back to article O2 chief techie: Light up dark fibre and unleash the small cell army

When it comes to improving mobile network coverage and increasing capacity with small cells, the UK needs more access to dark fibre and easier planning permissions. So says O2 CTO Brendan O’Reilly. Speaking to El Reg recently, O’Reilly said dark fibre was a prerequisite for small cells and heterogeneous networks (HetNets) as …

  1. Bob H

    Spare wavelengths.

    It's not just about dark fibre, there is lots of under-utilised fibre which could be exploited. I worked for one company where we found that we had just a 2Mb E1 going to one site and we wondered what else we could use it for.

    Lets look at what other wavelengths could be better utilised around the country and put them on the market.

  2. Uberseehandel

    Pay "Rates" on Dark Fibre?

    Some years ago, I asked the boss of a business that was making a great deal of money laying fibre everywhere, and doing work on the likes of Crossrail. I asked him why he didn't lay his own fibre when he put it in on behalf of others, and he told me that if he did, he would have to pay "business rates on it".

    This struck me as regressive behaviour. I have no idea if it was true, but I wonder how councils would know?

    1. chris 17 Silver badge

      Re: Pay "Rates" on Dark Fibre?

      Fibre business rates are very real and administered / processed via VOA, the same bods that do council tax valuations.

      https://www.gov.uk/government/news/minister-welcomes-new-guidance-on-business-rates-for-fibre-networks

      http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2014/03/uk-mps-hold-hope-voa-business-rates-fibre-tax-review.html

      http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Fibre-rates-time-to-repeal-the-modern-equivalent-of-the-window-tax

      laying fibre and under using it is an expensive habit.

    2. Tim Warren

      Re: Pay "Rates" on Dark Fibre?

      The VOA rates are a big hurdle to the laying of fibre by anyone other than BT and Virgin Media. For all other companies the rates are charged per kilometer of fibre on a sliding scale that drops with the greater amount of fibre, thus favouring larger players. The rates paid on fibre bear no relation to the revenue nor profit of the company So a small company wishing to put in a tail to a single customer may find that the rates on that line are greater than the end rate charged to the customer, so the company must lose money in order to get its installed length up, and thus lower the per kilometer tax bill until they become profitable.

      BT & Virgin Media however were deemed too complex to estimate their fibre network, so they just agree what to pay as a percentage of their profit.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Pay "Rates" on Dark Fibre?

        I've often wondered why the general rollout of fibre is taking so long in the UK.

        Now it all makes sense. The government have already shafted the market by taxing the crap out of everyone but the large incumbents, who have the most incentive to sweat existing copper (and aluminium) assets rather than replacing it for the godawful shite that a lot of it is.

        What abject bollocks. If Westminster really is interested in a digital economy in this country it's time for a new tax regime on fibre which actually incentivises deployment, rather than strangling it at birth.

  3. cantankerous swineherd

    plenty of dark fibre in s Yorks now that digital region has died / been murdered / whatever.

  4. breakfast Silver badge
    Go

    I would like it to be possible to get fast-tracked planning permission on masts if they are beautiful. Not weird fake trees, not pylons with some boxes on them, structures that at least endeavour to offer some aesthetic satisfaction.

    Strange, elegant, towers decorating the landscape would make things different in an interesting way.

  5. Christian Berger

    It's an obvious thing

    Since the single most expensive part about fibre is getting it into the ground, it doesn't make sense to just have as many fibres as you need. You want to at least have one extra fibre in case something breaks. However it's rather economical to just put in much more than you need as you can always rent it to someone else.

    For a mobile telco dark fibre is particularly attractive as they are dealing with changing technology. While a GSM cell happily ran with an E1, an LTE cell wants to have gigabits. Future standards utilizing macrodiversity and multi-site beamforming might need a _lot_ more, and/or rather unusual standards. In fact future standards might even move all the digital parts of a base station to more central points, leaving essentially an analogue device modulating the used spectrum onto fibres (this is already done in some GSM deployments where space is limited). You cannot do this over 100Gig Ethernet.

  6. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Windows

    "suppliers want to know what the demand will be"

    Here's a tip : mobile phones (which everbody has at least one of now) are going to 5G because people want to watch HD films on them tiny screens (yes, tiny compared to my widescreen TV - and get off my lawn).

    Lay the damn fibre already. Internet is becoming indispensable to our daily lives, and I'm not talking about Facebook. So invest and ye will reap the rewards when everyone else late to the party. Lay the fibre because there will be no party until that is done.

    I want my GBps connection NOW !

    1. Christian Berger

      Re: "suppliers want to know what the demand will be"

      Actually nobody knows if that is true. Such standards take 10 years from outlining the basic parameters to getting the first devices. That's why UMTS/WCDMA still has a "switched circuit" mindset. Back in the early 1990s when work was started, nobody in the industry thought about packet data. Things like having a 64k ISDN channel were much more important. After all that's how businesses exchanged files back then. Then the Internet and the first .com bubble came.

      Maybe future networks will be about other things, like battery power... or range. Nobody really knows what will be important in 10-20 years time. For example I already don't care about speed on my mobile connection. I care about availability. And that's currently rather bad in Germany. You only get service when you don't need it.

  7. Roland6 Silver badge

    Why would a company want to sell dark fibre?

    I don't know who is the daftest: O2's CTO Brendan O’Reilly or Ovum's Catherine Haslam.

    If the mobile networks aren't willing to commit to deploying or purchasing dark fibre in the volumes they think they will ultimately need then they can't expect others to carry their risk. So all regulation does is to impose a burden on network providers to provide what is potentially an unprofitable product (it will be unprofitable as the regulation will permit the mobile operators to demand cost plus pricing rather than commercial pricing - hence network operators won't be able to charge a premium for dark fibre) just so that the mobile networks can purchase as and when they see demand...

    The laugh is that following the logic of the O2 techie, small cells and HetNets effectively require dark fibre to be available to the home and given the fun and games of (lit) FTTC I can't see that happening anytime soon, particularly if the mobile operators themselves aren't willing to put their hands in their pockets...

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