Visiting family in the UK for the first time in about five years. Costs here are _way_ higher than I remember. I bought three hamburgers, three drinks, and two large pops at a burger shop here, the total was 48 GBP (about $60 USD). This was at Five Guys. I couldn't believe it.
I visited my co-worker in the UK, and over some beers, he mentioned he's getting taxed at 48-50% on top of this. Also 20% VAT on regular shopping. I couldn't believe it, so he pulled up his pay stub on his phone and showed me.
Family members out here who are working non-tech regular jobs are telling me they had to cut back on turning on their heating at night during the winter. I grew up in Canada, and lived seven years in Los Angeles, but now live in Asia. I don't know how the UK is going to get back to where it was 10ish years ago.
Five Guys is absolutely atypical and has always been very expensive. A burger and a soft drink in a Wetherspoons (love them or loathe them) will be between £5 and £7 depending on the burger.
> he mentioned he's getting taxed at 48-50% on top of this
Speaking as a pedant:
The top marginal rate is actually 60% and happens when you cross the threshold where you're nominally in the 40% band but you're also losing your personal allowance. The effect is, for every £2 extra income you lose £1 personal allowance (exposing an extra £1 to taxation) and pay 40p tax on that. That's 20% in addition to the 40% you're paying anyway, hence 60% marginal rate. Once you hit the income level where all your personal allowance has been fully cancelled out, then your marginal rate drops back down. And then the next threshold after that puts you in the 45% band.
yeah if you're on that rate and not dumping every penny you can into your pension allowance each year (and using up any unused allowance for previous three years), you're crazy.
whats crazy is forcing people to save for something they have no guarantee of seeing. Giving the pension age keeps increasing a pension is nothing more than paying into a pot you will never be able to fully use. Especially given how people are taxed on their pension payments.
To be fair, the amount people are forced(?) to put into pensions from employment income is pretty tiny and there are tax-advantages savings accounts which people can use instead of pensions, up to a limit. There are also limits on incentives for pension contributions.
California's state income tax is 12.3% starting at $677,276, so the top rate is 49.3%, and actually surpasses 50% once other taxes are taken into account, and then you have to factor in healthcare costs on top of that. Which as you get older and later into your career (which is when you'd make that much money anyway) can't be ignored either.
High-income wage earners on the US typically get health insurance from their job, which is a tax-exempt benefit that isn’t included in income statistics. After retirement age, Medicare will pay for most medical expenses, although it’s still smart to save some extra money for whatever Medicare doesn’t cover. Amortized over a career, reasonable savings for post-retirement health care might amount to 1% or so for someone in that income range.
> High-income wage earners on the US typically get health insurance from their job
This increase the total cost of labor which effectively is the same. Of course on the higher end paying a lump sum is way more optimal than an extra 10% tax to fund healthcare. If your income is low.. we’ll it’s a highly regressive system without government support. And with government subsidies it becomes effectively the same just extra hoops.
But that's the top marginal rate filing single. A California tax payer earning $677,272 pays 49.3 percent on each additional dollar but 43.9% is the effective rate on whole income. This is a very high single earner income.
A married couple with this income pays only 37.5% and doesn't max out until going over 1,359 million, at which point they pay the 43,9 effective.
You have to be a truly massive earner to hit 50% effective in CA.
The healthcare thing is really a moot point. Everyone who can afford private medical care in the UK goes private for anything they can. The NHS is good (and I _do_ mean just 'good' -- the quality of US healthcare is very uneven across the country, but the best care possible, by a substantial margin, is undeniably in the US) for emergency medicine and surgery, but the general consensus is that it just-barely-kind-of-works-sometimes for everything else.
VAT is the biggest scam, it's just an income tax under another name. What is a company's income? revenue - costs
What is a company's value-add? revenue - costs
massive eye-roll.
I once asked a real(tm) economist what the difference was and he looked up and thought for a minute and said "payroll tax". Payroll tax is what the US calls social security tax (for retirement, unemployment and the like)
Isn't VAT the best way to ensure tax is collected?
Somebody can just not pay Sales tax and so the government doesn't collect it. But with VAT the seller is incentive to report so they can recover the VAT they paid.
i.e. McDonalds buys 10 burgers and pays 1$ in VAT to their supplier.
then McDonalds sells those 10 (now cooked) burgers and can recover 1$ in VAT from the government while the consumers ultimately pay >1$ in VAT for the 10 burgers.
when your employer pays your wages, they have an incentive to report that to the govt as a cost so they don't pay tax on it. That gives the govt the information they need to come after you for not paying your income tax on it. So, same thing, income tax and VAT there is more enforceability because he structure of payments and information flow can make a difference to ease of enforcement...
but the amount of tax is based on what activity is being taxed. Sales taxes are considered "regressive" because poor people spend a greater %age of their income, so in some sense it can be seen as an "undoing" of progressive income tax. That's not strictly true, however, because the working class complaint about rich people is how much rich people consume while living greedy lavish lives: which shows that rich people would be paying a lot more of the overall %age of sales tax than poor people (not really strictly distinguishing VAT from sales tax here)
So, anyway, I'm not defending sales taxes here (meaning tax on final sale to consume-ers with no taxes backward up the supply chain). VAT taxes do make more sense in terms of economic efficiency: 10% sales tax on a printer selling for $200 is $20, where the printer cost $300 to make (remember, they're going to sell you expensive ink), and with a VAT tax the tax would be $0 (or would it even be a $30 refund?)...
...point is, VAT tax works out to a high sales-tax-on-high-profit-margin-goods and a low sales-tax-on-low-profit-margin-goods, which is helpful because govt doesn't want to distort the market for low margin goods with high taxes.
However, back to my original point, it simply means that income taxes make more economic sense than consumption taxes, and VAT is an income tax, not a consumption tax.
I'm not sure I follow your logic to say sales taxes are not regressive. And I don't think a strawman is the right argument for it.
It is regressive and it's clearly so because someone living, for example off minimum wage, will have no money (or very little money left) by the end of the month for savings or investment. Where has all this money go? It's gone to pay for goods and services. This isn't just for minimum wage incomes but it's generally also the case up to the median household though obviously the higher you go the less you need to spend in proportion of your salary in VAT. And that's the key difference, someone that's on top of the earning category will pay little in proportion of their earnings in VAT no matter how you slice it; because they always have money left for savings and investment! It's true that overall they're going to be paying more VAT but not more in proportion to their income. And this gets even worse when it comes to the top wealth as most of their "income" is through capital gains which tend to be taxed much lower.
VAT is however as you say an efficient tax. But I believe we should consider putting exceptions on certain products (such as basic foods and books) to ease the burden on low income earners.
Also capital gains taxes tend to be embarassingly low in most countries and the excuses given are, imo, quite speculative. As many economists have calculated people don't actually "fly off" until taxation is rather high, times and times higher what we tax either capital or income.
flat income tax: if you earn more, you pay more tax, but it's still the same percentage, so "earn twice as much, pay twice as much tax"
progressive income tax: if you earn more, you pay more, but also a higher percentage, so something like "earn twice as much, pay three times as much"
sales tax: spend twice as much, pay twice as much, a flat tax.
it's not regressive, it's flat. "progressive" doesn't mean the political tendency, it means the tax rate progresses higher with income. A "politically progressive" sales tax, you might say, would change the tax rate on the basis of total spend, but difficult to implement because it can't be properly calculated at purchase time, unless you just want to make more expensive items have higher taxes, but you'd lose the tax efficiency described above for the VAT.
now, it's not necessary to bend our thinking like a pretzel to try to make sales tax include an extra bonus for low income people (or extra burden for rich people) but why not just do that as part of progressive personal income tax?† and as discussed, fix sales tax with VAT... which we should simply call company income tax because that's what it is.
† capital gains tax is interesting to discuss but not here, except to say "don't try to fix your problems with capital gains tax rates by making the sales, income, or VAT taxes crazy"
Yup, it's mad! I pay £2,500 a month for nursery for my son in zone 2. So... to send your kid to nursery you need £40k of spare gross income before paying the mortgage, and everything else.
And thats why women generally make less. Losing 5-11 (or more) years of experience really puts you behind a man that didn't (stereotypes w/e) stop working to raise a kid(s) until they could go to school.
North London, near Turnpike Lane. I think all the nurseries I enquired at in the area charge somewhere between £1200 and £1700 a month full time. Our previous nursery in Brixton was £1625 a week for a full time place. It probably helps that those are cheaper parts of the city.
In the US, someone earning $155,000 USD (Equivalent to 125k GBP) will also be paying 6.2% in social security taxes, 1.45% in medicare taxes, and then another 6.2% in social security taxes (employer's portion)[1], and 1.45% in medicare taxes (employer's portion). Added to the rest of their marginal tax rate, they'd be seeing a rate of 22 + 15.3 = 37.3%.
Of course, they won't actually get health insurance for it, which will cost a family ~$20,000/year. That's about 6-13% of your paycheck that could have been going into your wallet.
Also, don't forget your state income taxes, which will scrape another 0-7-12%.
All-in-all, Americans pay ~26% of their GDP in taxes. People in the UK pay... ~27% (Edit - it's actually closer to 33%) of their GDP in taxes. [2] 'Americans pay less taxes' is largely a meme with no basis in reality.
[1] Just because that gets subtracted from a different line item on your W-2 doesn't mean that you shouldn't count it.
[2] This is the only meaningful apples to apples comparison of overall tax burdens. And it makes the US look really bad, because that 26% won't even get you healthcare. Or cheap university tuition. It does get you 11 carrier fleet strike groups, and 5,500 nuclear weapons, though.
> In the US, someone earning $155,000 USD (Equivalent to 125 GBP) will also be paying 6.2% in social security taxes, 1.45% in medicare taxes, and then another 6.2% in social security taxes (employer’s portion), and 1.45% in medicare taxes (employer’s portion).
In the UK, there is also National Insurance tax on top of income tax, which works similarly (but is a bit more complicated.) The employer share is 13.8%, which is a hair below the combined employee + employer share US federal payroll tax.
And there is also a 20% VAT impacting the cost of pretty much anything you might use your after-tax income to buy.
> All-in-all, Americans pay ~26% of their GDP in taxes.
Rather than contradict the OP's statement, the above document reinforces it. The document only covers taxes identifies as "taxes", which makes the comparison with US apples to organges.
The two huge elephants in the room in the US are health care and higher education both of which are very high cost in the US and both of which have to be paid separately in the US. Whereas in most other countries these are either fully or partially funded by taxes.
For an apples-apples comparison of out of required pocket expenses in the US vs. other countries you need to include health care and education costs.
If we’re talking about the UK, college has got a lot more expensive there. Cost to run a university is getting more expensive everywhere, the Baumol effect doesn’t discriminate. Some countries subsidize more aggressively than others, but it’s getting harder.
Add pensions to that. Many countries have mandatory state run pension funds (for lack of a better translation, it's late at night here.) People can add their own private pension fund.
The overwhelming majority of a person's expenditures (Housing, education, medical, most of the food you buy at the grocery, many forms of transportation) are not covered by VAT. Many forms of energy (residential electricity, gas) are covered at a vastly reduced VAT.
And, again, the giant bugbear that is health insurance rears its ugly head on the US side. See the overall 'Taxes as a % of GDP' comparisons.
Edit: I stand corrected about taxes as % of GDP. You are right, that the UK is at 33.5%. [1] Unfortunately, again, that doesn't include the percentage of US spending on healthcare - which is 17.8% of its GDP, with much of it coming out of after-tax dollars, instead of pre-tax ones. (Medicaid and Medicare make up about a third of that - and are, obviously, financed by taxes.)
> And, again, the giant bugbear that is health insurance rears its ugly head on the US side
Sure, yes, that's a bigger non-tax expense for individuals in the US. The US having by far the least efficient healthcare system in the world is a huge problem.
> See the overall ‘Taxes as a % of GDP’ comparisons.
Yes, I’ve updated my post to address your wildly inaccurate “Taxes as a % of GDP” comparison, using the most recently published OECD data which shows that you were close for the US, and way low for the UK.
And I've updated my post to point out the mountain of US post-tax healthcare spending, that in the UK, largely comes out of pre-tax pounds.
At the end of the day, Americans still pay, and pay more. 26% in taxes, and then another ~11% in non-government-covered (non-Medicare/Medicaid) healthcare spending.
I've been corrected (my initial data was wrong, I've updated my post), and I agree on both points.
I do, however, posit that when it comes to determining whether an economy/society/??? is healthy (which is the conversation in this sub-thread), we need to look at all of these 'costs of life/business'. So, yes, the sticker price on the UK looks rough, but add it all up... And it comes out to be pretty similar. As it turns out, providing similar forms of services costs... About the same, across the developed world.
Really? I have top of the line healthcare through my employer in the US, which also covers my wife and teenage daughters, which costs me essentially nothing. NHS in the UK is collapsing, but even if it didn't, qualitatively it's orders of magnitude worse than what one would receive in the US through one's employer:
Months to years for an appointment, incompetent doctors and a bureaucracy that puts Kafka to shame.
> Really? I have top of the line healthcare through my employer in the US, which also covers my wife and teenage daughters, which costs me essentially nothing.
Very few people in the US have top of the line healthcare (hence, why its “top of the line” and not “typical”), and if you do it costs a lot per covered person, even if it is less visible because instead of a salary deduction instead a large chunk of money that the company is willing to pay for your labor just goes straight to an insurer without being part of your nominal pay.
(I, too, as I suspect is fairly common for HN readers given the demographic tendencies, have excellent healthcare in the US, abd most of the cost isn’t a salary deeuction, but the cost is nontrivial.)
> NHS in the UK is collapsing, but even if it didn't, qualitatively it's orders of magnitude worse than what one would receive in the US through one's employer:
Over 1/5th of US workers (not residents, people actually employed) aren’t eligible for any employer health insurance, and for many of the rest it is quite bad, with very high out of pocket costs if you actually need any non-preventice care. NHS may be worse than what you or I have through our employers, but “top of the line” isn’t the usual experience.
> Yes US healthcare has issues but it's nowhere near as bad as UK.
...if you are part of the relatively narrow elite in the US with top of the line coverage, and for that the US pays more than a time and a half what the UK does as a share of GDP, and more than double what the UK does per capita...while leaving over 12% of adults and 5% of children uninsured.
So you have an employer paying tens of thousands a year to get you health insurance, leading to a situation where only the most well off can have access to healthcare. The NHS is struggling because there's a shit load of people to treat with very little means. The US healthcare system is doing well because it leeches money off of the most well off and lets the poorest die.
