Waiting for speedy broadband? UK's Openreach prioritizing existing work over fiber expansion

Openreach, the infrastructure arm of UK telco giant BT, looks set to prioritize existing projects rather than starting new buildouts of its fiber broadband network as it seeks to control costs amid surging inflation. Following government pledges to roll out full-fiber broadband access to all areas of the country by 2025, …

[Roland6]

>the plan is to prioritize investment in those areas where network buildout has already begun, rather than on starting on new builds in new areas.

Given the upfront infrastructure costs, undertaking works that have the potential to more quickly load that infrastructure up with paying subscribers, makes sound business sense.

Also it is probably in BT's long-term interests (wrt Ofcom et al) to have some areas where there is an opportunity for third-parties to deploy first.

[Hubert Cumberdale]

It would have been in everyone's long-term interests if this was a problem that didn't exist because it had been thought about a long time ago. Which it was. It was understood that fibre would be the future in 1979 (see the comments by Dr Peter Cochrane on p. 135 here). Then, a certain Prime Minister blocked the nationwide roll-out of fibre by BT a full 32 years ago, citing the need for competition and market forces. Fascinatingly, this 1994 episode of Tomorrow's World turned out to be rather prescient: I would not have expected it to age quite so well.

[Majikthise]

Copper has aged very well here, thanks

Our house - built ~1990* - is under 300m from the exchange (exactly 300 paces and my paces are well under 1m). The nearest Openreach FTTC cabinet is on the arterial road past the estate - the other side of the exchange, at least 450m away - and a Gigaclear fibre has been making its stately way down that road for some time, escorted by a retinue of temporary traffic lights.

ADSL is all we need, thanks - the service is great** and getting better as it seems the data hogs are moving to fibre and leaving the rest of us with minimal contention on the DSL. If we really need more bandwidth, then hopefully we can just move to VDSL straight into the exchange (the passing road traffic has a habit of running into the local pavement cabinets).

So don't worry about us, concentrate on taking fibre to those way out in the countryside who have had a rubbish service for years and could really do with it. When FTTP is ubiquitous and cheap we'll take it - but until then the only way they're taking our copper away is from our cold dead hands...

* The period when house builders were installing modular phone wiring, but were not required to use actual BT sockets, thus causing the furrowed brows of several Openreach staff. And yes, the estate should obviously have been laid with fibre from the start.

** Well, it is now - ADSL used to drop out when the weather was very dry or very wet, with a buzz audible on a clear line test (drowning out the dialtone on a really bad day). When we finally started insisting on a fix to what was obviously a dry joint, the first Openreach guy came (by which time the rain had stopped) plugged in a tester, said "it's working" and left. As did the second. The third one listened, nodded, said "I can't really check properly without a proper socket", fitted one free and then walked the line right back to the exchange re-making every connection on the way. It's worked perfectly ever since in all weather. One hopes that guy got a bonus, but I suspect he actually got a bollocking. To all the Openreach staff who actually understand what a dry joint is and how to wield a TDR - I salute you, but there's probably only three of you left.

[Martin-73]

Re: Copper has aged very well here, thanks

Indeed, they're not training new apprentices on copper either, so as the current staff age out... there will be precious little knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Copper has aged very well here, thanks

Funny thing, when my Head of Department wanted to patent the an fibre amplifier as a junior researcher, that would have made our university rich beyond our VC and council's wildest dreams, the senior Academic committee that had to approve all patent applications said fibre would never replace copper...

Now BT like our university wants to replace copper and Strowger analogue telephony with VOIP over fibre, what this means is a very fast but very easy to kill system, as our university has discovered one arse(i)solutions controlled switch misconfigured, one node link cut and the whole f'ing system goes down, not much good for lift/disabled toilet/or lab emergency comms.

The problem is too many involved want everything on one simple backbone, no legacy systems, so no back-up, as Hampshire Police/Fire/Ambulance discovered when a single point of failure went down in the past taking the whole 999 system in the county with it, that one took RAYNET radio amateurs relaying messages from Dorset's control rooms to Hampshire's to cover for several days until the system could be repaired.

I dare say much of BT OR's problem is they keep being told to resurrect the 'dark-fibre' that's already in the ground by the bean counters, the major reason the bean counters shutdown fibre manufacture in the UK was there were too many unused 'dark' never lit cores in the ground. The trouble is most of it is now 'wet' or damaged and can never be lit without spending more than new fibre would cost to put in. Much like our road network being 'dumbed' on motorways and generally falling apart, doing the job properly is too expensive, so we'll get a patchy bodge job in any case.

