Hyperoptic chief defends Kensington and Chelsea over BT rejection

"Much of the borough is already covered by Virgin Media's super-fast broadband service." Be that as it may, my street can get neither Virgin nor BT fibre optic broadband. I am furious with RBKC.

"Much of the borough is already covered by Virgin Media's super-fast broadband service."

I thought we were allowed competition instead of monopolies, bad move by RBKC. Also, BT have a budget for the entire fibre roll out which means each area is only allocated limited funds. If the costs end up much higher then they cannot go ahead with the roll out in that area.

The problem with Virgin Media is the throttling. So if you have a number of people in your home and a few are gamers or doing heavy media, then you breach the limits and are slowed down heavily. I worked out I could breach their limits on standard 12Mb ADSL internet speeds, so why have 100Mb fibre? BT don't throttle on their unlimited packages, except for peer 2 peer so it would have been a better option for many.

Andrew - I am not to sure how you have come to this conclusion. I am on Virgins top package and i use the connection very heavily for gaming, streaming Sky & accessing work FTP servers. I can assure you your speed is not throttled at a level that would effect you. Also BT do throttle the consumer network. All Consumer broadband services are contended / throttled /traffic shaped.

So how is BT the better option for many?

RBKC you seem to be out of date on many packages as things have changed lately.

BT are only throttling peer 2 peer on top packages now (I don't use peer 2 peer), they used to have a 300GB download/upload threshold on top packages which if reached within a month you were slowed down. This no longer happens.

Virgin have very restrictive throttling which is clear in their Traffic Management policy and has been complained about by many on Virgin forums. If you have a few people in the house on the internet using a lot of bandwidth, you are often throttled heavily. So somebody watching a HD film and 2 others gaming in high quality will lead to a heavy reduction in speed which will affect those users.

Also, many people in the RBKC cannot even get Virgin Media cable, they have very slow ASDL speeds and were relying on BT Fibre to be able to do the things they wanted/needed to do and you have killed off any hope they had.

I heard you wanted no boxes to be fitted (not sure if true) but remember, BT Openreach have a limited budget to work on each area. If RBKC seem to think the boxes are not good looking enough, why is it Westminster council are fine to have them in Belgravia and Mayfair? Both areas are generally considered more upmarket than Chelsea or Kensington, but they will be appearing there soon.

Please rethink this as many cannot get Virgin cable or for many others it is not suitable anyway and stops competition too. For the record I have SKY Broadband, it is truly unlimited with no traffic management. When I move I hope to get the same from SKY or another provider.

Since I found out about RBKC are now not getting BT Openreach Fibre (many companies use this not just BT), I have changed my search for a property to other areas. I liked Chelsea as it is very central, but I will now need to look elsewhere.

Added note. Sorry RBKC I forgot you were a resident and not the council in some of what I typed, my mistake by shortening your username.