> money off of the most well off and lets the poorest die.
A very significant proportion of US population is covered by Medicaid and if more if you add Medicare. In fact the US government spends almost 50% more on healthcare than Britain does (and that’s only public spending..). The problem is that the system is simply extremely inefficient.
Just look at Switzerland healthcare is privatized to a much higher degree than in the US yet still more accessible…
combined with ever increasing inequality offers a much better explanation. Inequality is high in the US too but at least they have a lot of growth which means that the bottom 80% or so are at least not getting poorer.
That may be the reality that some experience, I obviously couldn't say they are wrong.
But it isn't always the case. Where we live the NHS is excellent, appointments are fine, doctors are competent, and we've had no issues with bureaucracy. There is literally nothing I'd complain about, and we have double-digit interactions with the NHS each year.
The only fly in the ointment is the recent nurse strike happened on a day the wife was scheduled for some surgery, so that was cancelled. But I support them in that, and the rescheduled date is less than a month later.
There are issues everywhere, but there's no way I'd swap any of it for the US version. And always bear in mind that negative talk sells more papers/gets more eyeballs than positive.
That’s a specific issue caused by the Tories deliberately running it down. Pre-2010, the situation was very different. You didn’t have things like the Annual Winter Crisis (which now extends through to autumn).
Luckily, Labour will win the next GE, so they can start to turn this around.
Pre 2010 (well pre 2008 to be fair) UK had a higher or similar per capita GDP as the US, now it’s not even close. If the current trend continues it will be almost double in a few years.. Other European countries have been doing a bit better but it has clearly been a ‘lost decade’ in most of Western Europe and you can’t really blame the tortes for that.
> Other European countries have been doing a bit better
The UK has had the worst pandemic recovery almost anywhere in the developed world. How many other countries have an annual "Winter Crisis" in their healthcare that's extending into autumn and summer?
The Tories have been in power since 2010. They're the common factor in the many issues the UK is currently facing.
Everything that happened since Brexit is a disaster and it’s mainly the fault of conservative party and their voters (also labor picking comrade Corbyn to be its leader meaning there weren’t really any reasonable alternatives..). Combine that with the overall trend of decline/stagnation across Western Europe and you’ve got something…
Look at Switzerland. Fully privatized (too a much higher degree that the US in fact) very high quality yet significantly cheaper (still much higher total spending than any other European country). Yet the US government alone (so excluding private spending) spends about the same on healthcare (as % of GDP) as Britain but without even basic universal coverage…
> And there is also a 20% VAT impacting the cost of pretty much anything you might use your after-tax income to
Except stuff like food, rent, utilities, small stuff like that.
I'll give you the rest though. The UK is a low-tax country by European standards, and even by developed-world standards, but is above the US quite significantly.
The OECD includes countries like Mexico, Turkey, and Colombia that are definitely less developed than the rest of the list. Hell, looking at the IMF figures, half the European countries on that list count as "developing" too, especially the less-taxing ones. Don't think I agree with them, but I'm not an economist so hey.
Pretending that the employer is paying taxes for the employees is doublespeak popularized by large companies to justify why they want to stop paying it.
It is not taxes. It's a contribution to a functioning society. Otherwise, employers would get access to employees with NHS without putting a penny in.
It is taxes. Taxes are a contribution to a functioning society, though! There's nothing wrong with them when they are used well!
> Otherwise, employers would get access to employees with NHS without putting a penny in.
It doesn't matter how you slice it, the penny still comes out of payroll. It makes zero difference to me if I get paid 50,000, and 10,000 of that goes to taxes, or if I get paid 40,000 and my employer pays 10,000 in taxes. But it sure causes a lot of spilled ink about whether or not its 'really a tax' and 'who pays'.
> It is not taxes. It's a contribution to a functioning society
That’s what taxes in general are, so the second half does not support the first.
> Otherwise, employers would get access to employees with NHS without putting a penny in.
The idea that payroll taxes are a fee that employers pay the State for “access” to workers and that this is a defense rather than a criticism of the scheme is... interesting.
Nope. Words have a meaning. Contributions are dedicated to a specific thing. Nobody can take the money of the Build-Hospitals contribution and use it to Build-Death-Star. Taxes however can go anywhere.
Once again, "payroll tax" is language invented by employers to make it feel like they're being unjustly taxed. Additionally, in the case of Europe, most of these contributions were set up after WW2 because employers were happy enough to collaborate with the occupiers and kept wanting cheap labour without participating in rebuilding nations. So, sorry, I won't cry about them having to pay their fair share.
I don’t understand your point about the employer portion — it doesn’t come out of your paycheck, so if you wanted to include it in this calculation, you’d have to say your gross salary was higher.
I'm not sure where you're getting the $20,000/year healthcare spending number, but that looks like it is too high by an order of magnitude. See e.g. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2..., which puts median annual household spending on healthcare between $1,500 and $5,540 in 2019. If you're talking about total annual healthcare spending, that is largely paid by employers so should be accounted for as increased gross earnings for employees, which translates to lower effective tax rates.
And yes, the effective federal rate is not the total blended rate paid in the US, but it's not in the UK, either. For example, far as I know, no US region has a sales tax close to the UK's 20% VAT - sales tax is set locally but in most places is around 5-10%.
> I'm not sure where you're getting the $20,000/year healthcare spending number, but that looks like it is too high by an order of magnitude.
Certainly not by an order of magnitude.
In the US if you are single and work for a well-funded company (e.g. FAANG types) they will probably cover 100% of the health care premiums monthly and your deductibles will be low, so a couple thousand out of pocket is realistic.
Any other scenario though, it's going to be much more. Very few companies cover all the health care costs for the family of the employee. I've paid anywhere between $1K/mo to $2K/mo for full-family coverage while employed, with the employer covering the rest (total cost is over 40K/yr).
>which puts median annual household spending on healthcare between $1,500 and $5,540 in 2019.
I'm guessing that doesn't include employer subsidies. I pay (as an individual) ~$940/month for health insurance, plus a $600 deductible and $40/visit copays for doctors, $150 copay for emergency room visits and $1000 copay for hospital admisisons.
Assuming I don't need an emergency room or a hospital admission, that's over $10,000/year just for healthcare.
This article is specifically limited to people with employer-sponsored healthcare plans. $20k is a reasonable estimate for a family trying to get decent health insurance independently.
> $20k is a reasonable estimate for a family trying to get decent health insurance independently
So are we talking about people who have full time jobs and employee sponsored healthcare or are we talking about people getting health insurance independently?
> $20k is a reasonable estimate for a family trying to get decent health insurance independently.
That's on the low side. I'm currently taking a break between jobs and thus paying for health insurance out of pocket. For a family of 3 in California, I'm paying $42,000 annually.
huh? even the official UK Forces News youtube channel dedicated an entire episode to how hollowed out UK defense spending is at present
when Queen Liz set out to sea, half of the planes on her deck were F35s from (and staffed by) the US Marines...afaik the UK cannot provide full air wings for their own carriers
> All-in-all, Americans pay ~26% of their GDP in taxes.
It's more like 35%-36%.
The far more accurate picture is that the local + state + federal spending is going to be around $9.5 trillion in 2023. The IMF has the US at an estimated $26.8 trillion GDP for 2023. Beyond the federal government, the US has two other massive layers of government that spend well over $4 trillion each year.
I fully understand the difference between taxes and spending, and that spending comes out of your pocket either directly via taxes or via inevitable currency debasement (look at the enormous value loss in the dollar since the rampaging deficits & later debt monetization began after 9/11). The bill comes due, period.
No it really depends on the state. Washington would get me much closer to 25 percent. Plus as a tech worker you're making at least double what your counterpart in Europe is making (especially considering the insanity of taxes here) so you need to factor in a lot more variables than what I see most commenters doing for total take home.
The problem in the U.S. is inefficiency. The U.S. spends more public money per capita on healthcare than most of its peers. Simply nationalizing the healthcare system would quite possibly lead to lower taxes, and would certainly lead to much lower healthcare spending. We know how to make a system that provides for everyone and we know it will save us money, but we can't do it because that would be SOCIALIST!!!
There's no need to slash the defense budget to make the U.S. government function better. All we need to do is jettison the ideologues deliberately sabotaging good government at every turn.
(I do support slashing defense budgets, but that has nothing to do with saving money. I'd support lighting the money on fire rather than spending it on "national security".)
Extremely disingenuous to include employer taxes in personal income taxes to make whatever point you're making. Might as well toss in the costs of accounting in there while you're at it.
Edit: I'm being throttled from posting but response below:
There are a lot of factors that go into deciding the gross pay that an employee receives. What you are doing is muddying the waters to make a point but it just makes it trickier to compare. If you are an employee that is deciding where to live and work, the specific employer taxes make no difference to you -- what matters is your net pay and the services you get for the taxes paid. The rest of the costs, including things like parental leave, time off, and healthcare have already played into deciding your wage.
I'm also not sure why you included health insurance costs for the US total but not the 12-14% regressive UK national insurance tax or the regressive 20% VAT for the UK total unless you're deliberately trying to argue in bad faith. I'm suggesting comparing apples to apples. There's enough to criticize as is.
It's disingenuous to not include it. It still comes out of your paycheck, just because it happens above the fold doesn't mean it's not a real tax burden, equivalent to the one that is listed below the fold.
Splitting it into an 'employer and employee' portion was just an accounting trick to get political buy-in for it. At the end of the day, it's still a regressive 15.3% tax rate that gets slapped onto your wages.
Can't believe prices are so high...goes to Five Guys which is at least 3x any other burger chain.
I still can't believe how cheap the UK is. Big Mac meal near me is £6, cheeseburger is £1, 1kg of potatoes was 20p the other week, two-portion microwavable rice 20p, even a nice matured ribeye steak is only £5, it is genuinely incredible.
In particular, the price of stuff that comes from farmers is really too low in the UK (there has been massive competition in food retail, great...prices are extremely low but cost isn't an issue for 99% of the population...if you go into Tesco, it is staggering how limited their range of products is, the reason why is that they have driven prices so low that food production is often quite unprofitable...the recent trade deal with Morocco was also a real game-changer for food prices, UK farmers can't compete).
And the top rate of tax in the UK is 45%. When people say they pay more it is because they are paying for student loans (which aren't really on economic terms, are often forgiven totally, etc...the reason why we have this system is because wealthy students were getting heavy subsidies from free university education). But what people ignore is that you get substantial amounts of welfare and benefits.
For example, the govt recently introduced free childcare for a certain number of hours. Where do you think the taper would be? Probably median income? £28k? Maybe where child benefits stop £50k? Nope, £100k. You can earn £99k/year in the UK, and still receive benefits from the state. That is why taxes are "so high" (they aren't, taxes in the UK are amazingly low given the size of the state...we have wage subsidy programs worth tens of billions every year, housing subsidie worth tens of billions, on and on it goes, everyone on welfare).
Five Guys is not "3x any other burger chain", that is lunacy. I live in London and eat burgers a lot. Chains like GBK ("Gourmet" Burger Kitchen, of course just another mid-market chain, not gourmet in a classical sense), Honest Burger, Byron Burger, Black Bear Burger, Burger & Beyond, Patty & Bun, other imported USA chains like Shake Shack, and others. They're all popular places to go for a burger, and they're as or (typically) more expensive than Five Guys. You can find much more expensive burgers too. And yes you can find cheaper burgers, but not very nice ones (I do not enjoy Big Macs at all, and for that matter I don't like Five Guys either, but I can get something I like for their prices). I would say what I regard as a "decent" burger here has gotten much more expensive.
Correct. However, enough of us do to render your claim that Five Guys is "3x as expensive as any other chain" entirely factually incorrect. And the situation's basically the same in any UK city big enough to have a few Five Guys.
It is. I do. If not chains by the same name, equivalent ones that are as or more expensive than Five Guys. E.g., Fat Hippo are in Birmingham, Cardiff, Durham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham... And of the chains I mentioned, GBK for example are all over the place, in about 15 different towns and cities. I know of a chain in Manchester, "Almost Famous", if they're any cheaper than Five Guys, it'll be by about 50p. And so on. Your claim that Five Guys is 3x any other burger chain is ridiculous.
I bet the person complaining about the price of burgers was in London or some other major city which has them though. And nicer burgers won’t be much cheaper outside of London (they simply might not exist in some places though)
How much do you even pay in the UK for a 5 guys hamburger? the previous comment had a complicated order. For reference, in southern california, the regular hamburger is $10.79 from five guys. A lot higher than in n out, a double double is less than $5, but probably $2-3 cheaper than what you'd pay at a low key sit down restaurant like a brewery or whatever.
Out of curiosity I just checked Detroit, MI, median income of 20k usd a year. Still about the same at $10.49. This is almost bewildering how the price is pegged to about $10.75 the world over, no matter the price of labor or rent or beef or getting it to the world over. Margins must be all over the place.
> the govt recently introduced free childcare for a certain number of hours
I'm guessing you don't have children because they actually promised to do it in a year. Nothing has changed yet. Also the extra funding for free hours works out at like 20p/hour which is way below what is needed for nurseries to break even on free hours.
I think you're massively overstating how good things are. Are taxes aren't high because they're paying for great services; they're high because they're paying for great fuckups. Brexit, corruption, too-good pensions deals, etc.
Our state pension is paid out of contributions made over a lifetime, it isn't remotely close to a good deal...if it is so good, would you have all your contributions paid into the state pension? No.
Brexit? Zero cost. Corruption? Zero cost. It is amazing that the state is giving massive handouts to people in work, and they still complain that things are terrible. We are giving thousands of pounds per year to people on more than 3x the median salary, and your response is: more money please. We are spending £200bn/year on healthcare, fully universal..."why am I having to pay taxes for this? Things are so bad".
Okay...if you were on £50k, would you support the govt making thousands a year in transfers from you to people on £200k?
One reason why economic policy is so bad in the UK is that people genuinely cannot conceive of economic policy being made for anyone but them: planning, govt finance, monetary policy...every area, it is really quite excruciating.
He's not taxed at 45% he just doesn't understand progressive taxation. You'd need to make like 1 million a year or more for the effective rate to be 45% i think.
listed prices include VAT pretty much everywhere I've been to in the world, other than the US. If something says it costs €1 or £1 then you're paying €1 or £1 for it at the checkout.
Although the 45% is only applied to income above £120,000 and VAT either doesn't apply or is reduced to 5% on stuff like (most) food, rent, utilities, children's clothes, and loads more.