[GruntyMcPugh]

The whole 'competition' thing in the telecoms arena has been odd. When I worked for a local ISP who got bought by NTL: the 'competition' wasn't, it was a geographical split, a franchise area, and you could choose BT, or the franchise holder (or eventually whoever got to resell over BT) but then of course, NTL: started to acquire the other geographical areas, so if that was OK, why split in the first place?

It should have all been planned nationally, the way we let broadband get delivered was the same way we allowed the railways to develop, and pick different gauges, and have many unconnected stations per city.

[xylifyx]

Let utility companies do the work when they dig anyway

They shouldn't pay the cable just put it in the ground, just put the cable in the ground when they dig anyway. Then, after some years, it is ready when a fiber company wants to connect to a home.

[localzuk]

Re: Let utility companies do the work when they dig anyway

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Let utility companies do the work when they dig anyway

Unlit 'dark' fibre is a poor investment, unless in use it degrades as undetected moisture ingress etc doesn't get dealt with. Fibre to a local node 'box' that reports back is fine, from there copper as now or FTTP when a customer wants it installed isn't such a problem in pre-installed ducts the utilities can put in as they do other work. It even might help that they then would have records where the duct and therefore potentially an undetectable fibre is likely to be located, so they'd be less likely to hit it!

[xyz]

They had a nifty machine ..

For doing it out here in Spain. It just drove along and cut a narrow trench (7cms or so) in the tarmac at the side of the road. Blokes laid the fibre (note F I B R E) and filled trench in. Blue line painted on top. I think they were laying over 2kms a day. For other areas they just ran it in big gas supply pipes and the like. Every tiny weeny village now has full fat fibre internet.

[nematoad]

Re: They had a nifty machine ..

(note F I B R E)

Upvote for pointing this nonsense out.

This is a British story, of interest mainly to British readers and presumably written by a British reporter.

This attempt at homogenising the site to US standards is starting to irritate me. It's jarring and unnecessary and judging by comments here it is not just me being put off by these changes.

[NoOnions]

Re: They had a nifty machine ..

Yup - it annoys me as well.

[Will Godfrey]

Re: They had a nifty machine ..

And me.

We don't need another American tech mag. There are already several of them.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: They had a nifty machine ..

There are already Far too many of them.

There, fixed it for you.

[AJ MacLeod]

Re: They had a nifty machine ..

It irritated me so much that I stopped reading right there and came to the comments to complain about it. Sadly there's comparatively little worth reading on The Register these days as it is and the Yank slant on everything is just off-putting. I find myself checking here less and less frequently... anyone got any suggestions for better alternatives?

[that one in the corner]

Re: They had a nifty machine ..

> anyone got any suggestions for better alternatives

Anyone?

Oh, how I miss the NTK newsletter.

[Martin Summers]

Re: They had a nifty machine ..

Have you seen the pictures of what happens to fibre when it is laid in micro trenches? After Google finished in some cities in the US they were literally tripping over the stuff in the street.

[NeilPost]

Re: They had a nifty machine ..

Same here. 4 months after Openreach fibre-upgraded my estate - shrug - CityFibre (Vodafone) are filling it up Micro-trenching fibre but on the pavement. It’s less than 12 inches down and will be easily dug up. Esp. After it’s (kinda) covered over by ‘pavement dressing (aka sliming bitumen and Rolling some gravel into it).

[clyde666]

Re: They had a nifty machine ..

At least 11 mentions of wrongly spelt FIBRE in the article. That must have taken effort to copy & paste and change at the same time.

This was a 100% UK story about a 100% UK company being read mainly by a 100% UK audience.

However effort went into editing and changing the content - why? To what end? For what purpose?

If the intention was to annoy said audience, it's worked. It is actually very jarring reading along then bumping into some of this wrong spelling.

It's like reading something from Viz.

[David Hicklin]

Re: They had a nifty machine ..

In most towns and cities in the UK the ground under most roads is a rats nest of criss-crossing pipes, cables and conduits. You just need a quick peek the next time they are digging up the road to fix a water leak/power cable short to see the mess down there.

Run something like that here and you will either rip up gas/water/electric - of they next time they fix one of them they will rip up the fibre.

