plan even in peak times, and now we have 4G from EE its even better!.
However, whilst it may easily cope with 20 - 25 well scattered households in a rural area, I suspect it wouldn't manage in London or Manchester, if thousands of households began using it as a line rental free broadband connection, as opposed to a substitute for unusable broadband.