Isn't this basically how all economies work? You get taxed on your paycheck and then on purchases too. It's not unique to the UK to recognize taxes diminish your purchasing power.
In Canada tax rates are similar, although we do have lower VAT. In other EU countries income tax is more aggressive but they have more social benefits.
No, it wouldn't because when you pay tax your money isn't being flushed down the toilet. You don't understand at a fundamental level how the govt works in the UK.
If you’re making 50k, paying or not paying health insurance matters.
The US suffers from both a high tax burden and poor services. We just tend to nickel and dime our taxes more but it doesn’t really matter if you’re paying 1$ to the feds in income taxes, pay 1$ to use a state’s toll road, or 1$ to a “fee” your town tacks on the water bill.
Looking at total government spending as a percentage of GDP doesn’t show differences in services but it does show just what it all costs.
Simple math that you got wrong. Do you understand that 45% is a marginal rate?
And yes, it does have everything to do with govt policies because you are getting value back.
It is like saying taxes are high in Nordic countries, ignoring the fact that most of what you pay is returned to you. Saying that doesn't impact demand or the price level is not accurate, and misunderstands (again) at a fundamental level how govt operates.
Are you really in here arguing that UK is not in a cost of living crisis? There's plenty of evidence that they are, and this seems like a needlessly contrarian post.
I have no idea what "a cost of living crisis" is or what the quantitative definition for one is.
Demand is not falling so, by definition, there cannot be a "cost of living crisis". Because prices have increased does not mean they are at a high level.
You are acting as if some govt agency has declared a "cost of living crisis" and that is somehow meaningful to reality. I gave you specific examples of the prices of food: you call that "contrarian", I don't see any specific examples in your post however...perhaps you are being needlessly contrarian?
Except demand is falling, as demonstrated by the very article you're commenting under. Or by the figures showing people saved energy like crazy over the last 6 months. Or by the rise in people struggling with bills and credit [1]. I don't know what numbers you're looking at, but it's pretty clear that people are hurting more now than they did before, and that is inevitably going to kill demand.
> For example, the govt recently introduced free childcare for a certain number of hours. Where do you think the taper would be? Probably median income? £28k? Maybe where child benefits stop £50k? Nope, £100k
So do you also think primary education is also welfare?
Five Guys has always been that price, but I agree with your point. As a Brit, the US is pretty crazy too though. I just saw a single broccoli for $7 at a grocery store in Palo Alto.
On my $172k salary I pay $59k in taxes which is roughly $1k more than I'd pay in the UK but in the UK that includes national insurance while in the US I pay health insurance on top. So while taxes sound crazy in the UK it's not actually different to the US - it's all marginal. VAT is only 7.25% in California but then you have to add 15-20% in tips when you're out.
California's tax rate is much higher than the rest of the country. The bay area's brocoli prices are much higher than anywhere except times square. The vast majority of the country is not facing prices like these.
If you're capable of earning $172,000 in salary in the US, you can trivially get an employer that covers essentially all the cost of your health insurance (if that's an important arrangement wherever you're at in life; ie if you want that packaged into your total compensation vs taxes calculation). That's the typical situation for someone with a salary that high in the US. Your scenario is pretending that people earning so much are commonly having to cover the cost of their health insurance, which is not the case.
Which is simultaneously in no way defending the mess that is US healthcare.
> If you're capable of earning $172,000 in salary in the US, you can trivially get an employer that covers essentially all the cost of your health insurance
Employers rarely cover all the health care premiums for you entire family.
Most non-startups will cover 100% for the employee, but if you're not single you'll end up paying quite a bit to cover your spouse & kids.
>VAT is only 7.25% in California but then you have to add 15-20% in tips when you're out.
I don't know about the rest of the UK because I haven't been but most non-casual places in London charge an automatic 12.5% service charge. It's the same thing.
I'd tip at a restaurant but not at a pub. If people ask for a tip on the card machine I, being British, feel obligated to tip meaning I have to tip at weird places. For example I recently tipped at a cigarette stand in a casino in Las Vegas where all they did was sell a packet. I've even seen images on Reddit of people getting asked for tips at self service stations!
Another thing I didn't talk about is annual leave. Annual leave in the US is usually rubbish compared to European countries.
Draegers is probably the most expensive grocery store I have ever set foot in. The one near San Mateo has a crazy wine selection sometimes but I literally cannot fathom buying a week's groceries there. Beautiful produce, but you can get beautiful produce at a farm stand for a couple bucks too.
Not sure how to feel about the existence of luxury grocery stores. I'm sure the people who shop there are happy.
It's the only place that has guanciale and decent pancetta near me, plus they sell pasta from my in-laws village in Italy, which is fun to cook carbonara with from time to time. They also sell wagyu which is hard to find in the Bay Area! I absolutely would never ever do my actual weekly shopping from there!
Check it out! It's really quite good - comes in a proper slab you cube yourself. They also have some pretty nice American Wagyu steaks around the $30 mark which I've been using for yakiniku parties (thinly cut and cooked on a grill in the middle of the table)! As long as you want something semi-specialist they're great but general items like chicken breasts or broccoli are just mental.
Two years ago I was making $160k in Oxford with 7 years work experience and no degree - contracting in London for > $500 per day or working remotely for startups in the Bay Area are both easily accessible if you have a couple years under your belt. I'm moving back to Europe this summer and talking to companies at 550+ a day.
That thats the case for the US as well. The average salary for US software dev, according to glassdoor, is 88,395/year, which iirc is about the same I've seen form other sources. Everyone working in FAAG is an outlier compared to the rest of the US. These conversations are usually pretty poor because context is very important and job + location + circumstance is seemingly pretty much impossible to compare to each other.
I spent a while when I was trying to find a job trying to comes to terms with that "average dev salary" number, since the vast majority of jobs for an entry level position were at least 80k, with plenty being more (I was looking nationwide, wanted to move out, didn't care where). I think it's heavily biased by the fact that the field is growing at an extremely fast rate relative to others, which means the average software dev has dramatically less experience than an average, say, accountant.
So when looking at salary figures, the only sane way of doing it is to control for experience level, otherwise the variance in the explosive growth of the industry will dominate your results.
HN's conception of software developer is just very different from the labor bureau. Someone who makes wordpress sites, knows a little html, css, and teensy amount of javascript is a software developer.
These folks do not actually earn a great wage because they know less than what many bootcamp grads come out of a 12 week program with, but they exist in multitudes.
Yeah, this seems to be a stronger contender. The median income for someone with a CS bachelors in the US is $110,417, which is a much more believable number for what I would consider a software developer.
Not really. You have to compare the equivalent rarity between the two countries. He's describing a 99th percentile income in the UK. The 99th percentile income in the US is $350K. It's not even close.
Thanks for the link I guess... I'm not sure why this data is anymore useful alone, like I said, in a discussion about cost of living without cost of health care, taxes, etc. Your response perfectly illustrates my previous point, that having a discussion about an incredibly nuanced and specific comparison for cost of living (look at the post title) is made difficult by people who just say "Look at this thing here, it means I'm right! All I need to prove my point about cost of living is X". Man, I love throw away accounts.
To be fair, the average salary for hospital worker is quite different than the average salary for neurosurgeon. Yet both work in healthcare at a hospital.
I'm not in CA, never have been. I'm in NYC. And the reason I'm in NYC is precisely because these high-paying jobs are available here, which is also why I'm not in the UK.
I mean what you said is right. In general though, one would be earning much less in UK in IT/Tech/SW jobs compared to US. So overall earning remain higher in US.
agreed. US price is bat shit crazy. 'some' things are reasonably affordable in the U.S., like processed food in bulk, grains, dairy, etc. But eating out, rent, service labor, healthcare, are insane.
My unscientific burger comparison I think calls BS on the UK prices. Everywhere is expensive now.
The problem with the UK is Brexit and a country that went from being very supportive to small business and entrepreneurs to a high tax wasteland of averageness. The UK is the deepest into its decline of any western empire.
They are shuffling deck chairs on the titanic. the coronation was the canary for living in the past.
some data:
I looked at two restaurants in central London. Gordan Ramsey (expensive) and honest burgers. Their prices were 13 and 17 GBP for the regular burger. (16 and 21 USD respectively.
Compared to seattle. If I pick Victory Tavern (which is ethan Stowall somewhat equiv to Gordan) thats a $21USD burger. Little woody's is a $7.50 burger but has no sides. add fries for 3.5 and you are at $11.
Seattle is no London. Yet these prices arent miles apart and I would put little woodys as a cheap burger and America is the King of burgers and Beef production so would expect to see cheaper options.
what I dont think brits really understand about US food prices in restaurants though in recent years in places like seattle is there is a 40% tax on the prices on the menu.
sales tax 10%
Living wage tax 10%
20%+ tip expectation
Everyone I talk to from earning $80K a year to $1M a year are not eating out as much as its absurdly expensive.
Just this week. 2 people. dinner at a reasonable seattle restuarant on a tuesday - not high end. 2 mains, shared appetizer and bread and 4 glasses of wine. $300.
Hmm, even if the restaurant is not high end, those are quite high prices.
Just went out to a restaurant I would describe similarly (https://www.thebutchersdaughter.com/west-village/). Mains are ~$20, appetizers are ~$15, wine is ~$15. Two mains, two apps, four glasses of wine would be $130, with tax and tip is $180. That is still high for me, but that does include four drinks.
> America is the King of burgers and Beef production so would expect to see cheaper options.
There are, in McDonalds, Burger King, In-n-out etc. What you are paying for is labor and the fast food places are optimized to reduce that specific cost. The drive thru, for example, increases demand per hour and thus lets kitchens specialize more, and invest in more machinery. Ray Kroc, a salesman, loved the 8 at a time milkshake mixer he was pitching so much he bought a burger chain to put them to use.
But inflation, and labor cost increases in the low end especially, mean prices are up now versus a decade ago.
Is your brother in Scotland? If not he should get his tax code checked.
Combining income tax and national insurance contributions, the highest marginal tax rate on your salary is 47%, and that is only on everything over £125k (about $150k).
The vast majority of people are in the standard rate band where you pay 20% IT and 12% NI contributions, a total of 32% on what you earn over the tax free allowance £12,500 and under the £50k higher rate threshold, at which point it switches to 40% IT and just 2% NI.
If you earn £50k you will pay 23% total tax on your salary.
If you earn £125k you pay about 38% total tax on your salary.
The very highest marginal rate he should pay is 47%, if he is paying more then someone screwed up.
FWIW, in CA that order at Five Guys would be $55 (https://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/five-guys-prices/ gives prices at (8.95*3+3.06*3+7.41*2)*1.0725), but I imagine people in CA are richer than people in the UK...
Five Guys and In N Out are competing in different market niches. In N Out is operating in the fast food bracket, competing with McDonalds and Jack In The Box (both of which it's cheaper than, remarkably). Five Guys is trying to be a more premium burger place, in the fast-casual market. In that niche, we can compare it to Panera or Blaze Pizza or the like, where a $15-20/person bill isn't unusual at all.
I understand the market they're obviously aiming at, but it feels like a cheap In-n-Out replacement around here. For those prices I'd go to a roadhouse or Smashburger or the local bars or similar.
They do have that weird soda robot, so there's that.
They're post-tax and don't factor major expenses like healthcare, household bills in general are almost double in California, but yeah, the average Californian is probably wealthier.
To be perfectly frank, most people in the UK (and elsewhere really) just need to learn how to cook !
From a UK perspective, being able to cook achieves:
a) The ability to buy raw ingredients in bulk
b) You can cook dishes that last you multiple meals (and NO, this does not mean eating the same thing)
c) You can make soups and stocks from bones (all you need is bones, cheap vegetables, cheap spicing, and water)
d) VAT on raw ingredients is either 0% or 5%
e) Raw ingredients are cheaper than processed food
f) Raw ingredients are A MILLION times cheaper than restaurant prices (depending where you eat, you're typically paying up to 300% mark-up on ingredients because the restaurant needs to cover its costs)
And no it is not time consuming, the more practice you get, the quicker it becomes. And things like soups and stocks you don't even have to watch the pot, you just put it on and forget about it for a few hours.
The issue is that cooking becomes more enjoyable and fast if you have a well-stocked large kitchen which not many can have due to size constraints or budget constraints. Then there's also cleaning which is never enjoyable and takes a big chunk of time. Cooking is definitely efficient at 3 or more people, can have tradeoffs with 2 people and makes little sense if you live alone or with non-cooperating flatmates.
> if you have a well-stocked large kitchen which not many can have due to size constraints or budget constraints.
I'm sorry but that is oft-repeated nonsense that you have to have a well-stocked large kitchen to be able to cook at home.
You can cook as well in a small "galley" style kitchen as you can in a large one.
Other than herbs, spices and maybe a few bottles/cans of this and that, you don't need to keep vast stocks of anything. All you need to do is engage the brain and do a little bit of forward-planning for the week ahead.
How do you think people who grew up in, for example, communist-era Eastern Europe survived ? They all cooked at home. They certainly didn't have access to a supermarket so they could have a "well-stocked large kitchen". And their kitchens were certainly not large. Yet they ate well, they ate healthily.
> Cooking is definitely efficient at 3 or more people, can have tradeoffs with 2 people and makes little sense if you live alone
This is also utter tripe, again oft-repeated.
In 2023 we are blessed with this thing called refrigeration.
Again, engage brain and plan ahead.
You can make a variety of dishes for the immediate days ahead and put them in the refrigerator. As long as you stick to basic sensible food hygiene, food will be perfectly safe after a few days to a week in the fridge.
Leftovers can go in the freezer. You can equally (and should !) for example put a supply of stocks and soups in the freezer (soups for when you need a quick meal, stocks to add flavour and depth to other dishes).
It's not rocket science. It is simply, regrettably, a skill that has been lost in today's culture of immediate gratification and laziness.
I don't know if you live in the UK or not, but in my experience, almost everyone cooks at home here. It's pretty rare I'll go out and have a sit-down meal any more expensive than McDonalds or a coffee and cake, and I earn _very_ well even for London.
London (which TBF isn't the whole of the UK) sits pretty squarely in the middle of the pack at 201.1 restaurants per capita*. Assuming they're not all fronts for organized crime, somebody must be going to them, even if it's not you and your friends.
It's gotten to the point that I cook at home because the quality does not match the price anymore. And I'm lazy and work a comfy tech job, so you know it's gotten bad. Paid over $8 today for a slice of cheese pizza (regular size, not jumbo) and a small drink--this is in Cleveland, OH It's ridiculous.