[GruntyMcPugh]

Re: They had a nifty machine ..

Ha, exactly this. I'm in the process of buying a new house, and one of the questions I've had to answer about the house I'm selling was 'are there any services running under the property not documented on local plans?' Er, what? There are maps of services, I've never consulted them because I've never dug up my back garden, and therefore I don't know if they are correct. This just underlines that we might know the bigger picture, but there could be surprises.

[I could be a dog really]

Re: They had a nifty machine ..

It just drove along and cut a narrow trench (7cms or so) in the tarmac at the side of the road

As already mentioned, unless it's a new road with no services then your options are to stay very shallow (and be very vulnerable to damage) or go through all the other services that are in there. Also, one of the complaints about the cable network operators was that they'd use this very technique along a street - and the trees would die because the trencher had cut through their roots.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whol rollout is broken

My estate of around 100 houses, runs off a main road. Fibre got rolled out to the entire village via that main road, but they didn't trunk off to the right into ours. If they had done, they'd have effectively completed the entire village and job done. Now, at some point, they will have to bring all the machinery and labour back, rebreak ground, tap back in to the conduits etc, when it could've been done at the time.

I do love my 18mbs. :(

[Kane]

Re: Whol rollout is broken

"I do love my 18mbs. :("

Cries in 10mbs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Whol rollout is broken

I moved house - went from 38MBps fibre with BT and got to the new property. Standard ADSL. It "says" 5Mb but in reality it was 1 or 2. No fibre option from BT/Sky etc.

I'm with Virgin Media now on 1GBps. Only fast option really.

Grain are down the street but they've been denied digging up our street for some reason.

[NeilPost]

Re: Whol rollout is broken

Sympathies for you at contract renewal time. Esp. If they know they have you over a barrel.

*friends of mind in Lincolnshire middling sticks do well on unlimited data mobile broadband - moved to EE from Voda and got an increase in speed and signal… so fairly reliable about 10-25 mbit. More than adequate for most purposes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cabinet

Does this mean that my Openreach cabinet might get upgraded from standard ADSL to fibre? Been waiting 12 years for that now...

[Vometia has insomnia. Again.]

Re: Cabinet

They did that with ours and my transfer rates leapt from 8Mbit/s to... 13. Like, wow. No ETA for FTTP in these parts, so it looks like another decade or two of hyper-super-megafast 13Mbit DSL for me. Yay. :|

[Outski]

See me after class

It's FIBRE, it's spelled that way in the press release, so stick to it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: See me after class

FIBRE

PRIORITISE

CALL CENTRE

c'mon El Reg, you really are setting new standards of lowness nowadays.

[NightFox]

The whole FTTP strategy (yeah, I know) confuses me. I live in a small, rural market town of about 10,000 people, which only got FTTC a couple of years back, so I hadn't even thought anything about FTTP until Freedom Fibre, an altnet, announced it was putting in infrastructure by the end of this year. Yay! Then suddenly out of the blue, a couple of months back Openreach invaded the town and flood-wired it with fibre. Openreach is now available to order by ISPs, and FF are just finishing off (although I guess having to re-install a lot of the cable where they used 16-feed instead of 48-feed might have delayed things), but by the end of the year we're going to have two separate sets of FTTP infrastructure serving the town.

I'm not complaining by any means, I'm just (a) surprised that we're getting FTTP, and (b) confused as to why we're getting it twice! Surely where an altnet is building out infrastructure, Openreach should be looking elsewhere?

[Richard 12]

Openreach want to keep their monopoly

What usually happens is that an altnet announces they've got funding to start work, and then Openreach quickly announces they're installing in that area before the altnet would, killing the commercial viability of the altnet.

Usually Openretch then postpone indefinitely, leaving the place with no service at all.

I always wondered what would happen if the altnet installed regardless, thanks for confirming!

[NeilPost]

Re: Openreach want to keep their monopoly

Same here, but CityFibre in the wake of Openreach.

Also a long established VM (formerly Telecentennial, formerly NTL) area, but our house is ‘on the wrong side of the road’.

[Peterml]

Much the same in my small town. Openreach put in most of the main fibres in during 2020 (they pushed them through the ducts to our group of houses late one night in the middle of lockdown 1.0) and since then never a day goes past when you don't see at least one Openreach van and/or one of several contractors out and about. More and more houses are sporting the square box of fibre which is the giveaway regarding the level of take-up. Jurassic Fibre have also plumbed in a big green equipment hut to get in on the action. Great for us but a bit annoying for those stuck on the end of a long piece of copper.

