No fibre for USO

[WS4481]

I really wanted to stress my disappointment on the whole USO service with BT.

I feel that the 4g is just a total scapegoat for BT, when really for several reasons it is not viable for many users and cannot be expected to be taken as the uso being fulfilled.

Firstly, none of BT’s packages is unlimited, so straight away this is a no -go.

Secondly and very important to the many who use their internet for online gaming, Vodafone , o2 and EE (BT) all produce a double, strict which in turn makes online gaming near impossible.

the only 4g which provides unlimited data is three, but their network is congested and is absolute **bleep**. I tried them for a few weeks and speed/latency was terrible.

So in the 21st Century is BT really telling me I am stuck with an ureliable 2mb adsl service, or a fast 4g service which is useless as it can’t play online viability and the one which does actually provide open nat and is unlimited is useless ?

[-Richie-]

Ofcom wrote the rules and then asked for providers to supply it, several applied to be the provider of the USO and BT were chosen, not just for BT customers though.
The rules BT follow include being able to have 4G above 10 mbps available, affordable and at least 100GB usage.

You can read more on Ofcom's website Your right to request a decent broadband service: What you need to know 

[iniltous]

I think what you need to appreciate is that BT/OR are businesses, not charity...the USO is something Government foisted onto the Industry, other players looked at the ‘deal’ and wanted no part.
You currently pay something in the order of £7/month for your Openreach local loop, before you say you pay much more than that, what you pay to a retail provider bears no relation to what OR get.
So say taking 20 years of your line rental ( 7x12x20) , not even £1700, yet upgrading you to faster speed could potentially cost 10’s of thousands, what sort of company spends 10k for a return of £1700,the answer is  bankrupt company’s .
If the Government say 10Mb is a minimum, and that is achievable with mobile then that’s the USO satisfied , obviously not what you want , but, any private company can chose where to spend the company’s money, and they have a duty to shareholders to spend it wisely, in your case presumably it’s a bad use of money.
Depending on your circumstances, you could be ‘upgraded’ anyway , maybe not immediately, but eventually, but if you were pining your hopes on the USO, that’s obviously not going to help you.

Something to have in mind is the broadband USO isn’t for guaranteed acceptable game playing , that is arguably a little frivolous, it’s so no one is deprived from a usable internet service for ‘important’ things , and 10Mb and a generous ( not unlimited) bandwidth allowance is in the Governments opinion the correct level of a minimum service

[WS4481]

Thanks for the informative information guys.

unfortunatly I had pinned my hopes on the USO solving my problem, but it obviously won’t.

I appreciate where your coming from, but the ‘important’ things on the net are very different for different people, some people streaming, some downloading and myself, like many others is gaming.

our internet services are so far behind other countries it’s actually embarrassing.

When I checked with openreach there is no plans to upgrade the area because 4g satisfies the USO. There are hundreds of houses here with 2-3mb broadband. I actually find it quite unbelievable.

mostly it is extremely frustrating as it is ok to spend millions on upgrading city dwellers to GB fibre when many people still can’t get a decent connection.

another point to note is BT uses postcodes to check 4g coverage which is not reliable. My postcode covers a vast area and signal can be different just from house to house with buildings mountains etc.

Granted none of this is particularly BT’s fault of coarse, we can blame the govt and ofcom for this total farce.

Im pretty sure there will be many people up and down the UK in the same situation as me. Either useless, unreliable adsl or useless unreliable 4g.