I wonder how this kind of thing will affect low-mid tier sit down chain restaurants (think Red Robin, Chili's, BJ's, etc).
Right now, to take my family to one of these restaurants for dinner would cost on the order of $100. At that price, I may as well just stomach the extra $30-50 and go get a nice meal at one of the local independent restaurants. The food and atmosphere will certainly be better.
My in-laws took us out for dinner last weekend at Red Robin and the bill after tip was about $140. (4 adults, 2 kids). That's seriously obscene for the quality of food at Red Robin, which isn't terrible but certainly not worth spending $140 for.
The family dining segment (cheap sitdown fair) is a shambling corpse. They weren't doing well pre-COVID, because each successive generation is proving less and less willing to sacrifice food quality for table service. At the price point restaurants like Chili's, Applebee's and their ilk operate at ($15-30/head), you can get substantially better food at a fast-casual (above fast food, but no table service) restaurant, and people are clearly choosing to do so. Nicer sit-down restaurants (in the ~$40+/head price range) are still doing alright.
Then COVID hit, and "going out to eat" was pummeled: fast-casual restaurants weathered the storm alright-ish, because they likely already had a non-trivial takeout segment, and were attracting people based on their food. Family dining, who's main selling point is table service, were slaughtered.
The outlook continues to be bleak for them, since they're being squeezed out of the market: cut costs by making worse food, and they cement their laughingstock status, cut costs by cutting back on staff and they jeopardize what little remains of their customer demand, or raise prices and further reduce their value proposition versus going to a nicer sit-down restaurant.
Visiting the UK from the US in January and I was impressed by how far the dollars went. There was a burger and beer special at Wetherspoon for something like 6-7 pounds and a beer was under around 1-2 pounds. So my experience was different than the parent. Those prices are reasonable in the US under the old exchange rates but cheap now.
That being said, everyone was complaining about the costs so I agree that for people living there, the costs have gone up. My auntie kept her house very cold and taxi drivers complained a lot too about prices and the insurance system.
> he mentioned he's getting taxed at 48-50% on top of this.
The highest income tax bracket is 45%, and you only pay that rate of tax on the money you earn past £125k – you don’t pay that rate on your entire income.
thats incorrect. you lose your tax free allowance, which is a furtger 12,500 tax paid. Plus you need to consider graduate tax and the interest on those 'loans' which currently sits at 4.5%
they will exist for a while because you need to get to that level in your career. People rarely leave uni and get 100k+ jobs. If you leave uni and find a job paying at 50k and you get increases of 2.5% each year, it will take over 20 years to repay.
A quick search tells 5 guys burger prices are about same in US dollar vs UK pound ..e.g $9 here 9 GBP there. So yes, high price, but if anyone last few years still thinks that fast food is cheap and kind of daily thing is a victim of marketing myth.
It doesn't help that how its sneakily promoted by TV shows where beat cops, blue collar workers eating burgers and shake all the time where IT engineer like me would balk at such high prices
I'm not sure you'd be much different in the US. I find, among "fast casual" (i.e. step up from real fast food chains) burger chains, Five Guys is one of the more expensive.
To add to that, prices in countries which were famous for being cheap tourist destinations, like Budapest/Hungary are out of control. Expect to pay 10-14 euros for a pizza, which is very much in line with western europe almost down to the cent. I'd wager earnings-averaged cost of living apart from HCOL areas are actually lower in the US right now, than Europe.
I went to a local chain in my area and wanted to purchase a single cheeseburger, similar to the McDonald’s McDouble. McDonald’s dollar menu items are now up to 3 dollars, and this local chain’s cheapest option was 5.50. I just left the drive through without buying anything.
Even the cheapest fast food isn’t cheaper than cooking at home anymore, which is very new.
Allow me to side step: in these high prices times, people should investigate one-meal-a-day or caloric restriction. Save money and restore your health at the same time. Spend the free time doing family hike, singing in a choir, playing chess or crafting.
Tax blaming is b/s. The problem in the UK is that not enough rich people are being taxed. Meanwhile, shareholders are crapping all over normals (see story today about the water companies dumping waste and then passing on £10bn bill to their customers). The Tory gov insists that privatisation is the key - meanwhile the NHS falls on its ass, schools are crumbling, trains are late and expensive and shit.
Don't get me started on Brexit. There is literally NO redeeming feature to this shit show - again caused by rabid right wing Tory assholes - and once again in the news is the UK car industry saying we're going to lose 800,000 jobs due to Brexit unless the gov pulls its finger out.
So - sorry - but don't bang on about high taxes OR your obviously minted higher rate tax paying mate. It's 12 years of Tory austerity that is REALLY hurting people over here. More taxes on the rich would help mightily.
Oh, and a £162m public bill to bury someone who owned more diamond hats that she knew what to do with. Don't get me started on the royal shitshow either.
Sorry to rant but I'm bloody horrified at the state of our country and it ain't taxes that are the problem.
> Meanwhile, shareholders are crapping all over normals (see story today about the water companies dumping waste and then passing on £10bn bill to their customers
This has been so egrigeous, water companies are literal monopolies that have been braking the law and there are no consequences.
I don't know why you'd think that, UK manufacturing is about the same as France, and quite a bit more than say Norway or Australia. Definitely not an outlier in any case.
Exactly the opposite of what should be happening. Homes should be connected with permanent, reliable, high capacity fiber optic networks.
Mobile connectivity plays an important role but it should be complementary, an add-on to the backbone not a substitute.
Given how the costs of digital technology are generally on a collapsing trend this suggests significant dysfunction. Reducing the computing experience of the entire population to mobile phones is a severe downgrade, a sort of digital precariat.
> Exactly the opposite of what should be happening. Homes should be connected with permanent, reliable, high capacity fiber optic networks.
> Mobile connectivity plays an important role but it should be complementary, an add-on to the backbone not a substitute.
I desire fiber everywhere as much as any other guy, but for some, 4-5G and a cellular phone is enough. They don't even know or perceive the difference between mobile broadband and landline.
FTTC are FTTH are both fibre. I'd rather they _did_ upgrade everything to to FTTC, which they can afford, and let those that can fund FTTH pay for it, than leave it as copper wire all the way to the exchange because someone said "FTTH or nothing!" With full FTTC coverage, you're 90% of the way there for a tiny fraction of the cost of full FTTH coverage.
DSL is not being sold as "fiber". People are being sold FTTC with a description of exactly what is is and what speed they can expect. Weetabix is being sold as fiber?
> Also known as fibre optic broadband, it’s our most widespread broadband. It uses powerful fibre cables to transmit signals to a cabinet on your street, before copper cables connect your home. That’s why you might have heard it called FTTC (fibre to the cabinet).
> The result is strong, reliable, superfast broadband, with average speeds up to 80Mb.
If FTTC is fibre then so is a 56k dial-up or public Wi-Fi. Both have fibre at some point in the path. I think it would be good to give the benefit of the doubt and brand it based on what is likely to be the bottleneck which in this case will be the DSL.
> I'd rather they _did_ upgrade everything to to FTTC, which they can afford, and let those that can fund FTTH pay for it, than leave it as copper wire all the way to the exchange because someone said "FTTH or nothing!"
Fair enough, but in that case call it by what it really is - DSL and not fibre. This allows consumers to make an informed decision and competition to work effectively (so only actual FTTP providers can call their offer fibre and people will instantly tell the difference between that and DSL without reading the fine print).
> DSL is not being sold as "fiber"
It is. They should not be calling DSL "fiber" unless you are also happy with 56k dial-up being sold as fiber, along with pretty much any other means of internet access since there's always going to be fibre somewhere along the path.
> The result is strong, reliable, superfast broadband, with average speeds up to 80Mb.
It is nowhere near as reliable nor fast as true fibre. Also 80Mbps is the theoretical maximum speed - the actual average is much lower, especially on upload speeds despite those becoming even more critical since both remote work and cloud-based services are becoming more relevant every day. There's also no way to tell what your actual speed is going to be without signing up for a contract at which point it will be too late to cancel.
I just re-read the sentence and I find the inclusion of "average" speed redundant and can't help but think it is only there to trick you into thinking the average is 80Mbps, as opposed to it simply being the theoretical maximum. Really scummy.
I've had FTTC for many years, and it's been like eating grilled turd.
Latency was through the roof, if you try to plau CS Go you will loose to bots. Weired cal dropping issues on skype/teams/etc. But you do a speed test, and it shows solid 50+ mbps
That was Virgin media. Oh, and upload is shit.
The I moved to a newbuilt eith FTTH and I never looked back. It's a world of difference.
If i need to move I literally reject any home without fiber. Estate agents are always surpised - i. the age of working from home!
Wireless spectrum is limited and thus should be used for stuff that can't be wired such as mobile phones. Using it for static connections that can use wires is a waste.
Expensive to maintain: dunno, but I pay <10€/month for mine, so it can't be that outrageous
Slow: you can watch HD video ever since 3G came out, and 4G reduced latency a lot
Doesn't scale: that's also a thing 4G apparently addressed. I've never run into capacity issues, just range issues
Depends heavily on weather: never noticed it depending even slightly on weather. I've tested this in heavy rain because I indeed heard that 'straalverbindingen' have issues with this ("beam connection", "directional radio"? Not sure how to translate that word) and because microwave ovens seem to work at 2.4 GHz and water adsorbs this very well, but it appeared to make no difference whatsoever for bandwidth or latency tests on mobile data
Malicious third parties interfering: never heard of this happening to an ordinary citizen, and if you're scared of your government putting up an IMSI catcher, maybe use a VPN
I wonder... do you primarily watch HD video over this wireless connection, or are you watching it via a more traditional broadband connection? In the US, I pay ~$10 a month for wireless data (across two phones), but these phones are on WiFi 90% of the time and we never watch video on wireless.
Even if you have an unusual plan that allows unlimited streaming at that price (without limiting the video bitrate), it seems like it would probably not scale to most people switching to a wireless plan without a price increase.
Data is ridiculously overpriced in the US. In the UK, I'm currently on a 12GB plan which costs £7.99 month. But you can get completely unlimited data including tethering for £20/month or less from lots of different providers. Never heard of unlimited for less than £15 though (unless its a temporary offer).
“Unlimited” data is not comparable because different subscriber’s data gets assigned different priorities at times of congestion.
In the US, you can get “unlimited” data for as low as $25 per month, or as high as $90 per month, depending on what level priority you want (which you assume might make a difference at peak times).
And then there is a lot of bundling going on like Netflix and Disney or international. For example, I pay ATT $45 per line for 4 lines including all taxes, but they include phone calls and data for almost all of North and South America, minus the Caribbean Islands.
> “Unlimited” data is not comparable because different subscriber’s data gets assigned different priorities at times of congestion.
> In the US, you can get “unlimited” data for as low as $25 per month, or as high as $90 per month, depending on what level priority you want (which you assume might make a difference at peak times).
Yeah I don't think this happens in the UK/EU. The US system seems really weird and complex in comparison. Those prices I quoted above include unlimited calls and texts to anywhere in the UK.
I would be surprised if UK/EU did not also have it. Surely, it exists for certain levels of politicians/government/emergency services. Seems like a short throw to then extending that implementation to capture as much revenue as you can by implementing price segmentation strategies like in the US.
Yeah its illegal to offer plans based on throttling/prioritisation in the EU.
> Under these rules, blocking, throttling and discrimination of internet traffic by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is not allowed in the EU. There are 3 exceptions: compliance with legal obligations; integrity of the network; congestion management in exceptional and temporary situations.
> All traffic has to be treated equally. For example, there can be no prioritisation of traffic in the Internet access service. Equal treatment still allows reasonable day-to-day traffic management according to objectively justified technical requirements, which must be independent of the origin or destination of the traffic and of any commercial considerations.
Interesting, but I wonder if this exception would not allow the same:
> congestion management in exceptional and temporary situations.
I presume the US mobile networks are primarily selling higher priority that applies (since it only needs to be applied) in exceptional and temporary situations.
I'd say the EU are generally less tolerant of loophole based exploitation of the law than the US (see for example the potential Apple USB-C speed throttling in the news recently). Anyone who tried this kind of thing would get sanctioned pretty quick.
I didn't know this was a thing. As someone who's on roaming 90% of the time with a MVNO from another country, definitely a good thing to know about! Thanks for linking.
> do you primarily watch HD video over this wireless connection
No, I'm just saying it's been possible ever since 3G rolled out, and tech has only gotten better since then. The person I responded to said that mobile data can't be used as a replacement for a landline, but in practice, 99% of us use the airwaves for this already. We call it Wi-Fi. A lot of mobile towers also first beam their traffic to another tower before your packets meet a fiber.
Of course (as a general rule), the sooner your signal gets to a fiber, the better it is for your connection speed and reliability, but mobile data (with good signal strength) is clearly fine for most purposes. I am waiting for the day where people realise this and mobile data scales up and gets too cheap to meter in the same way as today's landline connections don't charge per gigabyte (I'm ignoring the existence of Belgium here; pardon me, belgians!). For now, having a landline dug to your home and work plus paying for mobile connectivity is cheaper than going mobile-only and getting a practically unlimited data bundle. A lot of rooms are also sandwiched in a way that outside signals aren't as reliable as a local WiFi. I'd be surprised if the former is still the case in 15 years, and the latter in 25 (thinking of something like a femtocell here).
> Expensive to maintain: dunno, but I pay <10€/month for mine, so it can't be that outrageous
I agree with this and all your other points. Surely it is cheaper to a put up a few mobile masts than to dig and install cables everywhere. In fact, this is the exact reason the government is using this strategy to get internet to rural locations rather than using cables.
You’re paying in euros. Which means you’re probably from a small country which also partially subsidizes infrastructure cost.
You’re also, in the context of the macro population, not using as much bandwidth as you would if people stopped relying on physical connections.
The weather dependency depends on your distance from the tower.
That’s not what I’m talking about? I’m talking about a coordinated jamming attack on cell towers in an area. Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it’s something that the intelligence community is unaware of as a possibility.
If the majority of the population only had cellular comms, the chance of this attack goes up to devastating effects.
If you only ever use your phone then there's no point in paying for broadband. I think a lot of people have been taking a look at their subscriptions and cancelling things which they seldom use. Do you really need a sub for a 500mbit connection when you use you phone? You can always cancel it and switch to a much cheaper slower connection or just use you allowance.
