Think you’re paying too much for your broadband? Hollywood actor Simon Pegg is facing down a £21,000 bill from BT to have broadband set up in his street.
The Star Trek and The World’s End star took to Twitter to reveal the cost of supplying his street with broadband.
Pegg, said to live with his wife and daughter in a Hertfordshire village, hit out at BT, complaining that the UK’s biggest ISP wouldn’t connect them to broadband unless they paid the five figure sum.
The actor said, following a grumble about 3G coverage getting worse: “In other phone news BT, Europe’s biggest telecom provider have agreed to hook our street up for broadband. We just have to give then [sic]£21K.”
Over 14,000 homes in Hertfordshire are due to be connected to superfast broadband by BT as part of the BDUK (Broadband Delivery for the UK) programme. It’s not clear if Pegg’s home is covered under this scheme – presumably not given that he’s reached out to BT for a quote.
It’s also not clear from Pegg’s tweet what is meant by ‘broadband’; £21,000 should cover the installation costs of a broadband street cabinet which would deliver up to 80Mbps speeds over FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) lines.
If he lived in a village of say, 150 homes, then £21,000 works out at £140 per home. Maybe some sort of village fete, a la Hot Fuzz, is needed to raise money? Without knowing exactly where Pegg lives, it’s impossible to enter his post code into SamKnows and find out if his exchange has been enabled for FTTC.
Perhaps if Pegg had continued living at 23 Meteor Street – known to TV fans as ‘the Spaced house’ – he’d be able to get a decent connection; the Lower Holloway exchange is currently accepting orders for FTTC broadband.
Image: vagueonthehow/Flickr
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