Bandwidth for Businesses

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After the disappointing (read: irritating as hell!) DBERR comments at the BSG conference that there was no indication that UK businesses require more bandwidth, this CMA report about business bandwidth requirements makes interesting reading!
Although many of the members are large corporates, which shows in the figures using fibre for comms currently, the number who are only able to get under 2Mbps is telling, as are the figures about latent demand within those surveyed. As the Telco 2.0 report from the BSG conference points out, there is currently no SOHO FTTH access yet in the UK, and yet there are hundreds of thousands of small businesses.
What may be used (and has been) against providing this decent first mile onwards connectivity, is the unwillingness for those surveyed to pay extra for FTTP connectivity. And that should come as no surprise. Many of those who responded are undoubtedly already being screwed for their comms requirements (especially if they live in Hull) by somewhat greedy telcos. But the real point that should be used against this is that there is as yet no proof that FTTH/P SHOULD cost more than current telco products. In fact, much of the evidence is beginning to point to the fact that such massive opex savings will be made once fibre is deployed throughout the whole of the UK comms infrastructure, that we may well see a drop in tariffs, but only if there is a truly competitive marketplace.