I had a Disney+ sub which I hardly used so I cancelled it along with several others I kept out of sheer inertia.
I'm surprised more people aren't doing the opposite. There are pay as you go phone plans that cost hardly anything. Meanwhile there is free WiFi almost everywhere, including at home. If you have broadband. So pay the cable company for fast internet and pay half that or less for mobile service, then connect your mobile to WiFi 97% of the time so you hardly use any mobile data.
The math gets even more dramatic if you have multiple people living in the same place. Broadband price gets divided by however many people you have there, higher cost of an unlimited phone plan get multiplied by the same number.
I can't remember the last time I used free WiFi and it actually worked as intended. It's always some combination of slow, broken, intermittent, and needs you to agree to terms and conditions too long to read.
I have. Most establishments have decent WiFi which is easy enough to connect to because they want you to sit there all day and keep buying $5 lattes. Once in a while you get stuck somewhere the WiFi sucks, but that only matters if you're transferring enough data to care, and those two things rarely overlap. So a couple times a year you have to pay $3 to transfer a lot of data over cellular, which is way less than what you're saving by having a cheaper plan.
Although I will say that WiFi terms of service are a blight that should be prohibited by law. Nobody reads them the same as nobody reads the Facebook terms of service, and all 99% of them say is a hundred paragraphs of "don't break the law" which is already implied. All the terms of service do is interfere with what should be a protocol where an access point intended to be public announces itself as such and then any device in range which is still on cellular automatically switches to it with no configuration required.
BT works just fine. Have used it for at least 8 years without any fuss. I don't even know that I've connected to it unless I checked, it just does it. As such, I use very little cellular data.
In the context of the comment I'm responding to that mentions "the opposite", that consists of paying for a home internet connection.
If I'm paying for a home BT internet connection, I get free BT WiFi, which hugely off-sets my cellular data usage. As a result, I pay just £9.50 per month for my phone plan on a rolling contract with Virgin.
Exactly. I used it for a few days before my BT modem arrived at my previous address. It's OK-ish if you're lucky but it's certainly not free in any sense of the word.
More than most in the UK. I pay £45/month with https://www.aa.net.uk/ for a more professional service than you'd get with the big providers. Comes with a /29, a /48, the ability to get real-time tech support from actual techies via IRC. I work from home so need a reliable connection.
Three's own MVNO (Smarty) gives you unlimited for £18 without long term contracts. It's £16 if you get it via uSwitch.
The problem with Three's network is that their 4G can be really bad in some areas (eg: parts London). I can't use them inside my flat because it's almost unusable during peak hours. On the other hand, if their 5G is available, speeds can be really good. It's common for me to get 100-900Mbps when near one of their cell towers.
I guess the point is for the average person an unlimited data sim is cheaper than a landline, let alone a landline and a limited data sim, so what's the point in a landline connection
It all depends on price details. In Norway one needs to pay about 20 Euro/month for a phone subscription with amount of data that allows, for example, watch YouTube or do video calls occasionally outside WiFi. Yet for 35 Euro/month one can get a mobile subscription with 1 TB of traffic with 10 MBit/s speed. That is enough to watch movies and do many kinds of remote work.
Yet the fiber costs at least 50 Euro/month. So it only makes sense to get broadband if it is shared by 4 people.
You still want a cheap mobile plan, so it's not technically cheaper until you have 4 people.
But that's comparing fiber to 10Mbps cellular, and even with 2 people the fiber is dramatically faster and only €20 more expensive. If you can live with 10Mbps then there is presumably some broadband option at no worse than that speed for less than €30 and then you're already ahead with 2 people.
And most people aren't going to be happy with speeds that low, but then you'd be paying more for each cellular plan.
In Norway there is no realistic option to have fiber cheaper than 45-50 Euro per month.
Based on personal experience 10 MBit/s is enough for video including full HD options. In fact it worked better than 100 MBit/s that was shared with several users and when somebody was downloading big gaming files.
Unless you're one of those people who don't need internet to survive, then this is nonsense. Wifi is far from everywhere and I'm not going to manually connect to wifi just to check if my date is running late. Is this the 90s?
But you still have a cellular connection, it's just metered. Which doesn't matter because checking if your date is running late uses a trivial amount of cellular data. Whereas if it turns out that they are late and now you've got an hour to kill and want to watch Netflix on your phone, you connect to the local WiFi.
Which it will have done automatically at home and at work and anywhere else that you actually frequent, so having to do that is rare.
I pay €13 a month for my phone plan with Gomo and if I needed to I could get by fine just tethering off of that for everything. I pay for 500Mb fibre broadband (€30 a month) as a luxury and because I wfh.
OTOH the article cited as an example an old guy who go to the library to have internet access. It is very likely he can't even afford a mobile plan with data. I have known a number of people who rely on prepaid and only pay for it when they can. They will send you an email or ask someone to send you an sms so you can call them back.
Exactly, are these people entirely cut off from the internet or do they just use their ridiculously cheap mobile data? Imagine this article 10 years ago talking about UK people ditching their land line and surmising those people are being left behind.
The reality is mobile data can cover your minimal internet requirements in the UK.
I'm on 'mobile broadband' in a city of 1 million in the UK midlands. That's where you pay a monthly fee and get a mains powered router pod that connects itself to the vendor's G4 mobile network. Several companies offer this.
I ditched my landline phone and pay just under £15 a month. Works fine. Easily saturates the wifi card on my old Thinkpad at the same time as her indoors is watching Emmerdale over the same connection.
Happy customer (at the moment, mergers in the pipeline).
It should be illegal to restrict tethering or charging differently for tethering. There are really no technical reasons for a phone to even convey whether it is using the data or sharing data using a hotspot. It is purely for price gouging. I also hate that even unlocked phones don’t have a way to stop the provider from knowing whether tethering is being used or not.
On the other hand, before moving abroad I used to live in a sleepy quaint village a few miles north of Cambridge, and was already able to switch from wired broadband to mobile broadband back in 2017 — just a few percent of UK households is sufficient for "a million".
It isn't necessary for everyone to be able to do this to get headlines, and logic, like this.
Just yesterday I was trying to sign up with Verizon for my new address. Fiber is not available in my building, so they offer "5G Home Internet" for $60-$80/mo, which is crazy expensive for what it is. I asked whether there were ADSL lines available, since these were recently available for as cheap as $15/mo. It seems this is no longer the case. Maybe there's a market here?
EDIT: I am in the US, and I've just realized this is a UK-oriented article. Nevertheless, the point might still stand.
Ask them for a landline phone. They'll either have to run new copper or choose to install fiber. Once they run copper then get a DSL company to run through that. Generally they won't want to run copper and don't want competition so they'll go ahead and run fiber. In either case I believe the law they're constrained by is local ordinances giving them a region based monopoly for traditional landline access in exchange for ensuring everyone has a phone. If you force the issue they'll run SOMETHING to your door. And through that something you'll have more options.
Will they still run copper? Out here on Long Island Verizon will not install new copper and existing cu lines are on 3rd party life support. Work had to replace a copper phone line for the fire alarm with an internet bridge and wireless backup after it went dead and the tech told us "We don't run new copper."
In a bunch of areas the companies rely on legal monopolies that were given to them by the local governments. The agreement was they get a monopoly if they agree to install phone lines for everyone who asks. If they don't run copper then the next thing they'll do is run whatever is their preferred equivalent. It's a quasi government+private monopoly agreement that benefits both and ensures residents get phone lines.
Correct. This is all based on my previous knowledge of my local monopoly agreements that someone told me about years ago. They refused for months to install internet until I asked people in my vicinity if anyone had asked for a phone line. Nobody had. So I did and instead of copper they ran fiber within 2 weeks.
I can only infer what happened but they really didn't want me to be without a regular phone line so I determined that was their legal weakness. The only way companies that large move like that is if something threatens their status with the local government. A call from a resident saying the company wouldn't install a phone line is a big no-no in my understanding.
In my area (Washington State, USA) this doesn't happen.
If you ask for phone service, Comcast will sell you a "landline" that just consists of a combo box cable modem and VoIP ATA. You can buy it with internet access or without, and they still give you the same equipment. The ATA part gives you an analog phone line to connect to your house phone wiring, but everything outside the house runs over existing coax infrastructure.
Maybe I'm not asking the right questions? It seems exceedingly difficult to get services over actual copper.
No guarantees bc it entirely relies on your local ordinances, but it did work for me when the company was giving me the runaround about internet. I just asked for a landline phone and they had fiber installed within 2 weeks.
T-Mobile 5G Home Internet is $50/month. They’re using spare 5G capacity because they overbuilt their network. You’ll see congestion during peak usage times, but it’s fine otherwise.
Not OP, but I used tmobile ISP for over two years during the whole Covid era. Worked pretty good for what it is, managed to get about 200 Mbps down and 20 up. I hit 500 Mbps but moved away from that area at one point. I only just switched to fiber recently because a 1G fiber line was installed and only cost $60 a month.
What? I feel like people coast on experiences from 5-10 years ago. This isn't a 3G hotspot. Ping time right now is 53ms and I'm getting 200/20 for $50, all included, no additional fees. This is outside their actual ideal service area too.
I'd love symmetric fiber for $50, but 'for what it is' isn't doing much lifting at all.
Hmm not sure if I totally agree. Like sure, it’s a no brainer for my situation since I get 1G fiber for $60. But I have a bunch of friends and family paying $50 for Comcast for 200/10 copper lines.
That's rare. T-Mobile averages 53ms latency according to Ookla/Speedtest.net for multi-server latency. For wired connections, Xfinity averages 24ms, Cox 25ms, and Spectrum 31ms. So wireless does add an additional ~25ms of latency compared to wired, but 100ms is out of the ordinary.
T-mobile != T-Mobile ISP. For the better or worse, anything going through the ISP plan is bottom of the barrel. You can look through all the post on the T-Mobile ISP subreddit. Even those with 500 Mbps speed are close to 100 ms of latency.
This is interesting since I remember having much lower latency for 3G, perhaps < 50 ms, about 10 years ago. :) At that time, some of my friends were even using the home 3G to play games.
I've got Verizon 5G for $25/month extra on top of my cell phone bill, and the tower is right across the street. It's pretty competitive with Xfinity's 1.2Gbps service since they didn't bother throttling it. I also get 350Mbps up. Seeing 15ms pings to servers in Sacramento from SF.
Some of the people on my team had to switch back to Comcast after trying it for a few months. Video calls were laggy and would drop packets constantly. This was in Colorado fwiw.
Your experience is highly dependent on how close you are to the nearest mobile base station and its utilization profile. If it's distant or highly utilized, you will have degraded performance vs being closer or less utilized.
It’s still always interesting to see how vested interests and rent seeking seems to be a big part of US business culture. I wonder if the US would be more or less successful without these uncompetitive business practices.
> vested interests and rent seeking seems to be a big part of US business culture
This is also true about nearly every other country that exists or has existed throughout history. US is notable for being, on average, much more competitive and less corrupt.
(But it's heading in the wrong direction, and that's only on average. Many countries have caught up, and a few others have surpassed it.
This sounds like American exceptionalism - I'm not sure the prison industry or the water industry being more competitive is good or that they are less corrupt than the state running them.
Corruption of markets happens because of no regulation or because of too much regulation. I personally think where to draw this line is an art and very difficult in an extremely polarised country like the US.
I don’t think capturing broadband markets and preventing other players entering would count on that scale as corruption although the sums of money involved are not doubt astonishing. You’re talking about something different to the context we were in as far as I can tell.
That’s not what I said, I said America is worse in many industries than for example the EU generally. For example farming, prisons and broadband all have various regulatory capture and vested interests that are far worse than anything we see in Europe.
I'm surprised they're quoting you $60-80/mo. Verizon's 5G home internet is $50/mo (or $25/mo bundled with one of their premium wireless plans or $40/mo bundled with Visible's $35/mo Visible+ wireless plan).
Why would you want DSL? In my area, Verizon's DSL is 3.1Mbps which really isn't good for much and costs $75/mo ($40 for the DSL and $35 for the required home phone service with it). You also have to pay $3.50/mo for the router or buy it for $100.
Verizon stopped expanding Fiber for the most part which is a shame. AT&T is doubling its fiber deployment in their markets.
Do you have a cable provider that's your broadband provider? Verizon is generally only offering 5G Home Internet in areas where there are other broadband options so it seems curious that you'd be interested in DSL over a cable connection offering 100x the speed.
>$25/mo bundled with one of their premium wireless plans
I mean, this contributes to my point: it's only "cheap" if you buy into their plan and also upgrade your phone. For a variety of reasons, this isn't a good fit for me, and I'm beginning to suspect there might be a small-but-respectable market of others who resemble me.
I tried Verizon 5G for several months. It could be very fast (600Mbps down, maybe 100Mbps up) but it wasn't very reliable. We had some days where it just didn't work (maybe two days out of six months.)
It's $50/mo (IIRC) if you have mobile phone service with them. For me, the worst part was that they want you to mount their 5G device on your window, and I'm in the city and have only a few windows. It's not an ugly device really, but I don't want to glue a big device to my living room window.
Note that if you use Verizon for your cell phone and have a 5G plan, the price halves. Setting up AutoPay lowers it further, down to $25 best case. (I'm currently paying $35 for 5G Home Plus.)
I just got Verizon home internet for 25$ a month, and they offer 200$ back if you stay on the service for 6 months(I am also on their phone service so that may be why the price is cheaper?).
"Too slow" is most always the wrong word. Too much buffer bloat is what causes most of the problems. I survived fine on a 6/.5kbs dsl connection from ATT for years. I had set up a few QOS rules on my router using fq_codel. Night and day difference. I was regularly on voip calls for work while netflix was showing on two different TVs with no issues. It is really depressing that bloat is still an issue.
YouTube, Netflix, music streaming, most video conferencing, and general web browsing all work fine on a 1.5Mb/s link in my experience. It's certainly not fast, but it's fast enough to do the basics.
Most things you mention are a matter of buffering and waiting it out, so those will work in a 'basic' fashion as you say. But video conferencing? Even in a 1:1 call, where you need to download only one audio and video stream, if you don't live alone (most people don't), I would be very impressed if you got a router that can recognise and prioritise the call traffic to the point where that works smoothly.
I used to have 768kbps down / 128kbps up cable internet. There was some buffering on Netflix at the start of a stream but it was fine. When we got upgraded to 1.5Mbps down / 256kbps up there was basically no buffering at the start of Netflix or YouTube streams and FaceTime worked fine.
