Upvoted.
I thought BT was owned by the government (particularly because every ISP ends up renting from them).
I still think that a centralized network that is rented out ends up working better than one that's deployed by different ISPs.
I thought BT was owned by the government (particularly because every ISP ends up renting from them).
I still think that a centralized network that is rented out ends up working better than one that's deployed by different ISPs.
I can understand that perception. Essentially, Openreach is regulated so heavily by the government that it might as well be considered public, from the perspective of 'what services it must offer, on what basis, to whom, and the prices it must set.' However, it is a private company, being a 'firewalled' part of BT
OpenReach is a private company, and has many loopholes to not support you if they do not want to. If you have a line issue and they cannot find the root cause, they will black list you.
I had an intermittent fault on my line which OpenReach couldn't (wouldn't?) resolve when I was with Zen. Magically after switching to BT, they sent out BT engineer, who escalated to OpenReach, who then found the fault and replaced the dodgy part in the green box.
It might be "firewalled" but that's not my experience. It shouldn't be firewalled, it should be a separate entity. The only reason to bundle it with BT is if BT was getting a benefit from it.
We've had BT/OR announce several times over the past 5 years that they are installing proper fibre in the area to squash competition, and then quietly cancel. Funny how we have an AltNet laying fibre here and suddenly BT/OR are getting their act together to upgrade the area.
I spent three months trying to get them to switch my line over to fibre after OpenReach had stated it was available. Their approach was to hope that waiting long enough would fix the problem.
Eventually someone just closed my existing line and immediately opened a new one.
I hope you complained to your MP, and/or ofcom?
What alternative would you prefer? It would be ideal to turn openreach over to either it's own heavily regulated PLC or a MIC/COOP, but can we really force that in a capitalistic society, when the current status quo is 'acceptable'?
I would prefer openreach were force to sell a regulated single strand dark fibre product, that can be used however the CP wants, but it would cause genuine chaos for ORs business model e.g leased lines would be cancelled.
Because of the way physics and fiber optics work, having a common carrier that rents out access to wavelengths or bandwidth on the fiber strands is the best economic model, by far.
*except in very rural areas for highly specific use cases, or in the case of wavelengths for medium range high capacity backhaul.
It just hasn't blown up as big as Thames Water, decades to get a fibre connection (other countries did fibre 15-20 years ago so it was possible) doesn't annoy as many people as filling rivers with sewage.
Someone posted this below, sums up the situation rather nicely. https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
Have you tried interacting with a state service recently, like renewing your passport maybe? They are not exactly the pinical of innovation, speed and efficiency.
The fact most of us can get a 1Gb full fibre service for 30-40 pounds a month (and faster is available, for a little bit more) is not bad.