UK's smaller broadband operators face tough road ahead, consolidation possible Alternative network providers (altnets) are facing tough competition from the big players in the UK broadband market, with consolidation likely in the face of slowing growth in fiber internet uptake. So claims Neos Networks, which itself operates a fiber network spanning much of mainland UK. Its report says that almost all …
Exactly… digging - even the amateur hour shitshow City Fibre with their minimum depth no cable armouring or ducting wildcat roadworks - costs money.
Virgin Media emerging debt free out of the cable carnage.20 years ago.
In my area City Fibre delivering where Virgin Media - or its sires- - had already been for 25 years, and an Openreach 21CN town with Fibre to the door and free broadband conversions.
Well I WOULD have signed up with an altnet (gofibre) but they skipped my 1970s street because it was direct in ground cabling, despite putting poles elsewhere in town they took my street out of scope entirely and started talking about applying for grants etc which soured me on it.
Openretch announced my town back in 2020 and was "by December 2026" but now it's "build not planned" so seems their usual dirty tricks at play as usual.
Openretch are an archaic shower that long ago should have been broken up / made a non profit to stop BT pulling dirty tricks
They used to play tricks like deliberately not fixing LLU connections, or deliberately breaking other connections, to make BT look better. Or in one case I recall years ago, a customer's broadband wasn't working - it wasn't BT - and after literally months or it not being fixed properly, the engineer suggested going to BT. Lo and behold, BT got them broadband within 2 weeks.
Even now, Openwretch still can't keep their hands off plugging BT. When we (a reseller of various wholesale broadband services) get a broadband connection put in by Openreach, they occasionally ask the customer where the "BT Hub" is, or even in one case leave one behind. Then we have to tell the customer it's not BT.
But, as I always end up saying, this consolidation that's inevitably going to happen is just part of the Enshittification of Everything. At the moment, altnets can move fast, and aren't bogged down in as much bureaucracy as the likes of BT, Virgin etc. That just won't last. It'll become awful.
Take TOOB for example. Their headline rate looks good but if you want a fixed IP Address then is it a monthly charge of at least £5.00. Then, according to the droid who called at my home less than an hour after BT had moved me to Full Fibre without a hitch, I would have to take their router which has next to no port forwarding or firewall or.... PlusNet let me use my existing router and I get a 500mbit service.
That makes it almost identical to what I can get with PlusNet who charged me once for the fixed IP address.
Yes BT can be a right PITA. I know that from selling kit to them in the 1990's but at the moment, there is little that would get me to move to a different supplier.
So? Do I really need a symmetric service? No.
On the downside to one of these smaller ISP's is that they have taken their conditions of Service from TalkTalk. They make zero accommodation for those who are not technical or old/infirm. That in itself is illegal but they don't care. Get more people signed up and then run for the hills in South India. My brother is going through hell with his FTTH supplier. Sadly he is in a 5G not spot and 4G is 1-2 bars on a good day otherwise, he would ditch the supplier tomorrow. It has got so bad that he is consulting a lawyer.
Many openreach-using ISPs run off to India once they've scammed a user. Such as that tinpot BT who sign you up to a year contract just for calling them.
I've had nothing but good experience from altnets. They're more reliable, provide better routers and are generally cheaper.
And you may not need symettric but a) some people do and b) why the hell don't BT sell it for a normal amount of money? We KNOW it's possible to do it…
There's 25Gb for ~£60 a month over here. I don't miss UK broadband...
because they can, it's just business.
Most people don't need symmetric broadband, it's download the vast majority of consumers and businesses care about. If you're needing a huge amount of upstream bandwidth it's not unlikely a hosted solution is more suitable.
I took Toobs headline rate, which is half the price that VM wanted for me as an existing customer. If I needed a fixed IP then even that doesn't suddenly double it to VM money.
Call centres are onshore, and speaking about technical issues with them gets a technical response rather than sticking rigidly to a script. I had an IPv6 issue and took a couple of days to get to the bottom of, and even saying traceroute was enough to get them to drop the have you reset the router, etc nonsense and ask proper technical questions about the network, device, tests I'd ran, etc.
> I would have to take their router which has next to no port forwarding or firewall or....
That has been the norm for consumer/home Internet since the outset. Looking at TOOB, I would expect that headline price of £25 pcm (900/900) to be without “frills”. Their £50+vat business package still looks good and may allow you to connect your own router directly the fibre.
