Until people realise that you don't get 'owt for nowt' you will be given a mediocre service.
If you want the best of everything, you have to set up each thing individually, and pay for it.
Broadband, tv & telephones.
If you want a 'lemmings' package, where everything is included for a fixed price, some area of it will usually suffer, and suffer badly. Most probably in an area that the supplier doesn't or hasn't specialised in before. Plus due to everyone scrambling for the latest all in one packages, the suppliers can't cope with demand, so terrible service usually ensues, and this is a merry go round, as each supplier tries to attract more customers, they change the packages as often as they change their socks, so over a very short period, customers are on different packages with the same supplier. The system soon breaks down into chaos.
I doubt many of you would have heard to words 'contention rate'. In the early days of broadband (only a few years ago), when you purchased your broadband package you were given the choice of contention rate, either 30 to 1, or 50 to 1. The 30 to 1 was more expensive because it meant you could in theory share your line with up to 29 other users, with the 50 to 1, with up to 49 other users. So the lower figure would give you better line speeds.
This has now seemingly gone out of the door, and they are piling more and more users on the same lines, hence that when the kids come home from school, you will find your rate drops to almost nothing, you are all sharing the allotted bandwidth on that line. Eventually the line starts to drop out because of overloading the bandwidth quota, so it then costs your suppliers more money to pay for extra bandwidth from say BT to get the lines up and running again. Once that is done, they start to put more people onto the line, so eventually it starts to happen again. It was a regular occurrence with my line going down every four to five months, then it would be fine until it started doing it over again.
Eventually, until the system goes fully fibre cable, the old BT wiring will collapse under the pressure of the continually growing number of computers accessing the internet.
The latest range of routers that they give away with these deals are great, usually four wired sockets and full household wifi coverage, until you realise what it is doing.
Are you buying the kids a new wifi laptop this Christmas, or getting the new game players that connects to the internet. If so, say goodbye to your bandwidth. Each new item that you put into your system will split your meagre allotted household bandwidth even further, so it then it isn't just the contention rate you have to cope with, the kids will pinch what little bit you have got left as well. The easy way around it is to buy an el cheapo router off ebay for about a fiver, these usually only have a max of two wired slots, one if you are lucky. You can then keep all your meagre bandwidth to yourself.
The kids can go back to playing Monopoly and Cluedo, unless of course, they just might mug you for your internet connection.
John