GurtTractor wrote:

Don't think there is a thread for this so here we go. I'm starting college at Bristol in September and I've just moved into a shared house. No one else has moved in yet and I need some recommendations for a good ISP. Apparently most people tend to go for Virgin Media here. Many thanks for any suggestions.

M0stly harm13ss wrote:

Don't worry swirl, they've managed to embark on one of the worst advertising campaigns ever, so we've been warned.

BT Broadband customers can watch BT Sport online at home with a minimum line speed of 400 Kbps

No idea where BT's going

A long-standing criticism from BT’s potential rivals is that they have little idea of where BT plans to roll out its own fibre network, making it difficult to create a business case. If a company were to commit, say, £50m to lay fibre in an area, only for the BT vans to roll into town six months later, the chances of a return on that investment are greatly reduced. BT does provide some forward guidance on which exchanges it plans to upgrade, but we still don’t know all the areas that will be covered by its fibre rollout, or which parts of towns and cities won’t be connected.

James suggested that if BDUK had followed the European guidelines on fibre rollouts, BT would have been forced to reveal where it plans to invest. “The one area where I have a real beef with them [BT], is that it’s still not telling us what they’re going to build where,” he said. “So the so-called 10% [that won’t get fibre under BT’s plans] is still not clear. That’s why I haven’t spent any more money.

“If the consultation process set out in the EU rules had been properly followed then they [BT] would have to declare very clearly where they were going to build, at what speeds, and what they were going to deliver, which would have revealed the 10%.”

Who's to blame

James admitted that he didn’t blame BT for pressuring BDUK into lowering the NGA threshold or for keeping its rollout plans secret – it’s a business attempting to extract the maximum return for its shareholders, after all.

Instead, he said the blame laid squarely at the feet of BDUK. “It’s the fault of the officials who allowed themselves to be lobbied. It should have been a much more robust process that shouldn’t have given in to some of that pressure.”