Sadly, those two letters are not close enough on the keyboard for an accidental slip. Yesterday, the banks got away with not paying at least £2Bn to 8million+ customers for their overpriced, unethical charges. Approx £2,500 each. Far more than FTTH would cost to each of those 8 million people.
I can't be arsed to write this post to be honest. But I had everything ready yesterday. Quantitive easing was given the go ahead for another £2Bn for some pointless motive to benefit a few already rich individuals and companies; 8M UK citizens were ripped off to the tune of on average of £2.5k each or the threat was a £2.50 charge on each bank transaction; new landline tax with added taxes (VAT) on top were announced, oh sorry, leaked, probably to put in BET or some other ignorant solution.
My lovely dad told me not to swear in my blog, but I have had enough. I will swear. In fact, I have.
Personally, I think it is time the bankers put £2Bn into an FTTH account to benefit the nation, especially considering how much each of us has bailed them out for this last 12+ months; that the Bank of England should match it with QE (sign the petition on the No 10 site); and that the broadband tax should only be payable if the Treasury waive the VOA assessments on both new fibre and wireless to the Treasury and add them to this pot.
Who would lose?
(Oh, and if any of you think I am aggrieved about the bank charges case, HSBC paid me off in a test case well over a year ago, which had I been backed by a QC who had cost what theirs did ...) I'm not so green as I am cabbage looking, really.
Internet banking? Nope. It's back under my mattress. (Hm, when I can afford one, I honestly don't have one yet. Am watching Freegle for one...) I have no credit card, no debit card, nothing except cash. LETS and barter rule. Problem??
The banks should pay for FTTH. Full stop. It's the least they can do with all of OUR MONEY.
Metro Bytes: Gateway, Great Plains Communications, Tonaquint, Megaport, Duos
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Four items of regional interest to catch up with on the eve of Christmas. …
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1 day ago
5 comments:
Oh, and as it is a given that FTTH stimulates the economy, I think this solution has everything that FiWiPie has always been about. It is fair, just, equitable, shared amongst all parties, etc.
The bankers will get back all they (ahem, we) have put in and more as the economy is stimulated and re-invigorated. The Treasury get taxes from companies who are seeing a return on investment. Communities get to enjoy access to e-gov services, the country makes huge savings on e-gov, and best of all, the UK becomes the cheapest place within which to move data, and therefore highly attractive to external investors. (Probably not Dubai, but there are others....)
Let's add HMG + friends to the team.
I know of a decent sized city (750K+ pop.) in the U.S. that tried to get a private company to put up the risk capital for a municipal Wi-Fi network. The town council equiv. didn't like the mayor that much, smelled something fishy about the deal, and scared off the private company. The problem was that the mayor's plan was the wrong approach. Had he gone after the low hanging fruit he would have succeeded in building a free access Wi-Fi network in addition to lowering the network costs (voice + data) for the city's government.
Sorry about the rambling preamble. In the U.K. the low hanging fruit controlled by HMG + friends are places like police and fire stations, libraries, schools, transit facilities (stns., shelters + yards), govt. offices, etc. If these places had fiber they could serve as a Wi-Fi hub for the surrounding community. Then that bleeding fifty pence jugular tap could be balanced by the low- to nil-charge Wi-Fi. Then you would have one less reason to think of some of your MPs and officials as leeches or vampires.
P.S. I'm an American and I had a front row seat to the fizzling of that mayor's plan. The city in question could be considered a radio engineer's idea of either [a] Hell or [b] Everest.
P.P.S. I can sympathize with you over that landline tax. Roughly a third of my monthly bill is a bunch of nickel and dime taxes and fees. I dumped my long-distance service when they started charging me an acct. svc. fee for NOT making long-distance calls and switched to a pre-paid calling card through another company.
For those who can't grok Hecta-Mega broadband (one hundred megabit per second) :
Q - What good is Hecta-Mega service to a fire station ?
A - Just before rolling out to a fire at the expensive new mall and office building down the road the fire crews download the building plans and a special materials list (e.g. flammables like ether, gasoline, etc.; explosives like fireworks and ammunition; radio-isotopes or bio-hazards).
Know what you mean, but all the low-hanging HMG fruit is tied into pointless contracts - remember Learning Steam, guys? Or red herrings, such as security issues about wi-fi. Like anyone who could would want to crack their way in to an HMG network run by a local council/LEA etc .....
If the publicly funded networks.....(why do we have to walk on eggshells and not name them? It is of no obvious benefit to anyone letting this continue)... would allow all of the local communities to use their untapped bandwidth without pretending they are doing us a favour when they waive some fictional network charge for year 1, we would be off in the UK.
We have stooped so low - allow me to doff my cap and tug my fringe - in the UK now that we pat publicly paid honoraries (mayors etc) on the back when they loose some of OUR money to connect OURSELVES over networks we bought with our own money.
Droll.
Ah, the fire service. Here in the UK, some ridiculous number of call outs to fires are made by bored teenagers who are either responsible for setting the fire in the first place (usually inside your tasteful BMW or Merc) or who are making a hoax call.
We might save not just money but risking firefighters' lives (who are desperately underpaid compared to bloody politicians) if those kids were in some PC bang or cybercafe in [pick a sink estate or deprived area].
They could be at the very least LAN gaming, or playing MMORPGs over a fibre network and flogging their avatars for real money, learning swdev, and bringing some cash in from international trade to make up the shortfall in the economy that the destruction of our manufacturing and agric industries, for starters, has brought to the UK.
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