Huge price increase from Kcom

[kaphc]

I've seen the revised pricing from Kcom for two of my primaries this morning.

 

They have gone UP by £2,000 from the "illustration".

 

As this is a public forum, I won't vent about this :-) but just putting out feelers to see if anyone else is in the same position and what you're going to do? We've been planning and budgeting to a certain figure, and to have £2,000 (at least) added to it at this stage is causing us to have to change the project plans quite a bit!

[SimpleSi]

Kcom?????

Si

[sparkeh]

Yep price up by £2k at one of my schools - this is despite the other schools on the exchange having no increase and being specifically told at the last meeting that the price wouldn't go up. Also two schools still haven't received a quote.

Rang up for answers about both issues last week and was told to wait for a call back. No one called.

 

This is probably the last straw for us, I am sick of the attitude of the framework suppliers - in fact the whole thing has been a shambles.

We have another supplier with a more competitive quote who actually want to have our business.

 

[/rant]

[X-13]

Kcom?????

Si

 

Kcom??

 

 

Yep price up by £2k at one of my schools - this is despite the other schools on the exchange having no increase and being specifically told at the last meeting that the price wouldn't go up. Also two schools still haven't received a quote.

 

 

See... This is why I don't trust people/companies who have no prices and are purely "price on request".

Edited June 19, 2012 by X-13

[GrumbleDook]

See... This is why I don't trust people/companies who have no prices and are purely "price on request".

 

Without going too much off at a tangent (as I won't comment on the OP's post) to get a price for a connection is not as simple as looking at a catalogue. This applies to most ISPs when they are charging you a true price for costs. Sometimes price on request is a phrased used to cover a range of areas including that the cost might be subject to survey (ECCs can be involved), setups costs, tech support, migration and much more. Remember that some costs are charged on the distance from A and B ends of the connection and they don't keep a record of every single site with every permutation on record and publicly showing ... the areas where you tend to see fixed and catalogue pricing is where there is a given cost for the connection (ADSL Max, ADSL2, FTTC, etc) on regulated wholesale pricing and the rest of the cost is already known (associated services, supplier markup, hardware, etc).

 

The variety of types of available connections and the model under which different connectivity providers operate can make this a bit of a muddle at times.

[synaesthesia]

Don't Kcom already own that infrastructure though, so surely would/should have an idea of actual costing?

[GrumbleDook]

My apologies to those who feel this sounds a bit like introducing a grandmother to a competition where you take a vacuum to some Gallus Gallus ova ...

 

When people say 'infrastructure' it covers a wide array of areas. The cables in the ground are owned by a range of people, from KCOM, BT, Virgin, IFNL and more. The exchange and street furniture are owned by companies too ... including some of those previously mentioned. When you create a WAN you have a choice of create these yourself (expensive to do, a risk to upkeep if something goes wrong and a long term investment) or you rent the various bits.

 

The present infrastructure is set up to make get the most bang for buck based on the exiting connections between school and exchange. This means that the cost of moving to a different (cheaper) technology has to be offset against the closedown cost of the old circuit and setup of the new one. This is a bit of a mixture between capital and revenue so can be difficult to mange via grants. You get a grant to do capital work and try to make it reduce revenue expenditure. Similar to a move to VDI you could say.

 

The network needs to be redesigned anyway to take into account increases / decreases due to corporate / school / community requirements and this is when you drop the existing infrastructure and rent new stuff in the most cost effective way possible based on the requirements of the connected sites.

 

Over the last 4 years there have been a number of changes to sections of the infrastructure of EMBC and this is done by changing which circuits / back hauls / exchange space is rented and what sort of circuits are used to connect sites. It would not have been possible to do a fraction of this if it involved laying cables directly.

[synaesthesia]

Ah fair play, didn't know they were changing anything in the meantime.

[psillars]

Hi All,

 

We live in an ever changing world and even more so in IT and telecomms.

 

Our own network which spans Europe has to take in to account all of the bits that GrumbleDook mentioned and it becomes a much bigger proposition when you are not just dealing with a local area.

 

That said, there are always economies of scale that can be taken in to account and the ability to utilise fibre that is already in the ground.

 

At the end of the day the customer demands reducing prices and when you are trying to grow and expand a network, that is very difficult to balance. I am not saying we have got it totally right yet, but we are getting there. In many instances now, we can be cheaper that the network owners pricing, even though we are actually using their fibre!

[SchoolsBroadband]

For primary schools KCOM often do something called LLU (Local Loop Unbundling). KCOM often refer to this as MPF. This is where they put their own equipment in the telephone exchange, put a network connection to it to another POP / node elsewhere for upstream capacity and then use a standard BT copper pair (or multiple ones) to deliver 2Mbit to 4Mbit of speed.

 

When a school decides not to use KCOM at an exchange where they are doing LLU then KCOM loses revenue so it pushes the price up for them to deliver the circuits to the other schools on the same exchange. They can of course subsidise this by where they make considerably more elsewhere should they wish / be able to.

 

When they had the contract for all schools within EMBC it wasn't an issue for them as they were guaranteed. Now other service providers such as ourselves, our friends above at M247 and others can use BT's 21CN platform which allows a near flat playing field for all providers. Some have the advantage of LLU'ing an exchange already as they have other businesses / customers using their services at the same exchange so can be more cost effective.

 

Unless a council forces all schools (which they shouldn't do but often do!) to continue to use the current supplier (as we've seen in many different areas over the country) then it's difficult for the RBC model to work. I must take my hat off particularly to Northamptonshire who I think have been brilliant for schools. They've not put up barriers for other providers to come into the market and therefore companies have been able to innovate, use the latest technology and give better services to schools which have directly benefited them both financially and technologically.

 

Schools will also be able to benefit from the new technologies BT are releasing such as full FTTP which will deliver speeds of up to 330Mbit download 30Mbit upload. Great stuff compared to the old 2Mbit circuits they once had......

[synaesthesia]

Hey, some of us still remember paying 20pence for 10 minutes on the single internet connected computer at school! 33Kbps - speedy!

[SimpleSi]

My apologies to those who feel this sounds a bit like introducing a grandmother to a competition where you take a vacuum to some Gallus Gallus ova ...

:-) :-)