Broadband.

[Workingman]

There is a renewed push for providers to offer discounts or "social tariffs" to poorer families.

Not much of a problem, there, but how fast does 'broadband' have to be, and how much?

I pay £23.33 for a guaranteed 35Mb/s with free evening and weekend phone calls - it is more than enough and the speed is often twice that. It is certainly way better than the 10 Mb/s of the 90's, and that was expensive.

Use of the Internet is now integral to communication for many of us. Try contacting the NHS, your bank, the council or any services without it - they do not do phones any more. So, how fast does it need to be?

I browse; a lot: news; science; culture; current affairs, and they can all update faster than I can read. I do not stream or play games, so how fast do absolutely necessary "social tariffs" need to be, and how much?

We should never close people out because they are poor, but that does not mean that we give them free access to premium services and superfast (expensive) speeds they cannot use.

[Suff]

It is certainly way better than the 10 Mb/s of the 90's, and that was expensive.

Well for most of the 90's I was dial up. Starting at 19.2 in 93 and culminating at 56k around 99. Finally we got ADSL at 256/128k which slowly ramped up to 1mb.

For the truly important stuff, you need about 1mb synchronous these days. If you want to have home media you need about 10mb down and 2mb up. I know, up until March last year I was on 19mb down and 1mb up.

Today I pay €44 a month for 2Gb down and 1Gb up plus a french mobile with 70GB a month. I'll be modifying that next month as the deal expires. Mrs S has taken over the mobile and it has been in the drawer switched off for the last 5 months.

The ridiculous thing is that my connection is now so fast that they don't have a fast enough port on the fibre box to distribute it throughout the house. They had to split it 1Gb to the switch and 1Gb to the Wifi. Hopefully the Livebox 6 will come with a 2.5Gbe port on the home side. I've updated one of my switches and some motherboards to 2.5Gbe to take advantage of the potential speed boost.

Back to the poor. Yes, there should be something like 10/2Mb tariff's for £5.99 with unlimited data. That is enough for a home and for multiple youtube or a couple of Netflix or BBC iPlayer connections. Not that it will happen unless the Government forces it. The poorer slice of society have a remarkable decision process for what is important. Not one I'd have.