Now we get taxed for broadband and digital radio? Who would pay to have a fixed line so you can access what you already use?
to be honest anyone with a BT connection or via a BT line like sky, tiscali etc have fixed lines, its only Virginmedia that use coax. I'd be happy to pay this if it made the network better, the network in this country is crap. I'd also like to see a fat tax on convenience food and takeaways.
Gosh, the government giving a regulatory body intrusive new powers to snoop into our activities? Who'd've thunk it? The whole political class that's just been caught spending our taxes on their goodies for themselves just has to make sure that those cheeky pirates don't share files online.
Well the USA has something like 150Mb compared to the 2-50Mb here in the UK. But would love to see the advert for Virgin saying tax free internet. That would really mess up BT and their throttling of other users on their system. Maybe they want the cash to pay for having that moat cleaned.
It's a perfectly fair charge, in fact it's nowhere near high enough. Those of us who live in big cities or even smaller towns will get access to the faster network speeds by default, but there are people living in rural communities who are still using dial up because it isn't cost effective for the providers to run the lines out that far - that is what this tax is for and I for one am all for it.
True. But they are updating their system for to have larger speeds. It will be upgraded here in August from 2Mb to 10Mb. So even if they throttle it will still allow a fair bit through to make it worthwhile. But then BT also throttle suppliers like AOL as they want their system running quickly to nudge out the competitors who use high speeds. When I was on AOL through BT they throttled a 1.5Mb to less than half of what should be coming in. It was a joke using BT with AOL. But then they do have competition on their phone line and network.
a 10Mb connection on Virgin gets throttled to a 2.5Mb connection in the evening after the first 750Mb, which is hardly a lot.
It's not for what we already use, it's for new high speed/fibre optic connections. If this 50p tax gets us to a minimum 50Mb connection then I'm all for it. Anything less then why bother? Weren't they talking about getting the country to 2Mb. That is laughable! If we're going to spend billions to upgrade the lines then we might as well spend big as opposed to having to do it all again in a few years. Our internet speeds compared to South Korea or Japan is frankly embarrassing! As for file-sharing.... it simply cannot be legislated away. The industry has to adapt to it by making free or extremely cheap offline versions of their content, in addition to higher quality paid versions.
Wish the Australian government would pull there finger out and organise it's national broadband rollout. I am paying $50 a month for 50gB ADSL2+ (~24mb/s) which I am happy with. But there are so many families that go without internet. My girlfriend is a teacher, and it makes life a little difficult in this day and age, when half your students don't have acces to one of the best resources for studying. I would hate to try and do my uni course without it (honestly I'm 3 years in, and I think I have opened 2 books).
