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The BBC’s proposal to switch off Freeview is a threat to its universal service | Letter
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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Most of the research pushing against the switch off is driven by Arqiva, who runs the transmitters, lol.
I cannot see how in 8 years the vast majority doesn't have some sort of suitable broadband just to exist let alone replace an old freeview set that will likely need replacing in that time frame anyway.
We are already down to 3% of households now, and less than 50k households that do not get 10mbs+. In eight years we will have fixed almost all of that, and aged out a lot of the older demographic that has worse adoption.
Cost aspect I get and agree with, we should be ensuring people on pension credit and other low income benefits get free broadband anyway, its getting increasingly difficult to interact with Government and Local Services without it.
I can watch 4 HD TV streams currently, I doubt my internet can manage that.
Yeah, that's still 50k who can't reliably stream and those tend to be already the most isolated and often vulnerable people already, I see a lot of them trying to maintain their existing connections and 8 years will make a good bit of difference but there will be people who sadly slip through the cracks but I guess that's always the way with progress.