Sure, you might get away with consuming a single video stream. But you shouldn't be surprised that there is very little demand for this.
A single HD video stream (1080p) can require 8 mbps. Trying to consume multiple of these, especially with a realtime protocol like WebRTC, is impossible on an ADSL connection.
I suspect there may be a fair few people in my position who would be happy to scale down. Whether or not that is actually the case is, indeed, a question for market research.
I don't think you'd be happy scaling down. You may think you'd like it, but when you can't watch a video on your phone and laptop at the same time (and that's not even talking about anyone else using WiFi in the home), you'll quickly realize why no one uses ADSL any more.
Do you specifically mean ADSL to exclude ADSL2 and ADSL2+? Through the entire pandemic I had a 20Mbps ADSL2+ line, and we had no problems with two of us remoting into work or one of us remoting in while the other streamed Netflix.
If you're referring specifically to ADSL then yes, however VDSL is passable, typically 100 down/10 up. Fiber would be ideal, but not worth 4-5x the price IMO (currently paying $33/month).
Disagree, it’s not ideal but it’s perfectly usable. I lived in a rural town with 4.5mb/s down and .25mb/s up DSL for a couple years and even 4K Netflix worked perfectly fine.
I just double checked as a new customer - you're right that it's 60 usd/m but it goes down to 50/m if you autopay using a debit card (strange Verizon artifact - but annoying). Edit: I've been a customer for a year and while the early months were rough wrt. reliability (1), it is now pretty rock solid in my area and I typically get close to 300mb/s though I don't game so I'm not sure how it is with that.
1: so rough that I wrote a script that power cycled the modem every time it disconnected, since that was faster than waiting for it to recover. I haven't used that scheme for months now though since it was no longer necessary.
Recently had to look at the property market again and the rents have increased significantly, in addition to the usual high cost of living increase and inflation/shrinkflation which doesn't show any signs of slowing down.
I very much wonder how they expect "normal" people to survive. It looks like you need to fall quite far into the highest tax brackets just to be able to rent something decent in London, and buying is absolutely out of reach.
Ironically enough, part of what makes those areas desirable is various businesses (such as food service, etc) that rely on low/unskilled labor to function, against which a war of attrition is being waged on. That war is being won and as a result a lot of those businesses have now themselves failed - I've now seen multiple repossession notices on closed restaurants/shopfronts and more and more vacant commercial property, and the high street never really recovered since the pandemic.
As far as I'm concerned I am considering leaving this country once my current lease expires unless business picks up significantly to offset the increased costs (doesn't look likely from what I see). There is no reason to pay the money I am paying here if I can get better food, climate and general quality of life for the same (or even less!) money elsewhere in Europe.
It's like this all over the US too. The short answer is they can't. Rental companies have eaten all the disposable income, and now they're trying to come for the income that isn't disposable.
On the other hand, housing occupancy rates are still high, arguably too high, despite the high cost of housing.
For whatever reason, people deem it worth it to pay such high rents to remain living in London. London's population is still growing, albeit slower than before the pandemic.
I'm guessing part of the challenge is that rental demand is fairly elastic in that people who might well want a house might be ok with a flat and put up with a flat share for the sake of a location they want or feel they need (e.g. due to work; family commitments etc.), and so even as people get squeezed out of the housing they want it might well take a lot before they move elsewhere.
> There is no reason to pay the money I am paying here if I can get better food, climate and general quality of life for the same (or even less!) money elsewhere in Europe.
We very much shot ourselves in the foot in that regard.
> There is no reason to pay the money I am paying here if I can get better food, climate and general quality of life for the same (or even less!) money elsewhere in Europe
Sure. And you should probably do that. But then a lot of other people are of the opinion that they can ignore food and weather and come to Britain. Net migration numbers in recent decades have not gone in favour of your line of thinking?
UK high street is being attacked from multiple sides, from apparent lack of labour satisfied/pressured into low wages, to having their access being cut by the latest LTN measures around the country. Rental market is getting squeezed hard by the latest measures that will only make the situation worse, esp for London (I'm lucky I've escaped that place when I could). Current/incoming gov't is drunk on high taxation and more and more regulation of every facet of your life and business. But I'm still unsure my business/work would fare better in any other european country (forget Brexit, it doesn't have much to do with any of this). The malaise is everywhere.
> But then a lot of other people are of the opinion that they can ignore food and weather and come to Britain. Net migration numbers in recent decades have not gone in favour of your line of thinking?
As a labor camp, Britain is very nice and efficient. Depending on the job, their country of origin, and whether they are able/willing to evade taxes, it may work out that a couple years of suffering in shitty conditions will yield a decent nest egg to enjoy back home. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a nice place to live and build a future in. I wonder if there are stats on the average length of stay of those immigrants?
> Sure. And you should probably do that. But then a lot of other people are of the opinion that they can ignore food and weather and come to Britain. Net migration numbers in recent decades have not gone in favour of your line of thinking?
Some of them are pretty surprised at the state of things when they get here. There was a report in the BBC that a lot of Ukrainian refugees find the education system and housing conditions an absolute joke compared to what they had back home.
Which is weird, since the UK scores higher than most of its neighbours and North America in stuff like PISA scores. Quite a lot higher than some of them.
If you're coming from a low income country and are in a life situation where you're willing to put up with worse living situation and more restrictive workers rights for a while to put aside money and then leave, coming to the UK is still an opportunity, so it's entirely unsurprising there's still a net inflow even though a lot of us are either leaving or considering it (I have family here that'll keep me here for a few more years, but once my son is no longer living between mine and his mums I likely won't stay long).
Other than london and a couple of other cities, most of the country was already ranked as most deprived in Europe.
Throw in Brexit, cost of living and most normal people are fucked.
I'm a lecturer (5 yrs) and I'm struggling to pay my bills. We've been out on strike and nothing happened. NHS is struggling. Pay rises are around 0% for most people I know. Food inflation is around 16%. Foodbanks are struggling to feed families.
Companies are making record profits, these are distributed as dividends to shareholders (the rich) who then go on to buy more shares or other assets (e.g. houses)
Where I live most houses are Air B&B for a lot of the year, this has destroyed most villages by the coast. House prices have doubled or more. So a lot of those families have moved into towns, forced to rent rather than buy. Tons of money that used to go into mortgages (investments) is now funnelled to rich people who own the housing stock.
There's a lot of crazy stuff going on. The UK has a shrinking middle class. The middle class used to drive the economy. The rich poor divide is breaking the country.
A better TAX system would fix most of the problems. But our government is not interested.
I think you are right on the symptoms, and some of the causes, but let me add some from the other side, as I think left and right both make good points and you have to be intellectually honest if you want to move forward.
There are some multinationals who escape taxation, but even if that were perfectly addressed it wouldn't solve the UK's issues. Tax receipts are already close to 40% of GDP, these are record highs, frankly there are few countries where going over 40% is both possible or sustainable. (The US is at 25% for reference).
House prices are high because for 15 years mortgages were basically at 0% interest. This didn't actually make housing more affordable through cheap mortgages, if just inflated house prices. The endless schemes to help young people buy property just makes this worse, as the schemes are just built into the price.
Lastly, and this is usually hard to hear for people of your persuasion, you just can't add 500k-1m NET people to a country and expect housing to be just as available, and the health service to not be under massive strain. It's a physical impossibility. YES, I know many immigrants work in the NHS. That is not a valid rebuke to the problem. 1m net immigrants last year is 1m more people who need health services. The NHS has received massively more funding since covid and just can't cope.
I'm not against migration, but the sheer numbers need to be talked about. You can't keep a sustainable country at these levels.
Finally, the UK has relied on financial and advisory services for decades as the core of its economy. This seems to be working less and less, tech is taking over. the 80-90s were about finance, since then it's been about tech. Slowly the country is falling behind.
This is a chronic issue in almost all of europe, but at least there there is high end manufacturing, and eastern europe has tonnes of catching up to do which grows the economy.
> * Net migration was unusually high in 2022, as several factors came together at the same time, including the war in Ukraine"[1]. *
Even so, the net migration numbers were nowhere close to 1 million. From the same source as above,
> * With this caveat in mind, estimates from the Office of National Statistics suggest that total net migration was 504,000 in the year ending June 2022. *
You suggested that the UK adds 500k-1m migrants every year, but the actual number seems to be pretty much at the bottom of that range. The number of students coming to the UK has also increased significantly (it does contribute to increase in net migration stats).
The ONS still predicts (with a considerable amount of uncertainty I'll admit) that the net migration numbers will fall significantly in the next 5 or so years.
I don’t think it matters really whether it’s 500k or 1m, if you have a massive housing shortage and a failing health service.
That’s still almost 1% addition to the population every year.
Even if that means 100k families, you still need an extra 100k houses or flats ideally per year. That is impossible, even with super efficient planning laws.
I found the same link as the other reply, and I notice the UK's net migration is broadly in line with other wealthier European countries and the USA.
You absolutely can have this level of migration, but you need to build the infrastructure to support it (homes, schools, hospitals etc).
Relevant statistics on number of dwellings are here [1], and they seem to fit the population increase, but I don't have time to find similar statistics on school places, hospitals etc.
It was a typical blame-the-immigrants comment with no evidence.
I don't mind what arguments people make when they provide some evidence to support them, but the commenter wrote "physical impossibility" when it took me 2 minutes to find statistics to the contrary for their first point.
I'm not sure why this pose was downvoted, apart from mentioning brexit.
I used to live in the countryside, the 90s had a background of rapid improvements in schools and hospitals. 2000s full of out of town megashops killing the high street. 2010s public service cuts. 2020 stuff just not working.
The scale of the housing price problem is difficult to behold.
https://www.adzuna.co.uk/jobs/salaries/norfolk is the average wage. The average house price is 10x the average wage. but thats not evenly distributed. if you live up in the northern part, the average house price is 100x times wage.
The UK was already extraordinarily unequal in the 2000s, however inflation, benefit "adjustment" and general failure in policy.
House prices are awful, and with the current mortgage rates it makes it even harder. Last July when we first started looking at what sort of deposit we would need and how much mortgage payments would be it looked like we would be spending an additional £400 a month (which is fine, I wouldn't have to save for a house after all). But since the catastrophic economic policies of our shortest term prime minisiter we would be paying an extra £1000 a month over our current rent.
The house 2 doors down was last sold for £80k about 20 years ago. The house over the road that has just gone up for sale is asking for £300k. I'm lucky that my salary is over the median, but a 3-bed semi detached is like 10x the median salary (£26k). The same sort of property that my parents generation bought for 5x the median salary back in the 90s.
And that's fine if the median salary increased by 7% a year (hint: it hasn't)
The houses here used to be affordable for a middle income person or family. Now they aren't, that's the issue, not the sticker price.
edit tldr:
At the same time houses have gone up in price, wages have stagnated, rent has increased and inflation has increased. So we earn the same, pay more for rent, utilities and food, and have to save more (10% deposit is usually the minimum).
UK was already creaking at the seems in the 2000's. I left in 2011 and have spent the last 5 years crawling up a sewer pipe of regulations trying to get my post brexit immigration sorted.
Brexit was just a fantasy of better days to come that was actually pretext for a right wing power grab. And what do right wingers ultimately want? A world of red in tooth and claw capitalism with themselves as the permanent winners, right up until they are hit with one of life's unexpected curve balls then they come crying to the state to save them.
Harsh but fair. It's not significantly different in the US.
You know, it's not different in ANY of the empires, past or present. Look at Russia and it's just a couple decades of further decline, but the same thing.
If hackers and nerd idealists are worth anything, it's for trying to solve all this against a background of constant push-back. I sometimes wonder if the most important thing I could possibly do is try to depict this larger picture in such a way that people got it.
> You know, it's not different in ANY of the empires, past or present. Look at Russia and it's just a couple decades of further decline, but the same thing.
I very seriously doubt that US or even the UK will look like Russia in a couple decades. Russia was historically a backwards agricultural country, that went through breakneck centrally-planned industrialization during the Soviet era, which ultimately collapsed under its own mismanagement, corruption and stupidity. Now they're just playing in the rubbles, getting most of their money from selling vast Siberian mineral riches. Whereas US/UK for the past 200 years have been at the forefront of enlightenment, industrialization, innovation, scientific discoveries, creation of complex and extremely well performing businesses etc. All that is constitutes an enormous capital that can't be just pissed away in a couple decades.
> If hackers and nerd idealists are worth anything, it's for trying to solve all this against a background of constant push-back. I sometimes wonder if the most important thing I could possibly do is try to depict this larger picture in such a way that people got it.
Thinking about this, it actually reminds me of season 2 of Clarkson's Farm. He might not be what you think of when you think of a prototypical hacker, but Clarkson actually is one. In the series he constantly found loopholes to evade the tyrannical council although they sadly ended up winning in the end. Although it makes you think that if someone with his influence and resources can't find a way through the bureaucratic minefield to open a restaurant in an disused barn in the middle of a field on his own property what hope do the rest of us have.
Closest I've got is a game concept where it's your job to manipulate populations's attitudes. However, this assumes that gamifying something and having people able to do it themselves, would give them insight into seeing it on a grand scale around them… and it assumes they'd be able to do anything useful about it if they did get that insight.
Might be like trying to guide chaos. Get beyond the Dunbar number and you're in trouble.
> UK was already creaking at the seems in the 2000's. I left in 2011 and have spent the last 5 years crawling up a sewer pipe of regulations trying to get my post brexit immigration sorted.
As someone planning to leave and never come back, can you give me a brief overview of some of the shit I might not know about that I'm going to have to deal with?
Make sure your gov.gateway is accessible for later pension stuff.
Make sure you can keep your uk bank account if in the new country - i couldnt. Had to close it and transfer costs are high in emergencies.
If your bank has an app Make sure it will work in thd new country. I had to change to UK on my phone for a year (Google rule?) to be able to get an app.
We're a fair few years on, but I changed to a very large bank before emigrating. Nowadays a second account with Wise or similar would probably suffice for occasional use.
I should have moved my UK phone number to a pre-pay plan on a premium network (O2, Vodafone etc), I left it on a budget one which cancelled it with very little notice.
Well EU immigration basically made it tougher for brits to emigrate, which is fair enough.
I can't elaborate too much but high skilled and family reunification pathways are still open, but the tests and documentation are more onerous than before brexit.
stop being misled. tories, labour, it doesn't matter. two sides, same coin. government needs to end. international banking cartel needs to end. the synagogue of satan needs to end. evil needs to end.
