What future for BT and the UK's broadband?
bbc.com
bbc.com
Perceived?
There's nothing new in these observations. The ringfencing between OpenReach and the rest of BT has been present for quite a while. It has kept the lawyers and legislators happy and done pretty much nothing for the customer. As far as I can tell this new review from ofcom is essentially a confirmation of the status quo: Yeah, let's leave things as they are but keep our options open.
Even the CEO of BTGroup pretty much said the same: We have most of these guards in place already, we're happy to work with OfCom.
Translation: Thanks bros!
I can see why you might get sub-contractors to help maintain the network, but shouldn't the infrastructure be in public hands?
Is it just market dogma?
Putting the infrastructure into public hands has upsides and downsides. If the public is willing to invest money, you can get a pretty workable system: e.g. the Paris subway. If the public isn't willing to invest the money, you can get a very bad system, e.g. Flint Michigan's water supply.
More often than not, public ownership leads to under-investment. In the U.S., for every enlightened municipality like New York that carefully manages its water supply, there are dozens that keep water rates far too low and consequently lack the money to upgrade miles of decaying lead pipes.
All told, BT OpenReach is probably one of the better ways of organizing this function at scale. It's ostensibly private, but it was privatized with a carefully-designed system of incentives to keep investing in infrastructure. OpenReach is, for example, much more profitable than Verizon's wireline division. That's why they're still at least building fiber, instead of trying to get out of the business entirely.
If more of these networks spring up, then maybe something good will come of BT's tardiness in laying decent infrastructure. Granted, B4RN is strongly enabled by being able to easily lay fibre under farmland, but there are other models that are more appropriate in urban areas - see e.g. the guifi network [2] in Catalonia.
[1]: http://b4rn.org.uk [2]: http://guifi.net
In France I am not aware of anyone using FTTC. FTTP is the standard and is now widely deployed in large cities. That comparison alone should hurt the pride of the British people!
http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/where-and-when/ try the post code "SW1A 2AA" (i.e. 10 downing street). Status of the exchange: no plan for optic fiber roll out.
I hope the CEO of BT always keeps on himself a one-way ticket to a country with no extradition treaty with the UK!
I now have Infinity, running at a rock solid 38Mbps down and 12Mbps up, for a decent price (almost the same as I was paying for ADSL), and it's been totally reliable.
Bournemouth had FibreCity which promised fibre to the home, and 100M/1G service. The original delivery mechanism (in sewers, with minimal digging) didn't work out, and instead lots of micro-trenching was done. It cost them much more than they anticipated, and the company went bust (more than once, I believe), and provided a sub-standard IPTV and ISP offering (I had it for a month on trial, and it was patchy), so while the numbers would look great, there's more to it than the raw figures.
FTR, my postcode always showed that my area was going to have infinity, but my specific address wasn't going to get it, and even though I registered to be told when it would be available, I was never told - it was only bored clicking one night when stuck at 0.5Mbps that led to me getting upgraded.
BT and openworld definitely need more separation, however, IMO.
the inclination being that BT only goes where Virgin goes.. if you have fibre then you have a choice, but if you're running ADSL then BT doesn't hear you.. BT doesn't care.
Cheers.
Virgin cable available right now, BT have put off upgrading my cabinet to FTTC for over 4 years now.
Still, I'm getting ~8Mbps/1MBps so it's hardly a reason to complain.
By the way - the openreach site you mention was totally misleading in my area - it said that 'superfast' was available when in fact it was not (it also gave rollout-time estimates that were wrong by years). Any naive regulator or reporter using their data would be given a falsely rosy view of broadband rollout.
The only reason I have the line is for the FTTC connection that runs over it (using Goscomb as my ISP, rather than BT) There isn't even a phone connected to it.
Same scenario and ISP here, but I switched line rental to Zen's most basic no-calls-included package at 12 UKP per month.
Still not 'cheap' but cheaper than BT Retail.
