UK watchdog still not ruled on Openreach wholesale fiber discounts

Britain's telco watchdog Ofcom is delaying a decision on Openreach’s proposed Equinox 2 wholesale pricing scheme for fiber broadband, with just weeks to go until the product aimed at internet service providers is due to hit the streets. The move concerns discounts offered by Openreach, the infrastructure arm of the UK’s former …

[Anonymous Coward]

"with rival network operators complaining that Openreach is unfairly undercutting them"

When I was trying to get a private FTTP company into my local area, I had to get sufficient people to show interest before the private company would "put spades in the ground".

BT offered 2 years free broadband access (via a letterbox drop) to everyone in the largest of the 4 villages in the area, to try to scupper me reaching the required signups.

Unfortunately for BT, so many people were fed up of their sh1t service, that it didn't slow the signup rate noticeably.

I did contact OFCOM, but they said that BT could offer special discounts in small areas as a promotion if they wanted.

Anon as during the previous few years I had meetings up to Area Manager level with many BT staff trying to convince them to take the government money to upgrade us, so they know who I am and where I live. I very much doubt that mine is the only area where they have used such tactics, so at least I have some anonymity.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "with rival network operators complaining that Openreach is unfairly undercutting them"

This seems common, in our area there has been bugger-all investment but as soon as an altnet appears they make promises that scupper those plans, and then fail miserably to actually deliver on them.

I think BT's comments are not out of context and in reality make that perfectly clear.

AC as sadly we have to use some Openreach fibre anyway...

[Lee D]

Re: "with rival network operators complaining that Openreach is unfairly undercutting them"

They've always done that kind of thing.

I've had the same problem with leased lines.

One workplace, they ordered a leased line and the only place that served us anywhere near reasonably was BT.

I took over the IT three years later. No leased line. Every six months or so, someone would kick up a stink, force BT to do something, they'd come to site, put a piece of tubing through somewhere, and then leave site never to return. It happened so often, the tubing they used changed several times over the course of those installs and was always left in place (eventually, there would have been a point where trying to join that tubing simply wouldn't ever have been possible without replacing the tubing from previous installs).

I decided not to propagate this nonsense when I took over. All the availability checkers said that there was no existing connectivity to the (quite rural) site, except through BT. So unless we wanted to spend six-figures-plus on installing a line to the nearest town, we could only use BT. That's what the availability checkers repeatedly said for all kinds of companies we tried.

So I decided to ignore them. I went straight to Virgin Media and told them our problem. They realised that actually they had a customer nearby which they could piggy-back off, and because of the rural postcode thing it wouldn't have appeared on the availability checkers. We put in an order with them.

Literally THE NEXT DAY, I had BT engineers crawling over our (privileged) site, uninvited. I had them removed. They were suddenly trying to put all the tubing and blow the fibre in order to complete a THREE YEAR OLD installation contract that they had never fulfilled. We escalated that with them and cancelled the contract. They tried to resist, and kept turning up to site uninvited to "complete your install" even after the contract was cancelled. BT claimed all kinds of contractual disputes with us, and then I said... okay... install.

Turns out - and I already knew - that they couldn't. The local exchange simply never had capacity enough, and never had enough, to install our line anyway. I know that, because their engineers knew that, and a cup of tea and a chocolate hobnob go a long way.

When they finally admitted that, we told them never to contact us again. We even terminated our ISDN/analog lines and went full SIP once the VM leased line was up.

And the VM line went live just a few weeks after our order with them. It's still in use, still doesn't appear on the availability checkers, and has provided flawless service for nearly 10 years now, including a 10Gbit upgrade.

So for three years plus, BT were basically pretending to install our line, never had any intention of doing so, and couldn't even if they'd wanted to without huge investment in the local exchange (which was never going to happen). Then they lied about it, tried to bluff us repeatedly and somehow found out that Virgin were delivering a line and then IMMEDIATELY turned up to try to look like they were doing something about it once again. And action only happened ONCE we basically found a way to use a competitor that they thought they didn't have.

As far as I remember, there are still about half-a-dozen unoccupied pieces of tubing underneath various buildings at that site, that never were joined, touched or filled after their install. And a shiny VM line right next to them.