I don't know those people. I think averages that include London and other cities don't represent most of the country. Average salary for where I live is £10,000 less than the UK average (I just looked it up)
> I'm a lecturer (5 yrs) and I'm struggling to pay my bills. We've been out on strike and nothing happened
Why would not working result in higher pay? Especially in a field where the product is increasingly seen as a luxury that costs as much as a downpayment for a house and ultimately not a essential requirement for employment.
Striking provides a forcing function to reveal the actual value to the employer of your labor.
In certain fields (e.g. medicine, academics) there are huge centers that represent the majority of jobs for a region. Specialized workers here find it harder to job hop, as there are fewer opportunities.
Striking provides another means to better pay. Say you value my work at $40/hr, but are currently paying my at $20/hr. In domains where employees don't have much recourse to just go find another employer, strikes provide a good mechanism to call the bluff of an employer. If they really only value your work at $20/hr, they'll not be willing to pay any more. If they do value it more highly, striking makes it so they have to choose between making concessions or losing work they value.
I mean I might be biased because this strategy worked for me. But how about, hear me out. Instead of not working you try working harder and providing unique value to your employer.
Hard to swallow for union types but it’s how I ended up being paid significantly more and having no issues buying a house.
This approach only works if your employer knows you have other options and risk leaving if you aren't properly compensated.
In an environment where your employer knows you don't have any options, there is no incentive for them to pay you any higher regardless of how much effort/value you provide.
This doesn't address the issue specified above. In this example, you already provide unique value to your employer at $20/hr over what they're paying you.
If you have no recourse when they value your work at $40/hr, what recourse would you have when they value your work at $60/hr but still pay you $20/hr?
Being a more valuable employee works great in combination with exercising leverage over your employer (quit-threat, striking, competitive labor market), since those threaten to take that value away from your employer if they don't play ball.
A lot of people get student loans. A lot of people never end up making enough to even begin repaying their student loans if they've taken a degree that's not in demand, or they never end up paying it back before it is just eventually written off. The student loans aren't like a normal loan. Yes, it may be to the sum of what you could put towards a downpayment on a house, but it isn't the same as that's something someone would have to repay, regardless of how much they were making.
As a lot of people can access further education, they take the opportunity even if it isn't necessary for employment. Most students work whilst studying, even with a student loan, because the loan almost certainly doesn't cover their rent, food, transport and textbooks for example. Most young people you see working in hospitality are probably in university studying.
What's the alternative to make ends meet for students? OnlyFans?
Of course we do. However, other people have mentioned people might just be using their phones instead.
As an example:
https://www.voxi.co.uk/for-now - £10/month unlimited calls, texts, data for 6months - then you go onto a £10/month plan but without the unlimited data.
Seems like a bigger issue is people not knowing about these tariffs.
I'd like to add, I firmly believe everyone should have government provided "basic" internet that's at least 38Mbps or something similar. I really do hate what the government has done to the UK over the last decade so I'm not on their side or anything.
They're not that bad at all. There's a lot of fud. The whole world is struggling at the moment, you won't find a single country that isn't affected by high interest rates or inflation or some other crisis or issue. We're real doomers in the UK so everything is the end of the world.
I think the rise in food bank usage over the last decade and a half has been quite alarming[0]. You can find supporting statistics elsewhere too[2][3].
I know that plenty of people are doing alright and, in my opinion, this group is vastly over-represented on HN. The food bank usage stats suggest that the living conditions of people across this country have been getting worse for a while now, and while the pandemic and inflation have exacerbated this problem, they did not create it.
That is an argument for not assuming the absolute levels are accurate. It does not explain the increase unless you're arguing that people have for some unexplained reason gotten more steadily more willing to exploit it.
You are saying it cost money before? People drinking more tap water and less bottled water would be a sign of decline in purchasing power and that doesn't even include a factor of losing time for something of insufficient value.
You can use the same argument to explain away homelessness. Personally I doubt _many_ is any big, or even most. Unfortunately, like you, I do not have any data.
It's interesting - I follow various UK and Canadian subreddits, and you get almost the same rhetoric in both.
"This country is much worse than it used to be, I'm going to emigrate soon"
Except in the UK, they're going to emigrate to Canada.
The UK does have some uniquely local problems to deal with, but they're overlayed with a global downturn as well. It's easy to attribute the whole thing to local problems, when in fact a big chunk of it is global. The issues seem to mostly be the same - the massive house price inflation that's sucking the joy out of life for everyone under 40.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the border.
Everyone knows the issues of their home country pretty well - but it's harder to get a real "feel" for issues of other countries without living there.
The best indicator you can find is net migration flows (those people who move from the UK to Canada/USA, and have the opportunity to return, do they?).
Every country in Europe feels the same way. Things are worse and the country is going to the dogs. That's not really the case though. High inflation and the post COVID, Ukraine war situation has caused problems that people haven't seen in a while. On the whole though, things are way better than they have ever been.
Both Australia and the US has larger populations of UK migrants than Canada (Australia alone more than twice as many), and while no individual EU country has as many UK migrants as Canada does, the EU as a whole (yes, unsurprisingly given the population size) also has far more despite the bigger language barriers.
I do agree that many of the problems are the same, but the UK is facing both the global issues and a case of repeated political footguns.
The uncompetitiveness of Britain has been obvious for decades. For a highly developed English-speaking country it is very underrepresented in software tech.
No it is not. What I liked about the UK was you could get a software job anywhere. Not just London, but out in the sticks, some small town, there will be a software company, hiring developers, selling stuff to industry, off the VC radars. In addition you have the knowledge hub of Cambridge, e.g. Microsoft Research and a startup scene in London, as well as being a financial centre that employs lots of IT for that. Britain should learn to code? It invented it! Turing. "Glasgow" Haskell Compiler, etc.
> Britain does very well in lots of software engineering fields: games, fin-tech, web.
How much of this is VC-funded "growth & engagement" crap that has no sustainable business model and will go out of business very soon, if it hasn't already?
If there is a high demand for coders in the UK it suggests that the tech environment is strong. Otherwise what are those coders going to do? I think the issue is more to do with business than technical competence.
Uh, I don't think that's true. The UK is 3rd in tech investment, only behind the US and China. The other non-US English-speaking countries are _way_ behind the UK here.
London alone gets more tech investment than Canada, Australia, and New Zealand combined.
Tbh, as others said, coding is not the problem. Everything else is.
In fact, Britain is kinda the poster-boy for the thesis that "learn to code" is not a universal remedy for economic malaise. A large percentage of the population simply can not, and will not, work with computers at a level worth paying for.
Seems like both the article and many commenters here are overlooking the fact that most people have cheap mobile data plans. For most people's use cases (read: not readers here) that's enough.
Most people living in cities and even most suburban areas have great coverage, so why bother paying for a landline?
While that’s a valid point, the Citizens Advice Bureau survey (which was conducted via an agency called Walnut Unlimited) asked follow up questions about negative consequences because of cancelling broadband and it was somewhat clear people’s quality of life suffered (12% of people said they cut back or cancelled broadband and experienced at least one negative consequence such as finding it harder to manage bills etc).
And 3 million depend on food banks. Things are getting tough for lots of people and that's with extremely high levels of employment. Not sure this will go well if there is a recession that causes the jobless rate to increase.
"By design" seems like a bit much, but the upper class sure didn't let the crisis go to waste.
Spend $800B so the poors can eat? Hand-wringing and pearl clutching up and down the air waves. Just think of the inflation!
Spend $3000B to pump real estate values? Complete silence, relatively speaking.
This experience made it very clear who was in charge and who wasn't. These are US numbers, but I tend to suspect the same story repeated itself all around the world.
The money spent during COVID ($13tn of various money printing and government intervention) was largely spent into the economy owned by rich people - who do you think owns your mortgage and the banks and your debts and the super markets etc.
The poor still spent most of their money, the rich did not buy more yachts and expensive meals and attending "charity" galas etc. so what would usually be a circular flow became a direct increase in the wealth of the rich and direct decrease in the wealth of the poor. The inflation we see now is going to remain for a while but in the end prices over the next 3-5 years will nearly double and wages will remain the same.
The rich just increased their wealth and the working person got dramatically poorer. Poor people in the UK can't even afford food and Internet but at least the rich have never had it so good. Tax the rich.
Although small businesses didn't really shut down, at least that I could see. Pubs sold delivery beer, restaurants went full-on collection and delivery, coffee shops turned into walk-throughs.
Tougher time absolutely, but almost all the visible small businesses in my area survived lockdown.
Clearly a conspiracy, which is why all the assassins were objectively incompetent, only succeeded by sheer stupid luck, and both Germany and Austro-Hungary were itching and planning to start a war regardless.
Ferdinand's death didn't cause WW1, it just started it.
Employment metrics make less sense now that poorly-paid gig work is ubiquitous. Just because you "have a job" doesn't mean you'll be able to afford basic necessities.
The gig workers I know do it because they like the money, it's the best money available to them. So I don't know about the "poorly-paid" part, there's so much demand for gig work people complain they can't find enough of it.
So good things are a result of capitalism, and the bad concomitant outcomes are due to "globalization, AI" and "failure of government"? Perhaps there is a link between the cheap Walmart milk in your fridge, record Walmart profits, automation (self-checkout), hardball supplier negotiations and rising inequality as indicated by Walmart employees also being on SNAP.
> That rising inequality is leading to poverty is a failure of government, not corporations or capitalism. Why introduce a layer of indirection by blaming the rich or corporations, when the rules are made by government? Blame the government directly.
This implies that capitalism is not capable of self-regulation and therefore requires government intervention. It follows that this is a joint failure of capitalism and governments to reduce negative externalities that lead to high wealth inequality.
> Let reddit handle the economic ignorance.
Please don't include implicit ad hominem jabs at other posters. You could have omitted your first sentence with no loss to your argument.
Which country was first in space, and led space-related innovation?
Capitalism didn't invent or produce computers or milk. Workers did.
Capitalism is just a wealth distribution mechanism on top of innovation and labor that only concerns itself with how the wealth generated by workers is distributed.
We can choose other mechanisms of wealth distribution.
Also because just this year broadband companies raised the prices by inflation + several percents. I.e. my monthly bill increased by > 10 quid. And in the same time I'm in a contract (till the end of the year), so I can't even switch.
It's not surprising that people cancel their contracts if they can.
It's amazing that one-sided contracts like this (where you're committed to a term, but they're not committed to a price) don't violate consumer protection laws. What if they chose to double your monthly bill?
They can't. The contract generally says the price rise will be inflation plus a specified percent. Otherwise, eg if they raise call costs, they have to tell you that you can cancel penalty free - which I have done multiple times.
You sure? In NL it's just inflation, anything else means you have the option to cancel. Seems odd that they could specify an extra percentage in their terms of service just for the heck of it, not because of increased costs or so.
Though, in practice, you're with a carrier for a reason (either best quality or lowest price) and the competition also raised prices per inflation, or at least close enough that it doesn't tip the scale, so there's never a point cancelling a contract prematurely. Maximum contract duration is 2 years anyway iirc.
Annoyingly, I just got a new mobile contract as I was leaving BT and moved to EE.
I had agreed to a price of £x per month. After 2 weeks, I hadn't even had my first bill in, I got a letter saying the price was going up because of inflation...
This one annoys me. Yes technically you're out of contract when they raise the price, but usually they only give you 30 days to move which isn't always enough to organise an alternative to avoid loss of service. They imply that the price is assured but it isn't at all and often they jack it up just months after taking out the so-called "contract". And the contract terms have been getting ever longer. The regulator needs to force advertised contract prices to be fixed for term.
That's not even really true any more - Ofcom (who are in charge of regulating telecoms here) decided that all the companies could increase their prices by inflation plus 3.9% every April without voiding people's contracts or allowing them to cancel and without having to account for this in the headline prices in all their advertisements, so naturally everyone did and ran lots of promotions based on the bogus prices right before the increase. I think they even let some companies do this when there was nothing at all in the contracts permitting it (though that may only have allowed increasing prices by inflation). There's also apparently a newer swizz where companies advertise discounted prices but calculate the price increase based on the original, non-discounted price. The whole thing stinks of regulatory capture and oligopolies and the British media and establishment doesn't seem to care. They're more interested in attacking actually-competitive sectors like supermarkets with tiny profit margins.
In the case of Virgin Media, they said each year it will increase by RPI plus 3.9%. It's ridiculous and I'm not sure what they're trying to accomplish, cynically in thinking they're anticipating a vicious cycle of rising prices, people cancelling, so upping prices on whoever is left.
Even 10 years ago I knew people cancelling their broadband to just use mobile internet. It's smart to cancel broadband if you're not streaming video, or if you are streaming but have a fast mobile network connection and decent plan. It probably sucks for any real-time stuff like gaming, but otherwise it makes sense. I don't doubt many people would rather cancel broadband than turn their boiler off.
Ironically, 8-10 years ago my carrier's cellular network felt so fast that a young, naive version of myself expected to never sign up for broadband internet. I used to actually play video games on this connection because it was way more reliable than my home internet connection. But in the past 4-5 years, this same cellular network has become a high jitter, low bandwidth disaster, despite "upgrades" from 4G LTE (i.e. faux 4G) to what my carrier claims is "5G".
I'm aware this is just an anecdote and n = 1 implies infinite variance and what not, but it's amazing seeing countless people have such a good cellular network they can just ditch broadband subscriptions.
I'd seriously consider it if not for working from home. Other than that, all we really use our home broadband for that I couldn't do with my phone is streaming—and you can buy/rent quite a few discs per month for the cost of broadband plus streaming services.
Not to mention that a lot of connections are still DSL (misrepresented as "fibre" which is apparently perfectly legal) so in practice a cellular connection may very well be an upgrade.
I used to live in a house that was about 1.6km from the nearest FTTC cab and 8km from the exchange, just about 20 minutes drive from Glasgow. I could get very intermittent ADSL (2Mbps on a good day, typically down about 1Mbps if it was windy or rainy because of all the splices in the cable).
I switched to 4G and got 40Mbps symmetric using a Mikrotik SXT-LTE on a pole at about eaves height aiming at a mast about 5km away. It was cheaper than ADSL, too!
I think a lot of people on here are in the US where you get absolutely fucking *rinsed* for mobile data. Here in the UK it's cheap as tap water.