BT were so shit that I complained to the ombudsman about them to get out of my contract. Made the complaint, got a summary email to confirm "is this your complaint?" and replied as it was completely wrong. They ignored that, found that BT were not in breach of my contract (because they investigated the wrong complaint) and then ignored every attempt I made to correct them.
Sadly all the small suppliers seem to end up getting bought over, I was with Demon (gone), BeUnlimited (gone) and now Origin (very quietly went bust and got bought over by TalkTalk) and am about to move to YouFibre but even at that I've had texts from Openreach telling me that the connection has gone live.
I've just ditched PlusNet after many years (and was with Demon before ADSL came along). Since they became part of BT they just went downhill - picking up speed in the race to outdo BT on being rubbish. The final straw was having been part of their IPv6 trial over a decade ago, they still haven't managed it.
Communication Networks, should be modelled on the energy sector, Openreach and VM02 networks should be merged in to one infrastructure supplier who charges ISP for access to network at a capped price by OFCOM who has more power for the consumer and not just protecting the industry. BT, VM should be split up in to regions and offered to smaller players give the a bigger footprint and offer better opportunities and alternatives.
They are modelled on the energy sector, except they are currently modelled on the pre-1930 energy sector where there was a dash to install a cable to every home from multiple suppliers.
What happened?
- Those that could be served were over-served by 'competing' providers.
- There was litte standardisation in voltage or current type.
- Anyone where it was too difficult/expensive to install to was just told to s*d off.
- The companies eventually went bust.
But we've been here before with national infrastrucutre:
- Roads. Built privately as turnpikes, bought up by the state
- Canals. Built privately, boomed, went bust, bought up by the state.
- Railways. Build privately, competed badly, companies went bust. Bought by the state (BR), privatised, infrastructure failed and was bought back in state ownership. Train companies left to private means, failed, now being bought up by the state.
- Electricity. Nationalised following the War and failure to provide capacity in supply. 400kV super-grid built in the '60s using state money which is now creaking under years of under-investment under private ownership. Part of the grid already renationalised - fully expect to see full renationalisation in 20-30 years when we really exceed capacity.
- Post. Was always nationalised until really bad 'competition' came along and cherry-picked the high-value section. Now the Universal Service is under threat and I suspect we will see a public 'operator of last resort' once the Czech billionaire gets bored/loses too much money.
The list goes on and on. Even the telephone network (which is what the ISPs really are) was private/national/private. We really do need to think does it make sense to have 'competing' roads to your door, rail to your door, water and gas pipes to your door? If not, why does it make any more sense to have multiple data transport to your door? Why do we need 4/5 mobile networks all over-serving the good areas and under-serving the difficult ones? Why do we need a 'choice' of the data pipe into my home?
We don't. We just need one connection to every location in the country at the same quality and availability.
Telecoms is a utility like water, gas, roads, post, rail and we need to see it as a national asset, not a commercial playground. Forget the films, the sports, the entertainment - leave that to the media companies. Just build a good network everywhere at a price that leads to a self-sustaining business able to invest in the future.
The answer is simple. Renationalise Openreach with a mandate to provide a single fibre to every UK premise. Roll the network infrastrucutre parts of the other companies and the altnets into Openreach and run it as a not-for-profit publicly-owned agency with a mandate to provide highspeed Internet connectivity and nothing else. Also collapse the four mobile networks into a single air-interface under the same ownership. One 5G network covering the whole country without fail.
Then make the existing ISPs and mobile providers virtual services on the national infrastructure.
We have a local company "Facto".
Not being an "early adopter" I decided to wait and see how good they were.
Their marketing is like an Indian call centre but with less honesty. The new system reliability is appalling with frequent drop-outs for 1-2 hours.
At one point they were emailing, texting and ringing my mobile and land line numbers several times a week to the point where I threatened them with the Information Commissioners' Office unless they ceased and desisted.
Meanwhile we're staying with out existing provider which, whilst not the fastest, is adequate for our use and reliable.
I’m with BT/EE FTTC and have had a faultless service since it was switched from ADSL around 15 years ago. Until a year or so back, there was no alternative supplier. Then an altnet came into the village and dug up a lot of streets to lay their fibre. They’re offering a competitive price (and have called several time to encourage me to switch). A few neighbours have signed up and say it works OK - but there’s no incentive for me to leave a service that’s been all I’ve needed (faster upload speeds would be a marginal gain).