[I could be a dog really]

Surely where an altnet is building out infrastructure, Openreach should be looking elsewhere?

It is standard operating principle that when an altnet announced plans to serve and area, they get in first and scupper the plans. It's all about preserving a defacto monopoly and keeping competition out. If you go to this comment and look at Peter Cochrane's session, you'll see it mentioned there - it's nothing new. I recall reading that B4RN had exactly the same problem when it was expending out into new areas - there'd be an area where BT/OpenRetch had declared it was not cost effective to service, B4RN would announce they would go into that area, and then BT would be out promising FTTC and signing people up to long contracts to lock them in. Only the usual thing was to sell then a 2 year contract on ADSL, and the promised FTTC upgrade strangely failed to materialise.

[that one in the corner]

So what you, and the other guys, are saying is that if I want to fibre in our village then I should start up an altnet project and just spend any money we get on making sure that OpenReach get to hear of it.

[Licensed_Radio_Nerd]

Costing to fix the copper

Voneus turned up in the village of Gamlingay in South Cambridgeshire (where a friend of mine lives) and started making a mess installing more ugly poles to join the existing Openreach poles, then they started digging up roads and verges to lay their fibre interconnects. A village meeting was called to ask who the hell invited them to make a mess - seeing as Openreach have the village marked for FTTP roll-out, and to highlight that those in other areas with underground services did not want ugly poles suddenly sprouting up. Openreach have had to follow the Voneus contractors around the village fixing their damage. Lots of people have had their POTS line damaged or completely broken. The upshot of that is that my friend's VDSL is now rock solid as the flaky connections damaged by Voneus have been repaired.

Fibre Optic was invented and patented in the UK, so the correct spelling is FIBRE! And yes, the shift to "International English" is exceedingly annoying!!

[Will Godfrey]

Re: Costing to fix the copper

As has been mentioned before American is not actually 'International', but in fact a minority dialect.

[Richard 12]

Re: Costing to fix the copper

Parlez-vous Americanese?

[Jean Le PHARMACIEN]

Meanwhile...2 gbit/s in rural France

My copper VDSL had dropped from 48mb/s to 6mb/s in October, cue 2 visits from OR 'engineers' to fix. Which they didn't. We're c 1mile from exchange, FTTC then to pole 25m from house. Not difficult you would think.

3rd engineer came and fixed, corroded wires in junction box in side of my house (connected to pole) 6 WEEKS TO FIX.

New speed, 58mb/s down and 17 mb/s up. Happy bunny... eventually

Meanwhile in our rural French village of 200 inhabitants (4km from main road south from Bergerac) FIBRE runs past village onto next bastide town. Orange reconnected us after amenagement (moving in) as prev owners had taken connection number. Shocked to find we have 2 GIGABIT mb/s shared up/down...(as has everyone else in village)

In facts copper lines are remarkably absent from roadside poles (yes, Orange are sticking fibre on poles - and tidying copper clutter as they go

Not sure what I'm going to do with 2Gb service...

[NeilPost]

Re: Meanwhile...2 gbit/s in rural France

Yet despite the ubiquity of fibre/speed anecdotes … France (and Spain) are not too different to the UK in average internet speed rankings.

https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#mobile

Same pattern elsewhere in other metrics.

[chris street]

FIBRE - repeat after me... F*I*B*R*E

please - this is a UK story on what was a UK magazine site, can you please spell the damn things correctly!

[druck]

It's pretty obvious the Register no longer gives a shit, and its becoming mutual.

[Claverhouse]

In The Middle Of Suffolk...

After years of ~55mb with fibre to the cabinet * [ £23 ] --- and that was very slow in arriving --- these last few days it suddenly hotted up and LITFIBRE indicated they will supply 1gb at around £60 odd; Sky the same ( 'Full Fibre' ]; and poor old BT today offering pretty much what I already have from Vodafone, but with their own annoying little twist as usual: £17 a month for 6 months then double that in the future. ( 'Superfibre' ) So I'd be paying £10 a month extra for nothing.

They never did have a clue.

.

.

