Lack of options, FTTPoD price increase harmful, where's the feedback?

[#1]

Quote from: dave

I'd be interested to know what you need more than 70Mbps for today. 4k TV in the future and other high bandwidth applications will mean that people will need faster in time.

Let's imagine you have a well-heeled family of 4. The parents are watching 'Orange Is The New Black' whilst the son is watching 'House of Cards', both in 4K on Netflix. That's 40Mbps straight away. The daughter is a budding film director and therefore appreciates the highest-fidelity reproductions - she turns up her nose at streaming. She stores her videos (ProRes 422) and stills (full-frame DSLR RAW) on her NAS, which she wants to be continuously backed up and therefore requires the fastest upload speed possible. She has a Kaleidescape Cinema One and downloads the films at 50GB a pop. This is also the case with her Xbox One and PS4 - she's gone all-in on digital downloads this generation.

[#2]

0.001% of families like that? 

[#3]

Quote from: dave

If you're trying to compare Virgin Media with Openreach then how much has Virgin's network increased in the last few years? Openreach's fibre products cover around 2/3rds of the country now and with the BDUK funding it's growing further. It's much easier to just turn up the dial on the headline speed than to expand coverage.

Addendum: VM's parent company have written them a cheque for £1 billion of CapEx. Some of this is earmarked for new cable coverage with a major expansion drive on the way.
Given BT's 'Next Generation Access' network cost c. £1.6 billion in CapEx spread over 5 years I'd say Virgin planning on spending a billion in a single year on CapEx is pretty impressive and puts BT's 'massive' investment into context.
Now to convince them to infill here....

[#4]

Was the Openreach Capex only £1.6bn for NGA?
They've invested over £1bn each year for the last four financial years (including 2014) according to their accounts.
Edit: This is VMED's Capex:
2011 - £656m
2012 - £782m
2013 - £713m
1Q14 - £166m

[#5]

Yes Andy, somewhere around there. Remember they spend on a lot of things other than just NGA.
This is a slide from a BT investor presentation.
Virgin's CapEx is apparently increasing markedly as a result of a nice fat cash infusion from the parent company - funds for network expansion are doubled this year and tripled next. You should break VMED's CapEx down somewhat though, a large proportion of that figure is going to be CPE, which is considered capital expenditure. Scalable infrastructure, network overbuild, etc, are where it's at. Openreach, now they supply modems and ONTs, can also write CPE up as being CapEx. A fair amount of the CapEx on NGA is also capitalised labour, not actual equipment.
I think I broke it down at some point and worked out that VMED spend, per home passed, about the equivalent of the entire Openreach NGA rollout, per home passed, about every 3-4 years in scalable infrastructure and network upgrade.