One in five UK households cannot afford to be online

Is there a term from economics where a portion of the population do less and less because they can&#x27;t afford to travel, properly eat or heat their homes? And who have no chance of educating themselves due to their circumstances?<p>People talk about the UK productivity gap and I wonder when society realises that people who can&#x27;t afford to eat are not going make great workers.

FWIW I used to be a Community Fibre customer (I left them because I moved somewhere outside of their network) and their service was great. It was cheaper than the competition, and worked. Customer support was great too.<p>Their only con is that they&#x27;re not available in more places (they run their own infrastructure), but I guess you can&#x27;t expand at the speed of light.

UK fibre scene has been pretty good to me. You give us money we give you 1gbps symetric with no serious gotchas. (Hyperoptic).<p>And I suspect communityfibre will be more of the same generally honest proposition (or better). Plus they&#x27;re promising last mile fibre and 3gbps. So I have high hopes for these guys.<p>I can&#x27;t help but notice the disconnect between that commercial proposition and this article&#x27;s tone. I&#x27;ve been primarily been receiving 3gbps ads from these guys. Not quite on the same mental wavelength as connect the poor so rather surprised to see this...let alone on hn<p>edit: One area where community fibre will need to up their game is static IP. Hyper has static ipv4 at ~6USD and you get a ipv6 block by default. When you consider that the 1gbps is symetric that static ip starts looking pretty good

This surprised me, but it really shouldn&#x27;t have, given the figures look similar for other essentials (food, energy, school supplies…). The cutting back of the welfare state has had a horrifying impact on the number of people in the UK living in poverty.

&gt; Thee in ten (29%) will have no choice but to cut back on data to save money<p>What is the marginal cost of 1 MB of cellular data?<p>If the government outlawed usurious data caps&#x2F;excess fees&#x2F;throttling, I think that would go a long way to helping more people stay online.

They don’t specify what the headline means and I can’t see a link to the survey questions or data. Feels like an ad rather than true research.

Severe conflation of mobile data allowance and wired broadband. This looks meaningless.