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Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

Completely not comparable. Openreach has significant marketshare but is also extremely tightly regulated. It has to allow other providers access to basically every element of its offering, now including its physical ducts and poles.

Hence you have a very competitive market landscape in the UK. There are at least 5 major national retail players using various wholesale products (BT, VM, TalkTalk, Sky, Vodafone), plus dozens of altnets offering FTTH on totally seperate fibre infrastructure have started (Hyperoptic, Cityfibre, GNetworks, Community Fibre).

In my flat in London I have access to 4 seperate FTTH networks (with completely different infrastructure) - Openreach FTTH, VM DOCSIS, Hyperoptic FTTB and Community Fibre FTTH. The market works here, prices are low and there are very few data caps.

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>> London

Yip, things in London are quite different than the rest of the UK.

While Openreach has to allow access to other providers to its infrastructure, most infrastructure is owned and controlled by BT.

If you want FTTP, the underlying service is still BT Openreach. Openreach is very profitable.

At my previous employer it cost us £30K to have BT put in 3000m of fibre that took them 1 afternoon, then it cost £1K a month for a 30Mbs service.

BT owns provides the vast majority of broadband service in the UK and it is somewhat disingenuous to claim BT is on an equal footing as Hyperoptic, VM, or Community Fibre.

TT and Sky use BT OR infra, and EE, Plusnet, and BT Retail are all owned by the BT Group.

The telecom market in the UK is very consolidated and controlled by BT.

You don't even have to leave London to see a night and day difference. I currently live in a new-build flat and have multiple choices for fibre (Hyperoptic are great). I am hopefully soon to be moving less than a mile down the road into a house where my choice is either an offensively slow BT-backed service or an offensively unreliable (so I have heard) Virgin Media service.

If you have a new-build flat in a major UK city you probably have a similar decent choice but the rest of the housing stock (the majority by far) is stuck with BT/Virgin.

You'll almost certainly be getting BT FTTH in the next year or two if you have access to VM. The program is running quickly, something like 6 million premises a year and ramping.

VM can be ok or can be congested depending on the area. BT FTTH doesn't suffer from congestion issues (nor does the FTTC).

Check https://bidb.uk/ for more information. It collates all the altnets and planned roadworks into one dashboard.

>> BT FTTH doesn't suffer from congestion issues (nor does the FTTC).

That is just not true. BT consumer FTTC is contended up to 40 to 1--that is you are sharing your backhaul with upto 40 of your neighbours. I am assuming that their FTTH services are the same.

> If you want FTTP, the underlying service is still BT Openreach. Openreach is very profitable.

Not always. There are many altnets now (cityfibre etc).

> TT and Sky use BT OR infra, and EE, Plusnet, and BT Retail are all owned by the BT Group.

TalkTalk also use cityfibre.

> The telecom market in the UK is very consolidated and controlled by BT.

If you mean physical infrastrure, yes it is (though changing rapidly). Consumer level pricing is competitive though and the services are reliable in the large. It is a different planet compared to the US and especially Canada.

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