Another part of the same site, about half-a-mile down the road... sadly BT only. Virgin say they could deliver to it but the costs were stupendous because it's the wrong direction (i.e. further away from their kit). We got another leased line over there (for connecting sites and for redundancy) from BT and we have nothing but trouble with it. They delivered only TWENTY MINUTES before our final, business-critical deadline that we informed them of nearly a year in advance, leading me to have a full and complete backup plan in action involving point-to-point wifi and church steeples (and I already had all the permissions lined up, I just needed to say the word). The engineer who finally saved their butt on delivery of that contract nearly got himself removed from site too, because he was so rude (mainly because his bosses were telling him that this HAD TO COMPLETE there and then and the guy took his frustrations out on his customer too).

[John H Woods]

Re: "with rival network operators complaining that Openreach is unfairly undercutting them"

Wow, that is barely believable. I'm not saying for a minute that I don't believe you, this is pretty much the definition of "you couldn't make it up"

[Snapper]

Re: "with rival network operators complaining that Openreach is unfairly undercutting them"

I've been dealing with BT at clients sites for 35 years. Bunch of badly trained apes for the most part. The introduction of ISDN and the (in)famous inch-thick invoices every month because you got charged for a full minute when the second 64kbps line kicked in when required, which might happen happen several times a minute or even several times a second.

This went on for years and BT claimed it was the customers equipment that was faulty.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I'm not going to be a BT customer firstly I don't have FTTP from BT in my area and they only offer 100mb/s upload which is frankly pathetic. City Fibre offer 1GB up and down, if they can manage it then so can BT and Virgin, they've been holding us back for years now.

On a slightly (un)related note a word of warning, avoid any ISP offering an eero router that comes with Amazon built-in and send data about your network and devices to Amazon, probably DNS data too, so avoid Giganet and TalkTalk for starters.

[Flak]

Ofcom doing something forward looking?

"our view is that it would not be appropriate for the offer to launch until we issue our final decision"

Finally an Ofcom decision (even in this state of indecision) that prevents a potential problem rather than trying to fix the damage afterwards.

I believe BT still acts in concert across its divisions, despite repeated assurances over the years to the contrary.

A full separation would get my vote.

This statement from the BT Group website is just window dressing: "In October 2018, Openreach became a legally separate company from BT, with our own board and strategy."

The sentence directly following that says it all: "The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of BT Group."

https://www.bt.com/about/bt/our-company/group-businesses

[G R Goslin]

Fiber? Where did that come from?

Fiber? What is this stuff. Can we have a bit of proper English. Fibre it is and always has been. Look in thje dictionary.

[John H Woods]

Re: Fiber? Where did that come from?

Muphry's law strikes again.

[diodesign]

Spelling

Nah, fiber's good, mate. Unlike "thje".

C.

[Chz]

Re: Fiber? Where did that come from?

I've just found it's easier to use "fiber" as short for fibre-optics and "fibre" for every other use of the word. While it's nice that technical fields have adopted English as their lingua franca, we have to admit that it's American English that they use. I put up with a lot of Americanisms in technical stuff that I would certainly blow a fuse over in a different field.

[AndrueC]

Ah, always a good discussion. So Openreach might be taken to task for helping to keep prices down.

Who's first in the ring for this?

[Fred Dibnah]

Walmart had (has?) a policy of bringing prices down in towns across the USA, then once all the smaller opposition had gone bust it raised its prices again. Is that what you want from Openreach?

[AndrueC]

Does Walmart operate under license from a government body that has demonstrated an historic willingness and ability to enforce an open and competitive market? Has Walmart ever been forced to separate its distribution network from its sales arm and make the former available to competitors under the same equal terms? Has Walmart ever been forced to allow its competitors to set up shop within its own stores?

Even more relevant: Are Walmart's pricing choices constrained by a government agency (BT's are).

If not then I fail to see the point of your comparison.

Ofcom would not let the scenario you describe occur. That's precisely why it's reviewing this pricing change. Personally I'm ambivalent. Some of Ofcom's decisions are odd but it's a complicated market. This wouldn't be the first time that BT was forced to raise prices (or at least forgo a drop) because Ofcom wanted to make room for competitors. They are usually allowed (and even encouraged) to drop prices on new services. That happened with VDSL where Ofcom allowed BT to drop prices as low as they wanted in order to get people onto the service. Ofcom also forced BT to raise the price of the older ADSL service in order to help push customers to change.

It's an interesting discussion point is all.