UK gives Openreach £289M for 4 rural broadband contracts in 'gigabit by 2030' push The UK government has signed contracts with BT Group's Openreach worth upwards of £289 million ($363 million) for the further build-out of fiber infrastructure to serve more rural areas as part of Project Gigabit. According to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT), about 131,000 hard-to-reach homes and …
I agree. We've just had Nexfibre digging up our pavements who will apparently be opening up to wholesale at some point. But when it goes live it will initially be limited to Virgin Media O2.
What's that? No static IP for residential customers? No discrete ONT? No modem mode on the supplied router? Thanks but no thanks.
+1 for this
We have just had gigabit fibre from a non-BT supplier arrive in the area but asking some pointed questions (after being passed from pillar to post until I found a techie who mistakenly picked up the phone) I discovered that while static IP is possible, hosting your own server is not as the ports are all locked down. Not even the basic set of POP/IMAP/SMTP/HTTP is available for inbound and as for anything esoteric like a game server...
I do have a vaguely good enough connection from BT which I am now stuck with and interestingly they touted 'coming soon' for their Gigabit but are unable to advise which decade 'soon' falls into
One operator wanted £5.00 per month for a static IP. Others were unresponsive when asked about running a server at home. Two said 'Not allowed by OFCOM' which is bollocks.
In the end I stayed with Plusnet and kept my old IP address (static). I even used my existing router (Draytek Vigor 2862 for the connection. Ok, limited to 500mBits but good.
OpenReach came and installed the Fibre from the pole across the road and connected it all up in 45 mins.
Overall, I am very satisfied with my setup. If I want to go to 1Gb then I'd need a new router.
Fibrus by any chance ?
They've rolled out round our town over the last month or 3. On doing some online searching, it seems the standard offering is behind CGNAT for IPv4, so no public IP address - I suspect that's going to be the reason for most operators with similar policies. Given the shortage of IPv4 addresses, and the way that will hit newcomers hard while incumbents will probably already have enough, there is now a least a justification for charging for a static IPv4 address. As service isn't yet turned on for us (though last time I walked pas the cabinet it's humming with cooling fans), I've not had the chance to grill anyone on the detail - but at least the NFU members offer makes it attractive.
But, at the same time, BT OR have also been busy round town, so our pole quickly sported a second splitter box.
And for good measure, I've seen new manholes sporting CityFibre ID plates, but no other activity so far.
Just like busses - nothing for ages, then 3 come along at once !
Fibrus will provide Static IP on "business" connections, which seem to be around the same price as "home" connections, but come with the ability to get a static IP, use your own router and a VoIP connection, or at least, they did when a friend of mine got his connection. It's been much more reliable than the previous OR copper connection.
Brother in law has their "home" service, and he is CGNAT'd, but seems very happy with the service (apart from targeted ads thinking he's in NI these days!)
I live on the edge of a small town, not close enough inside the town limits to be getting fibre to the home any time soon, and not rural enough to be a priority.
The FTTC we do get, is a pathetic 37Mb, which after years of getting 70Mb at my old house... feels antiquated.
I've seen them laying cables around the council houses less than a 1/4 mile away... we have no idea if/when they will get to us, but the new housing they've been building for the last few years behind my cul-de-sac is getting it installed with the new builds. We are literally sandwiched between both of those... 100-200yrds in either direction as the crow flies.
We've already lost the landline and everything has to be done over VOIP to save them money whilst making sure that in a power cut we lose the phone line entirely and have to rely on the very poor mobile signal around here.
The enshitification of everything continues to make life worse for people so profits can be increased.
I'm in a similar situation. Getting about 33Mbps due to being on the end of a very long wire. We were hoping to use the rural broadband voucher scheme but that has been pulled. The govt gigabit page for our county has a very low-res map of the planned govt funded rollout so we can't tell if we're in or not. The company that they've contracted with has no real info on their website either, just 'sign up for updates'.
"The FTTC we do get, is a pathetic 37Mb"
I have a friend who would be quite pleased with that or, indeed, anything reliable. Her house is across the valley from me, a mile or so closer to the exchange and yet on a long line to the same cabinet is my connection a couple of hundred metres or so from me. I doubt that scattering of houses will be on the list for this project even if "North East" were to stretch so far. As ever we're seeing a lucky* few get fibre while those who would be happy with a decent FTTC service get nowt.
* Personally I don't consider myself particularly lucky in having the option of FTTP. I have a satisfactory connection on FTTC.
76Mbps on FTTC here, in terms of speed very satisfactory, never run out even with a proto-adult gaming 24x7.
But in terms of reliability can be a shocking mess. Always have a handful of random drops per week. Occasionally it will go into total meltdown with hundreds of drops a day and then DLM kicks in and drops the speed to next to nothing. I then have the uphill battle of convincing the OR "engineer" that its not my fault once he sees the Draytek router and the run of CAT5 coming out the back of the master socket...
If I get fibre it'll be because of better reliability, faster uplink and lower latency.
Also in a similar situation here.
On a street built in the early 70's with little to no ducting to the houses, so Openreach made FTTP available to all the surrounding streets and roads but have left us out.
Because I'm a long way from the cabinet I'm only getting around 28Mbps on FTTC.
A few months ago I thought the perfect solution had come along - BRSK were going to install their own fibre network and I'd already pre-ordered their 2Gbps package and I was ecstatic!
