One in five UK households cannot afford to be online | Hacker News Reader

One in five UK households cannot afford to be online

communityfibre.co.uk

19 pointsMikeAshley17825 comments

Is there a term from economics where a portion of the population do less and less because they can't afford to travel, properly eat or heat their homes? And who have no chance of educating themselves due to their circumstances?

People talk about the UK productivity gap and I wonder when society realises that people who can't afford to eat are not going make great workers.

> I wonder when society realises that people who can't afford to eat are not going make great workers

Society knows and has always known. This government does not care.

I’m quite well off (at least relative to the area I live) and yet I genuinely despair because it feels as though every form of social good is at breaking point.

I second that. Perhaps it's a perfect storm of COVID (NHS degraded), international economic problems (inflation, fuel, food prices), Brexit (bankrupcies, universal shortage of staff, Horizon science funding, etc), fatigue of a decade+ Tory government, sometimes all bundled in one (travel chaos, no staff at airports due to Brexit and COVID), and a "fill your pockets while you can" atmosphere (billions of taxpayers money wasted on PR stunts, alleged fraud, etc), slow erosion of democratic institutions (lowering of standards laws, bonfire of enviromental and worker protection laws, losing trust in the police) but there's this gloomy atmosphere that things will get a lot worse before they get better.

Capitalism?

Capitalism wants customers to run their capitalist businesses. Capitalism is more about making people consume mindlessly than preventing then from consumption.

But a society is not completely defined by its economic system. Other parts of the culture influence this a lot. It helps that the majority of the population can vote. But it's also about daily interactions, who is seen as undesirable where, etc.

FWIW I used to be a Community Fibre customer (I left them because I moved somewhere outside of their network) and their service was great. It was cheaper than the competition, and worked. Customer support was great too.

Their only con is that they're not available in more places (they run their own infrastructure), but I guess you can't expand at the speed of light.

I was also a community fibre customer and had to leave when I moved. I also liked the decent service at a good price.

I believe community fiber is a for profit private company, despite what their marketing may imply.

Yep, I'm aware. I wasn't implying that they're not. They're on the same level as Hyperoptic, but I feel like Hyperoptic has been trying to expand for a long time, but hasn't done much expanding until Community Fibre came along.

UK fibre scene has been pretty good to me. You give us money we give you 1gbps symetric with no serious gotchas. (Hyperoptic).

And I suspect communityfibre will be more of the same generally honest proposition (or better). Plus they're promising last mile fibre and 3gbps. So I have high hopes for these guys.

I can't help but notice the disconnect between that commercial proposition and this article's tone. I've been primarily been receiving 3gbps ads from these guys. Not quite on the same mental wavelength as connect the poor so rather surprised to see this...let alone on hn

edit: One area where community fibre will need to up their game is static IP. Hyper has static ipv4 at ~6USD and you get a ipv6 block by default. When you consider that the 1gbps is symetric that static ip starts looking pretty good

This surprised me, but it really shouldn't have, given the figures look similar for other essentials (food, energy, school supplies…). The cutting back of the welfare state has had a horrifying impact on the number of people in the UK living in poverty.

> Thee in ten (29%) will have no choice but to cut back on data to save money

What is the marginal cost of 1 MB of cellular data?

If the government outlawed usurious data caps/excess fees/throttling, I think that would go a long way to helping more people stay online.

Here in Chile the government forced carriers to allow easy switching between them and banned selling phones locked to one carrier. This was really effective at bringing the prices down. Now I can get 200GB a month for ~15USD including 5G from almost any carrier.

hahaha, here in Czechia you will get at best like 6GB for that price, with 200GB I could use it as my main connection instead broadband

The government should nationalise all the cellular towers and then sell radio airtime to the carriers just like the electric grid. Having multiple companies maintain separate infrastructure (that in the vast majority of cases isn't shared between them) is extremely wasteful and provides a worse service for everyone (a roaming foreigner would actually get a better experience than a UK resident as their SIM would seamlessly roam across all available carriers).

Why is the marginal cost important?

Cellular networks have enormous upfront costs.

They also aren't particularly profitable (at least by GAAP standards with how they do depreciation).

It's almost like asking what the marginal cost of wind power is, and asking why poor people don't get free electricity.

It doesn't matter. You're mostly paying for the windmill...

Marginal costs are important because that is what is in play when I run out of 4GB and want a little bit more data. As a user I'm paying, say, £13/mo for 4GB (£3.25/GB) as part of my base plan, but if I go over it, I'm all of the sudden paying £117/GB[0], and it costs no where near £117/GB to build out that network. If it actually was expensive to deliver an extra GB to the user, so 5 instead of 4 per month, then that kind of increase in cost is reasonable. But, it is no where even close.

Cell companies are just using it to take easy profits, which ultimately impacts the poorest. Similar to how some banks in the US were using overdraft fees as a profit taking exercise, even structuring transactions to increase overdraft fees.

[0] All numbers are real, and from BT's sim only plan:

https://www.bt.com/products/mobile/sim-only-deals

https://www.bt.com/help/mobile/manage-service/how-can-i-mana...

I also like how, on the second link, they tell you you can "order extra data and minutes" to bridge the gap. You're paying 11.47p/MB, but if you just fill out a form instantaneously the price drops substantially, which is even more evidence that this is usury far above and beyond the reasonable economics of running the network. And finally, the best part, the link for actually filling out that form is broken.

> but if I go over it, I'm all of the sudden paying £117/GB[0], and it costs no where near £117/GB to build out that network

Absolutely agree with you, but the reason for that predatory price is to scare people into signing up for a base plan with more data than they need thus paying for more than what they'd actually use. This is coupled with contracts so they can't downgrade once they realize they use nowhere near that, even though it's a fully automated service that has no set-up nor termination costs that would otherwise justify a long-term contract.

Cellular carriers piss away insane amounts of money on marketing which they then need to recoup from their customers. Everyone will be better off without that overhead.

Not to mention, the billing model of charging per GB per month is predatory and doesn't actually address congestion very well. Charging for allocated bandwidth would reduce congestion much better while still giving people unlimited data in non-congested areas (making good use of the radio equipment & airtime since it's already there & paid for regardless of whether it's being used or not) which would open up plenty of new & innovative use-cases.

1MB is really too small a unit to be useful today. 1GB/month might be enough for some things. No video though.

Yeah, 1MB often isn't enough to load a single web page.

They don’t specify what the headline means and I can’t see a link to the survey questions or data. Feels like an ad rather than true research.

They want you to infer from the headline: "One in five UK households cannot afford to be online," that one in five UK households aren't online, which is not true.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/itandinterne....

92% of adults in the UK were recent internet users in 2020, up from 91% in 2019.

Almost all adults aged 16 to 44 years in the UK were recent internet users (99%), compared with 54% of adults aged 75 years and over.

Severe conflation of mobile data allowance and wired broadband. This looks meaningless.

The article is talking about restricted access to internet. Families who can't afford wired broadband rely on their mobile data allowance. They have phones at least.

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