Ofcom says no price controls on full-fibre broadband until 2031, giving BT's Openreach the kick to 'build like fury' UK comms regulator Ofcom has confirmed it will limit pricing restrictions on Openreach's full-fibre wholesale products during the gigabit rollout period. Under the rules, introduced as part of a five-year review of how the UK fixed-line telecommunications market operates, Openreach will have autonomy in how it charges for …
...they'll barely make any progress building new infrastructure, do a bunch more layoffs, and then funnel all the profit into executive bonuses.
I mean, it's only what happens every single other time that it's decided to not regulate a large business. Surely THIS time will be different, right?
To be honest, it depends. In the area of London where I live they are building like fury indeed, in a matter of a month I saw FTTP distribution points appear everywhere on the poles. An area (south east London) where there are still streets without even FTTC available. In a city like London it is (to me) just ridiculous when cities like Milan were cabled in FTTH since 2001 (yes, 2001). Regulation won't make them build faster, it would just squeeze their margins and for FTTH rollout you need to invest upfront a massive amount of money with customers upgrading only gradually (if any, because they could very well hold on to their existing service to avoid engineer visits and works).
It's not like I'm suggesting an "only stick, no carrot" method of regulating them. The problem is that this isn't "all carrot, no stick" either, it's full on "give the carrots in advance and hope the donkey feels like doing the work".
There's absolutely no motivation for Openreach to improve if they can just carry on as they are now, there needs to be either positive reinforcement for actually doing the work or negative reinforcement for failing to do so.
And of course they're building like fury in London, it's London. As always, the pace of things outside the M25 is more... "relaxed". We certainly get plenty of Reg articles pointing that out.
Just about all broadband improvements in the last 20 years have concentrated on urban environments. That's not surprising given that the return on investment will be far greater there but it won't be long before people living in urban environments have a choice between Virgin, FTTC, 5G and now FTTP. Meanwhile people in more rural environments are lucky to get a 1Mbps ADSL line.
I know that there are still several built up areas where the options are poor so this isn't a universal truth but rather than giving yet more options to people who are already able to get >50Mbps why not try to get everyone up to that standard first. If we don't we'll end up with a two tier system where half of the country get 1Gbps whilst the rest are lucky to get 1% of it.
"current prices at least are an order of magnitude greater than a fixed line connection"
100/20 for £80/month is about 25% more expensive than Zen. It's planned to bump to 300/100 before the end of 2021, which puts in itn FTTP pricing territory and at that speed the £365 dish cost is CHEAP
or 15 miles from the M25.
There are ZERO plans to get FTTH available for domestic customers.
i fully expect that BT will fibre up all the constituencies where the MP is on one of the select committees that BT have to answer to (and/or where the MP has their 2nd/3rd/4th homes)
"Affordable" is an interesting word. If a service is not affordable, that literally means nobody can afford it, so I suppose here it means "affordable by the plebs" as opposed to "only affordable by the sinking rich". Same as "affordable homes". Oh, the cunning euphemisms for disparity of wealth.
Apart from which, total withdrawal of the copper service will reduce resilience, as POTS is self powered, but of necessity fibre endpoints must be powered locally (unless some cunning person works out how to convert the average light level in the fibre into sufficient power for the endpoint to operate). In event of a local power cut, comms will fail pretty soon too.
If your Internet speeds turn to custard when it rains, you have a service that may benefit from the additional reliability of fibre (wel, other than just the speed).
And the £1.70 is per month - £20.40/annum.
we do live in a remote village and BT have replaced the 100 year old aluminium cable that ran past the duck pond with fiber. We can now get 30 MBPS and its not affected by rain (although strong winds can still be a problem) its been a fantastic upgrade from a link which varied from 0 - 8 mbps with no way to forecast when there would be a problem. Whilst 30 mbps is a huge improvement I can't see FTTH coming here any time soon as the housing density just isn't there.
If they had "replaced the 100 year old aluminium cable... with fiber" then you would already have FTTH.
Given that you are only getting 30Mbps, it sounds like they installed fibre to the cabinet (FTTC). There will be fibre from the cabinet to the headend exchange. However from the cabinet to your home it will use the existing aluminium cabling - they're not going to replace it with copper just for this.
"HS2 is about capacity. Speed is just a side effect."
more specifically, HS2 is about FREIGHT capacity on the east/west mainlines.
Getting faster passenger services off them essentially doubles the amount of frieght that can be shifted on them.
The actual cost of HS2 is in the noise compared to the economic benefit of making more capacity available on the other mainlines
You're joking, right? The government has spent £53 billion on test and trace and there's fuck all to show for it. If they throw £30 billion at Openretch there will be fuck all to show for that either. Well, OK maybe BT's executives will get extra-large bonuses and pay rises.
Nice piece of negotiation there. Isn't there a subsidy for rolling out superfast broadband? And now they can charge what they like for it.
Meanwhile, oop North, we actually have FTTC, but being all of 200 yards from said C, we can only have 13Mbps. Phooey.
Vermin Media know this, so no discounts to stay for us!
"Signup for starlink"
Seriously.
The deposit is 100% refundable, Starlink get to use the preorder numbers in their press release and if you change your mind. loaning Elon £85 to scare Openwound into actually providing customer service is a pretty good investment
https://www.starlink.com/
I live (for my sins commited in a previous life) in Miles Platting. About 1.5 Miles from Manchester city centre. It's not in the sticks or at the end of some god forbidden farm track.
My Internet offering (all ISP's) is ADSL+2 with around 7mb down and a sprightly 1mb up around 36ms latency. The exchange (Collyhurst) is situated 1.5 Miles away (cable length). I'm an Ex Openreach engineer just for the record.
We don't have FTTP nor FTTC at the cabinet, just ADSL direct to Collyhurst (via the cab).
Across the way, about 200m away, I can see the pole garnished with fibre access at the top serving a host of SME's.
I wrote to the shadow minister for business, my local MP Lucy Powell, and put the matter to her. She wrote back to say 80% of Manchester of residents have fibre access, but if I want to have FTTP I could bung Openreach (OR) a few thousand and they'd provide me and my neighbours with the goods. I only asked for FTTC.
I contacted OR and they said that they are now concentrating on FTTP rather than FTTC. So FTTC has left the building.
Someone said that OR were obliged to provide FTTP to all new builds. A thought quickly flashed through the old grey matter, knock the house down, rebuild, and hey presto FTTP. Surely must be an easier way......
Maybe that nice man Mr. Musk from the computer shop who has a sale on for Starlink is an alternative route?
No 5G mobile here and 4G gives me about the same speed as ADSL.
Apart from moving, what do other readers suggest? (Answer on a postcard and no smutty suggestions).
Toodle Pip.
As you’ve mentioned, You could pay the thousands of pounds and get a faster connection for you and your neighbours would be cheaper than rebuilding your house.
There is the community fibre partnership that could reduce the cost to you
https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/community-fibre-partnerships
"Maybe that nice man Mr. Musk from the computer shop who has a sale on for Starlink is an alternative route?"
Maybe: he's taking preorders. Put down your 100% refundable £85 deposit to reserve your place in the queue
The advantage of doing so is that when Starlink announces orders numbers it makes BT look bad and might make them realise there's a tank on the lawn with 75mm gun pointing at the front windows.
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