50p a month Broadband Tax to be made law.

[StripeyKnickersSpottySocks]

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8270772.stm

I don't nderstand this. Why do we have to pay for it? Surely the companies who male hundreds of thousands a year profit from broadband such as Virgin, BT, Sky should pay for it. After all they're the ones who are going to benefit from it and then make even more profit by being able to charge more people for broadband.

Am I missing something?

[Ponders]

They would just pass it on to customers

If I lived somewhere remote where access to broadband was a distant dream (& there are a lot of places like that) I would be chuffed to bits

[StripeyKnickersSpottySocks]

But its wrong. There should be an ombudsman making sure they can't pass it on to customers.

And I'm sceptical that people in very remote places will get it anyway. They'll still only put it in place if they think its going to be profitable for them.

I was reading about some bloke who isn't on the national grid and his electricity company say he has to pay 7k if he wants connecting as he's so far away from the nearest cable. Can you imagine Virgin agreeing to lay a broadband cable to some house in remote Scotland thats 20 miles from the earest current supply?

[TwoIfBySea]

Like an ombudsman would bother. The ones currently in use allow the energy companies to run all over their customers without standing up for us.

Things like this happen because there is no one out there to stop it.

[Ponders]

Virgin don't lay cables for broadband - BT do that. Virgin just use the cables BT provide.

There is no cable TV where we live, only about 12 miles from the nearest cable TV cables. We only get Sky. I bet the bloke you read about has a phone line.

[SqueezyCheese]

I've no issue with 50p a month TBH. Could be worse.

Broadband should be available to everyone, regardless of where they live and I thought that with all the phone lines bring upgraded over the next few years we'd all have super duper speeds anyway. The money has to come from somewhere surely so the Conservative argument on this doesn't really make sense for me.