* Obviously over the last few years I've been checking every couple of months to see if there's an upgrade, because 55mb is pitiful, yet Vodafone UK has one of the worst websites in the country. One has to select the enquiry, then log in to see the offers, and once logged in --- with all the fun of finding one's assigned username and password --- one is offered no offers and switched to another screen.

[NeilPost]

Re: In The Middle Of Suffolk...

But Sky’s full-fibre is piggy-backing on (BT) Openreach’s. Same as Talk-Talk’s.

If Sky are doing it, BT, Talk Talk, Plusnet, Zen etc all will be too:

[ChoHag]

Honest, guv

We in the UK will deploy an internet infrastructure of the quality and resiliance enjoyed by Ukrainians during a literal war some time this century. Maybe the 50s? We just need to skim off the wages our front-line staff a liiiittle more...

[Abominator]

Two months ago they announced how they were accelerating fibre to the premisses roll out. Now they have the government cash and okay from the regulator to do things differently, they are now dealing it back in perpetuity.

Fucking shit show form BT.

[NeilPost]

I would not be surprised if promised Government cash was a bit late. See Jeremy Hunt.

[jollyboyspecial]

The expansion of "full" fibre to meet government targets was always a joke. Openreach were only picking the low hanging fruit so that they could say a certain percentage of properties had full fibre available by a certain date. So they would hit an area and ignore streets where the properties were not fed overhead. Running fibre to a property is easy when that property is fed from a pole. All they need to do is take off the copper from the pole and replace it with fibre. On the other hand where a property his fed underground it's possible that they could blow fibre through the existing duct, but it's also possible the duct may be blocked or it might have corners in it that are below the minimum bend radius for the fibre they use. Openreach didn't bother to find out and simply skipped all exisiting properties that were fed underground.

This wasn't actually a very good plan. UK.gov still have a target for all properties to have full fibre available by 2030 (that got quietly put back from 2025). Openreach are still going to have to hit that target. There are those in the industry who expect that target to be scrapped entirely before 2030. The reasons given for this are various - one is that Openreach simply won't do it (for reasons of cost and difficulty) and the government will be forced to scrap the target long before the deadline in order to avoid losing face. The other is that we'll have gigabit plus radio coverage in one form or another before 2030. However this is unlikely. The roll out of 5G and 4G before it were just like the Openreach full fibre rollout.

I could show you loads of properties that can scarcely get a mobile signal of any kind, while properties not so far away can get a strong 5G signal. Not so long ago that statement would have been exactly the same except you could swap that 5 for a 4. A few years earlier you could have swapped the 4 for a 3. Mobile network providers just like BT and Openreach state that they are going to roll out their latest and greatest to everybody, but what they mean is that they are going to go for the low hanging fruit. Upgrading existing 4G masts to 5G was always going to take priority over installing 5G masts in areas where there was little or no signal simply because that would cost more for less financial benefit.

The only way to address the widening gap between those with increasingly fast connectivity and those with slow to now connectivity is through legislation. But while you would think that a Tory government would be more interested in sorting this out given it's potential to impact house prices, in reality they don't even seem to think this is a problem. And don't expect Labour to be any different Starmer (who he?) has spent the last week or so saying that his concerns are exactly those of the current Tory government, but that he would do a better job of them. A strange approach for an oposition leader.

So if you currently have a crap connection don't expect Openreach or any of the mobile networks to do anything about it any time soon. While there is no pressure from government to address the issue they will always go for the highest return for the lowest outlay.

[Anonymous Coward]

> On the other hand where a property his fed underground it's possible that they could blow fibre through the existing duct, but it's also possible the duct may be blocked or it might have corners in it that are below the minimum bend radius for the fibre they use. Openreach didn't bother to find out and simply skipped all exisiting properties that were fed underground. <

Actually my neighbour had underground fibre installed by Openreach (sub-contractor) and the install took 5-6 hours: dug a hole about 30-40cm deep in pavement where the existing underground duct turned towards the house so he could "break into" the existing duct, then he found that the onward duct from the hole going into the property was blocked/unsuitable so dug a channel in pavement to route fibre from hole, around the side of steps and up to the front door, with an entry point in the wall adjacent to the front door.

Soo that's a long time to connect up a single property. Obviously not all properties take as long as that.

[nijam]

Maybe BT could stop installing FFTP in places (such as, for example, Milton Keynes) which already have FTTP thanks to City Fibre. Oh no, that's way too sensible.