I am astonished at the Talk Talk rep Andrew Heaney. The Talk Talk service is configured in such a way as to be just about functional for browsing, certaintly no headroom to support large numbers of customers accessing a live event. There peak capacity is less than 20Kbps per user. He will never know if people are willing to pay more, because the limitations of the service allow no room to play. In addition TalkTalk(+Opal) will be sold off next year so Carphone have a vested interest in insuring NGA (which bypasses their LLU assets redundant) is slowed down. See Ofcom August consultation on NGNs.

It is also my opinion that an over focus on speed only (one dimension) creates its own problems, because speed alone does not deliver a quality home working experience or a good telecare service. As it stands the plans for FTTC will means we will get more of what we have today, more best effort, forcing people to continue to pay for legacy services.

Going from a USC to a USO does require real investment as your stating that our data conenctivity is now a critical asset and its going to be used to transform healthcare, education delivery and make a greater contribution to changing our travel habits. You could never realistically use a Talk Talk engineered service to host a critical service. It, like all the other retail broadband offers has few guarantees and non publish their planning rules.

Many points were missed but the industry should be shouting at Government, that if a USO is to happen, then it is driven by critical service delivery- not the collection of taxes. This demands plans and commitments to change how education, health and transport are delivered. I will expand on fixed /mobile convergence, the replacment of legacy voice with mulit-media communications.

The 2Mbps, could be a 2Mbps symmetrical service engineered to support low latency applications. That 2Mbps could be within these 40 or 100Mbps service.

The fact the debate has been about speed rather than outcomes has meant industry can manage its legacy and gain extra but really marginal revenues from best effort broadband. The fact that Broadband is best effort means policy makers can avoid the difficult job of service transformation, continue to tax the industry rather than invest.

There is a fear of transformation. NGA makes Carphones investment in LLU redundant. NGA should lead to far tighter integration of fixed and mobile networks, and should lead to the replacement of the legacy PSTN and mobile voice services. It should mean the GOv does not auction radio spectrum to the highest bidder, but create a split between data transport providers and service providers.

I keep reading about our communications being fit for purpose, without any purpose being outlined. If purpose is another word for outcome, then the current generation of connectivity are mere appetisers to what is actually possible. Users understand this. Everytime we put £60 petrol in our cars we know how unfit for purpose our connectivity is.

You could then have a conference where people are allowed to put forward thinking points across and also have demos of advanced services that make use of higher speed internet connections.

If we keep allowing private companies to dictate what the market decides, it never will be a free market. And the USO/C of 2Mbps is a joke anyway. We are, it seems, going to permit mobile companies to infill in rural areas where they KNOW the technology cannot deliver that and it will only be “best effort” to get close.

For all those currently getting on and JFDI, keep going!! This country needs YOU.