True. But quality metrics differ and no wireless connection that i have seen is an upgrade in terms of jitter and reliability overall a wired one (even dsl)
An interesting thing to note in contrast to this is the massive amount of PE cash being pumped into privet regional FTTP broadband companies. Affluent areas, such as where I live, are even seeing multiple competing companies pulling fibre through the OpenReach ducts. We have two along with BT to chose from in a town of only 30k people in the midlands.
As others commenters have noted, the rich/poor divide is getting wider. On one end you have people canceling broadband, and the other massive privet fibre startups servicing affluent areas.
The fact that you have multiple companies each running their own physical network (through the same ducts, no less!) is absolutely wasteful - imagine if we did the same for the electric grid, water or gas.
The physical network should be government-managed and any providers can pay for layer-2 access between any 2 points. This will prevent wasteful, redundant infrastructure.
I would agree with you on water, gas and electricity, but that's mainly because those installations are bulky and H2O, CH4 and electrons are (relatively) fungible.
On the other hand, being an L1 fibre provider requires a point of presence in the every location where your customers' fibres are terminated because packets are not fungible. Of course, you could expose L2 access by mandating that an independent party such as OpenReach own that fibre terminating equipment and then have them interface with ISPs in an IXP, which is what I assume you're suggesting. That works. Technically. It worked for LLU to privatise BT's existing network, and resulted in a huge reduction in prices to access the existing network.
On the other hand, it was pretty useless for innovation. Nobody had any incentive to build any new infrastructure, so it just languished. My OR connection is still 30Mb/s, rather than the multiple private 1Gb/s+ providers in my area. Plus OpenReach takes weeks to set up a new service and are useless at fixing faults. Even now, OR fibre, in the few places you can get it, is limited to 115Mb/s upload, and it's expensive, whereas the best private fibre company near me is 3Gb/s symmetrical for £50/month. If as an independent ISP renting L2 access from OR, if I want to provide better bandwidth than OR is willing to sell, there's nothing I can do.
Fibre is tiny and easy to install, relatively speaking. There's not much additional cost to having multiple redundant fibre providers covering a street. I do wonder if there's something we can do to find a middle ground, like open access under-road trunking, or having a right to buy the fibre installation from an ISP and port it to another provider.
What you have is already the case - that's "OpenReach", owned by the incumbent and required to provide wholesale access to ISPs for the "last mile". Independent ISPs then provide the Internet connectivity.
But they have to provide nationwide coverage at uniform pricing. So private companies can provide parallel service in dense urban areas for less.
Here in the US, the courts piece by piece courts took apart Section 271 of Telecommunications Act of 1996 that guarantees unbundled network elements (UNE)/local loop unbundling (LLU).
By 2003, the FCC basically gave up. They ignored Congress & said, yeah, fine, broadband is exempt, because it's kind of expensive. Their Trienniel review dismantled UNE/LLU. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-03-36A1.pdf
So now America has nearly no competitive access to broadband.
The new 5G wireless providers are changing this some, at least in urban areas. I’m currently using one and get around 500mbits download rate. Cost is about $25 per month.
I pay seven times that. Because I'm on a creaking old DSL line the provider doesn't want to maintain, at 12mbits or so. Consistent. SYMMETRICAL.
I don't give a crap about download. I work publically and support my work using YouTube. Every week I'm uploading 20 gigs or so of video, MINIMUM, and if it dropped I'd have to start over. I'm uploading 4k ProRes because my competition is at that quality level or better, and I won't stand out if I look like crud, and what I upload is going to be recompressed no matter what.
Don't tell me about download. I'll just sit reading Hacker News if download's a problem (evidently!). I depend on upload, not download, and I rarely even see it referred to much less touted.
I abandoned a brief dabbling with Starlink before even getting an actual dish, because it didn't look like I was going to be able to trust upload bandwidth to beat what I've got with my symmetrical, reliable 12M. It matters.
Stayed at an AirBnB once that had fiber. I had >100m upload. It would make stuff possible for me that I just can't do currently. Granted, taking advantage of that requires thousands in investment, but what real business doesn't?
A local phone company just rolled out some fiber near me, and it's honestly amusing to watch their poor marketing people try to describe the differences between 500/500, 1000/1000, and 5000/5000.
Did you know you should get 5000/5000 if you have a lot of smart home devices? hahaha
Most seem to soft cap you after ~20GB traffic, here in the US.
Last I checked Comcast Xfinity Mobile was one of the kindest soft caps, offering 1.5/.75Mbps down/up.
I think maybe there has been some shift recently around these incredible limits (5.3 minutes/month of full speed use is 0.0001% utilization). Xfinity went up to 50Gbps. I think some plans now "deprioritize" rather than outright limit, which is interesting, but there's such utterly non-existsnt data, such inability to shop & see what to expect.
Exactly, it's absurd. For a little more detail, this is Stamford Lincs. As well as BT installing FTTP we also have Upp Broadband and LightSpeed Broadband installing their own infrastructure.
They have had to make some of the underground junction boxes bigger to fit all the kit in.
My only thought is that they hoped to get their kit in quicker than BT and get brought out. Clearly the aim of these regional companies is to eventually be acquired by larger national ISPs.
Sounds oddly like the early days of the London Underground. So many weird station layouts in the modern system are the result of multiple separate systems run by private companies later being combined. There's an excellent YouTube channel about it: https://www.youtube.com/@JagoHazzard
UK government bodies are not known for speedy infrastructure installations/upgrades, which is why the UK has always been at the arse end of broadband speeds in Europe (let alone compared to the rest of world).
Sort of true, but comment suggests UK is much worse, which is sort of not true:
Country Mean Mbps
France 120.01
Spain 115.61
Netherlands 113.98
Malta 107.70
Monaco 100.26
Belgium 91.74
Portugal 91.61
Norway 88.80
Sweden 86.76
Germany 72.95
United Kingdom 72.06
Ireland 70.42
Switzerland 63.20
Finland 56.28
Denmark 52.57
Italy 46.77
Austria 45.56
In Manchester, there isn't even a date given for Openreach to lay fibre, there is a private regional ISP that has done it though.
I currently have FTTC. I'm either going to switch to fibre with the regional ISP or cancel my landline and change my FTTC contract to just rent the copper pair. Will use my mobile phone for voice calls.
Also, broadband in the UK is not very expensive. 130 Mbps from Virgin Media is £26 a month with no set-up or rental fees. The £10 difference between the avg social tariff and what you can get on the high street is inconsequential in the context of the cost of living crisis. Heating is several hundred pounds each month for a typical apartment, food is another several hundred for a couple of people, unless they eat very low quality food, and renting a room is another several hundred in most cities, can go up to a £1.5k in London. If you have a family, you probably won't feel right living in a room, so your housing expenses will be much higher.
I mean... there is value in jumping through some hoops to save £10 a month. But it's not really anything to write home about. I can understand why people would rather save £25 and cancel if they struggle to make ends meet and don't use broadband besides what they can get on their phone + hotspot. Or share a WiFi password between rooms/flats.
They aren't "significant poverty-related benefits", a lot of the benefits that make you eligible are in-work benefits or from having children. That is why most people don't claim, most of these people have jobs and have no problem paying another £10/month and don't want to go through the admin (or restrictions, I think some of the plans have restrictions).
You are bang on about property costs. You notice how instant action has been taken by regulators to blame telecoms companies. Where is the action on planning regulations? Trying to reduce bills through this route really makes no sense.
Yes, I oversimplified the significant poverty-related benefits part.
Also, when I said “significant”, I meant “not insubstantial”. I don’t mean benefits for those severely affected by poverty. And “poverty-related” to my mind includes “poverty-reducing”.
Probably it could have been phrased better seeing that it wasn’t clear what I wanted to say.
As an American expat in London, I think the thing that consistently shocks me is how neither Brits nor Americans understand how much poorer Brits are than Americans. The median London wage is something like 30k GBP / 40k US. In New York (where I lived before London) that number is ~70k, and the costs of living are pretty comparable.
And as much as I love that the NHS is a thing, it's not a reasonable comparison. No one I know who has a choice uses NHS services apart from emergency medicine or surgery. Everyone I know who can afford it has private health insurance anyway.
In general, everyone I know in this country either has serious family money or is downright poor by American standards. There really isn't much in between.
TO BE FAIR: it's generally much more pleasant to be poor in the UK than it is in the US. NHS is miles better than nothing, which is what many Americans have to deal with.
> The median London wage is something like 30k GBP / 40k US. In New York (where I lived before London) that number is ~70k, and the costs of living are pretty comparable.
Couldn't be bothered to verify the numbers, but even if they're true: you've compared London to New York. The vast majority of Brits and Americans don't live in these two cities. I'd argue that these two cities are not representative of the rest of the two countries.
> Everyone I know who can afford it has private health insurance anyway.
Have you considered that your sample is biased? It's akin to looking at the top 1% of earners in the UK and concluding that nobody uses the NHS.
> It's generally much more pleasant to be poor in the UK than it is in the US.
For some definition of "poor" this means that it's much more pleasant for the _majority_ of people to live in the UK than in the US. This seems to contradict your prior claims.
US: Real median household income was $70,784 in 2021, not statistically different from the 2020 estimate of $71,186 (Figure 1 and Table A-1). [1]
UK: Median household disposable income in the UK was £32,300 in the financial year ending (FYE) 2022, a decrease of 0.6% from FYE 2021, based on estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Household Finances Survey. [2]
I think the GP’s claims are true (the UK is poorer and many people don’t realise it). It used to be a bit less obvious when GBP was strong so you needed to look at things like PPP (or like, how good the tumble driers are) to see the difference.
No mention of mobile phones? If you have a good data plan, and can tether your phone, ditching your broadband makes sense. Especially when the uptime of 4G/5G is much better in my experience, at least in populated areas.
In addition, I might come up on a 'quit broadband' stat, as I sit here with my 5G hub. I am just using a different medium.
This applies to where I live in Canada. The price skew may be even greater elsewhere. Good residential broadband now costs in the neighbourhood of $60/month; this will be essentially unlimited, to the point of being able to leave a 4K video stream playing as background entertainment.
Good cellular service costs in the neighbourhood of $40/month and the amount of data you can use is going up gradually; currently I see 20-25GB advertised. That's plenty for "needed" internet access - not the leave video running part - and if you need your laptop online you can just tether it to your phone.
So it's perfectly rational, if short on cash, to get rid of the home broadband. Can't get rid of the cell phone anyway since you've likely gotten rid of your landline phone already.
BT are no longer providing PSTN service. The existing copper infra will still be used for DSL services. Gradually these will get phased out and replaced by FTTP, but there's no real rush to do that.
I just canceled one of my ISPs because there was no way for me to adjust my plan online unless I selected an upgrade. The agents I chatted with were misleading and the website was full of dark patterns. I'd still be a customer if they had simply allowed me to make choices a la carte.
A lot of people, including my parents, are doing fine with just their smartphone's 4G/5G plans with unlimited data. Even watching hours of Netflix on TV doesn't lead to any throttling.
Although if "cost of living" continues to rise, cancelling mobile contracts may be next.
Many less well off folk have annual or multiyear deals (which include handsets) so the cancellations would come at end of term for most.
I suspect the issue at hand is that a fast growing number of people simply can't afford non-essentials, and in the process of deciding what's absolutely necessary and optional, access to the Internet may not be a necessity when rent, food and energy (including fuel) consume every penny you earn (or, more than you earn, there's a increasing trend of short term loans being taken out to pay bills, which will come home to roost).
As counterintuitive as it might be, I think the cellphone and mobile contract come last (thought switching to a lower plan or a MVNO is an option).
There is a saying that if you don't have money you need connections, so as it gets tougher, communication becomes critical.
In particular missing a message from your bank alerting you of a operation that could get rejected, getting mail from social service of paperwork you need to get in order, alerts for tax deadlines etc. are essential.
On the other end of the spectrum, keeping in touch with your buddy's friend who's a garagist and can fix you in a pinch, keeping an eye on your elderly in case they fall short of something, answering the call when your neighbour needs you to see their kids for an hour or two as they have an emergency is also critical.
Those things don't need contracts, just a phone with prepaid service. Top up £5 and be careful to make it last a couple of months, or potentially a lot longer (6+ months) if you can use WiFi and mostly receive calls and texts.
I don't know for the UK, I was expecting contracts to be better value and cheaper than prepaid. Let's say you're phoning 20 min every month and burning through 3G or data, having even a minimal contract is probably worth it.
Just bought a cup of green tea in office(UK) today and realised the price has increased by ~43%....Even after a 10% employee discount....
Now ask yourselves does water+electricity+green tea import+paper cup+worker wages of the coffee shop increased collectively by 43% to justify this increase...
Some telecoms allow hotspots from phones to Pcs, and data plans are a afforable, considering most people rarely need more than 50-100 gb/month of mobile data. Personally in Italy i only use phone with hotspot, i pay 10$ for 200 gb data/month and i can "restart" the plan if i use all the data for 10$.
Citizens Advice data from an online survey of 6,000 UK adults plus a boost of 243 respondents in receipt of Universal Credit to make a total of 1,215 respondents in receipt of Universal Credit. Fieldwork was conducted by Walnut Unlimited on behalf of Citizens Advice. Fieldwork was undertaken between 9 January - 8 February 2023. The figures have been weighted and are nationally representative. The figures for the Universal Credit boost are weighted to be representative of the demographics of those receiving Universal Credit.
If that survey were properly randomly sampled across the UK population, the 95% confidence interval for that sample size would be around +/- 200,000 people: i.e. we are 95% sure that between 800,000 and 1.2M people canceled broadband (or whatever the question is in the survey).
Even if the 6000 people surveyed are selected from those who seek help from Citizens Advice, there are ways to make reasonable inferences from that.
1 million cancel broadband in a year? The entire population is like 65M so the number of BB connections is going to be what, <10M? And 10% of them cancelled and didn’t renew in a 1 year period? Doesn’t pass smell test for me.
Second ddg hit: "there were an estimate 28.1 million households in the UK in 2021". The actual Census (third hit) says 24.7 in England and Wales alone.
So the actual cancellation figure would be around 3%. Sounds reasonable.
I visited my co-worker in the UK, and over some beers, he mentioned he's getting taxed at 48-50% on top of this. Also 20% VAT on regular shopping. I couldn't believe it, so he pulled up his pay stub on his phone and showed me.
Family members out here who are working non-tech regular jobs are telling me they had to cut back on turning on their heating at night during the winter. I grew up in Canada, and lived seven years in Los Angeles, but now live in Asia. I don't know how the UK is going to get back to where it was 10ish years ago.