Then when they turned up with some telegraph poles some of my elderly neighbours kicked up a stink, and supported by local councillors managed to get BRSK to pull out of installing on our street. I was heartbroken, as it would have made such a difference.
So I’m now in a situation where all the surrounding area has an option of either FTTP through the Openreach network or through BRSK, and we’re left with a badly degraded FTTC service.
We've already lost the landline and everything has to be done over VOIP to save them money whilst making sure that in a power cut we lose the phone line entirely and have to rely on the very poor mobile signal around here.
That's not entirely correct and somewhat disingenuous. The problem with the old (soon to be discontinued) voice service is that it's getting harder and harder to find anyone willing to make the kit or spare parts for it. Anyone who does is charging an arm and a leg for the privilege. Hardly anyone uses a landline these days, those that do are probably using DECT units that are reliant on power and in any case power cuts of any significance are so few and far between that it doesn't really matter.
That sucks if you're a 90 year old living in a remote cottage relying on two miles of pole supported, tree threatened, copper for your phone using a Bakelite handset but for everyone else it's all very 'meh'.
For decades now BT has been maintaining a VoIP service hidden from customer sight behind AD/DA converters in the exchange. It is a technically archaic solution and the time has come to do away with the duplication and decrepit equipment just shift everything onto IP.
Without wishing to continue the four Yorkshiremen of the apocalypse... Maybe power cuts are "insignificant" where you live, the village I'm in has an unusually large representation of analogue phones for when the power goes off, usually with a torch beside it so we can ring ENWL to see how long it's going to be this time. There is some form of backup power to the local mobile site, but it appears to consist of the run down time of whatever capacitors are in the kit, so that's gone within 5-10 minutes usually. We also have a strong representation of gas hobs or Aga type cookers, because they will run on Mains/LPG/oil while the power is out so we can still cook, as well as open fires so there's some heat. Don't get me wrong, I love living here, but it really doesn't take much wind to take out the local power lines!
Sort of similar here.
I'm sure I've posted about this in the past.
We're about 4 miles from the nearest old-style phone exchanges, so our regular BT connection would be about 2mbps (if we had taken out the connection*). However, there's an OpenReach fibre exchange less than 50 yards from the house. But, with only 4 residential buildings within the postcode, we're right at the bottom of OpenReach's todo list.
* When asking the BT customer service representative what we could do to improve that, his response was "Move".
Instead we added an EE 4G account and a TP-Link 4G modem and get something like 50-80Mbps down and at least 20 -30 up: fast enough for MS Teams and video streaming. Luckily there's a mast just the other side of the field out back. :)
“Contracts with BT Group's Openreach worth upwards of £289 million ($363 million) for the further build-out of fiber infrastructure to serve more rural areas as part of Project Gigabit.
According to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT), about 131,000 hard to reach”
£289m/131000 is £2,200 a pop. I did the maths twice as I didn’t believe it.
Isn’t Rachel Reeves warring down on Government waste??
Up to surely.
Stick fibre in to a a community mesh/5G and far less digging needed. It would also help with Mobile Deadspots esp. with 3G being ditched (if you fortunate enough to even get that and not 2G/EDGE).
You don’t need to dig/hang a mile of fibre up a sheep farm track if you can get mobile signal there from a small 5G femtocell.
Digging/stringing fibre is limited by physics, geography and available money. If you can give a rural area decent broadband with a small 5G cell? Saves a ton of work.
Won’t be practical in all cases … but delivering fibre to the very edge communities and businesses is VERY expensive and labour intensive: many of these places barely have 4G/, any 3G. Wing turned off … and don’t have cell past 2G/EDGE.
I think you are a bit deluded on how many people are out of teach of fibre. £289m and 131K premises is a literal drop in the ocean of fibre outstanding.
I live in a London Postcode, but BT can't get me FTTP. Not only that but they can't even give my a date by which they will be able to give me FTTP. They did have a date, that was over a year ago. Now they can't even give me a date when they can start planning to give me a date.
I have FTTC and I get 60+ meg. I can literally see the cabinet from my window.
But the new pub I spoke to that is closer to the exchange than me has been told that it can have only 14.4. So, no public wifi in the pub then.
Unlike all those "trade journals" which do exactly what you say, Mark regularly pulls apart press releases, drills down into the detail to find out what's really going on, and calls out, sorry, "seeks clarification" on the bullshit. You do him a disservice.
Yeah, there are a lot of BT shills in the comments. Such is life. He's recently started moderating comments, so I guess the more extreme are getting mod'ed out now. Or maybe just the spam and abuse.
he doesn't mind indulging in culture war stuff though, given I know someone who raised the blatant homophobic and transphobic comments being posted and the reply was straight out of the culture war fake claims about adult materials in primary schools and so on, pretty clear where his sympathies lie. A shame as previously I did enjoy his site, till my acquaintance shared the email chain...
Yet no ISP offers it for a non-extortionate sum (I seem to be only able to find UK plans that offer ~900Mbit/s line rate download and no mention of the upload).
It actually takes more work to throttle the connections, rather than just plugging in the cable and letting it auto-handshake 1000BASE-T, but the shareholders couldn't be paid per byte then.
Of course other countries are even worse - in some you get 100BASE-TX with less than 100Mbit/s download and severely limited upload (as we can't have you hosting servers to enhance freedom to a high degree) - you will be happy with what you get.
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