We don't even have a landline phone in the house.
One month after the transfer, Openreach ceases the PSTN line and the reaction from my new ISP was "well it's your responsibility to keep up your BT subscription" (never had BT).
Two weeks later, the PSTN line is still dark, and I'm waiting for Openreach to install a new MPF line provided by my current ISP (for an extra £10/month of course).
Apparently the reason for doing this rather than re-start the PSTN line is part of a process called "Local-loop unbundling".
I imagine the entirety of Downing Street is connected back into the larger Whitehall network via redundant private gigabit circuits.
Depends on how far the curb is from you. VDSL2 Vectoring is pretty good and I'm pretty sure if someone has the option of no fiber or fiber closer so them they would pick the latter. Not everybody lives in cities and FTTC is often the only thing available.
The partnership where OpenReach does everything for the infrastructure and BT adds absolutely no value. The split of the partnership would have been what the consumers wanted.
Th decision falls short of bringing much needed change in the industry. There is still huge number of people who have super-slow internet which is a HUGE shame for ofcom for not having been able to get this problem sorted.
In my area, I get internet speed of 2MBps. I cannot get even basic things done. To put things into perspective, to download 100 photos, it would take 10 minutes.
Ofcom - This is the twenty first century and you are still living under a rock.
Edit - Thanks Xophmeister for spotting the typo
It's saying "superfast broadband is here in this cabinet, but will never make it the extra 50 feet to your house". I've had that sticker on a cabinet at the end of my road for three years now. But still just sketchy DSL offered to my house.
According to BT's helpful "when the F is Fibre going to F'ng make it to my area" page, my postcode is going to be ready in "March 2016". But then that page used to say March 2015, March 2014 and March 2013 since I've been checking. At least it's always March, so I don't have to get my hopes up more than once a year.
I'm sure there's people that it's working out wonderfully for but I've never found them.
Some kind of shake up is needed in the industry, similar to when cable came in around 2000(?).
I moved down from Worcestershire last year, only a few miles outside of Worcester but also very slightly rural and exactly the same happened there.
What I guess is happening is they connect up the very centre of large towns/cities and then don't really have any intention of providing fast broadband to the more rural areas, probably because it's not economical.
What is ridiculous, though, is the industrial estate never did, so my entire office building was sharing a single DSL line until we got a point to point wireless setup.
We got fibre last year.
What amazes me is that Hyperoptic sells 1gbps internet over OpenReach fiber but BT only sells 300mbps (at a higher price) http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/08/hand...
The price difference, let along the speed difference, between the two companies offerings is insane.
BT is leading companies around the world testing out G.Fast, the next generation of DSL technology. Which should give you 500Mbps over 250M of cooper cables.
Because there are no upgrade done on users part other then a modem. This could be quickly rolled out many UK citizens, while others will wait for cabinet to move a little closer to them. Both will be much cheaper and quicker to deploy then FTTH.
Yes, broadband is cheap in towns and cities. But go to the countryside and it's a different story. For me - £25/month (Andrews & Arnold) plus £8/month line rental (Primus).
Our village finally got FTTC cab#1 activated at the end of December (cab#2 which served a much smaller segment of the village went live in September), has made a world of difference for us folks working from home.
Google's project Loon has done an amazing feat that they will achieve full internet coverage for the entire country Sri Lanka by end of next month using 4G LTE network.
On the other hand, in the past 5 years, my cable speeds in Oslo have increased from 20/5 to 250/20, and supposedly I might have an option to get 500/50 sometime soon. Would still prefer fiber, but I can't complain nearly as much as a lot of people!
[1] http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/09/uk-isp-bt-to-de...
The real issues with 21CN are that many parts of the edge network have multiple SPOFs (so a single failure can result in multi-hour or longer downtime for customers served by multiple ISPs that connected to an exchange) as well as insufficient bandwidth provisioned for those links in some areas. Another issue, is that backhaul from exchanges is metered at a fairly expensive rate.