The big kicker, though, is seeing the standard of their installation work around the streets - cables hanging loose from poles, ducts left open with the blue rope used for pulling left in place… in most towns or cities, that would be irresistible to yobs.
I currently get a reliable 70/20 over copper which is adequate for my needs. I'm only 2km from the exchange.
Gigaclear have put a connection point at the end of my drive (made a real mess of the path in the process but that a separate issue).
I have asked Gigaclear how they will make the connection from the end of the drive to the house - they tell me place an order and then they will do a survey.
Next question to them can you provide me a fixed IP - no they say.
Can you provide me a “landline” telephone (over IP is fine) as I currently have? - no.
I need 2 power sockets within reach on the ingress of the fibre to the house - don't have them on that wall.
I get discounted rate now then you stitch me up in 12/18 months?
So why would I want to switch from my current provider?
(zen by the way - good support when its been required).
Maybe some of these newer providers need a reality check on what they are providing versus what potential customers might want or need.
76/20 (occasionally 80/20) connection here.
I really don't understand the use case for those multi-hundred megabit home connections. How many UHD streams can you watch at once? No more than the number of people in residence so that hardly touches the sides. And of course most people are on wifi without realising that its the bottleneck. Its just a bit of willy waving.
There has to be wholesale access for altnets to work. Not everyone needs a static IP (or has any concept of what it is), but those of us who do will want to stay with their existing ISP's, whilst taking advantage of a fatter pipe.
> I really don't understand the use case for those multi-hundred megabit home connections. How many UHD streams can you watch at once
Container pulling, downloading games, backups for photography / videos are all things that like bandwidth.
> And of course most people are on wifi without realising that its the bottleneck.
Having got a fast connection by most people's standards (10Gb symetrical), the bottleneck is normally out on the Internet, for example the last Apple MacOS update limped in at ~2Gb
I'm still on FTTC 80/20, frankly it's good enough for my needs, and even the previous ASDL2+ (20/10 or similar?) was adequate. However it depends how impatient you are.
Played Indiana Jones and the Great Circle recently - a brilliant game, very impressed they've not sold out and have created a genuinely decent experience. It's around 130GB in size.
At 80/20 ~ 3.5 hours (reality was a bit slower)
At 20/10 ~ 14.5 hours
At 115/20 ~ 2.5 hours
160/30 ~ 1:50 hours
330/50 ~ 50 minutes
550/75 ~ 30 minutes
1000/115 ~ 17 minutes
Those are very large differences!
(I am tempted to upgrade to FTTP 550/75. It's a huge improvement and the minimum speed is exactly the same as 1000/115)
I was instrumental in getting Gigaclear into my area, after frustrated years with BT and their refusal to upgrade the (as low as) 128K lines in our village!
In those early days, I spoke to the Gigaclear CEO and the Sales Manager in person and over email. They were a genuine company, very clear on the sign up rate I had to achieve and what was involved. I converted that to non-technical language for the villagers and we achieved our sign up rate, despite BT offering free broadband to the residents of the most populated village!
The length from the Pot outside the premises to the house had about a 50/50 split between paid for and DIY installation.
Knowing their costs, the original price for the broadband was fair and the service excellent.
Then the CEO sold (more of a hostile takeover) to a company, who have now shipped it on to an Equity company. Guess what has happened to the prices?
If we had a decent mobile service (we do not!) the cheapest broadband for us would be 1 year on the introductory rate over mobile and 1 year on the Gigaclear introductory rate, repeated.
The introductory rate is roughly what we used to pay (when Gigaclear were recouping their (sunk into the ground) investment over 5 years). But now for us customers with no alternative (except 128K BT) we have to pay twice as much as this and it really rankles. I know their investment was recouped within the predicted 5 years and so this has been 8 years of nearly all profiteering.
Isn't that...a good thing? The reports wording seems to be implying it's a bad thing. Did BT sponsor the report?
Depends on your perspective. Upside is you have choice. Downside is 99% of consumers will just choose one provider, and unless that provider screws up, will stick with them. Then the other two or three providers have to spend OAM maintaining connectivity that isn't being used, and SG&A marketing to customers to try and convince them to switch. Then an 'easy' way to do that is via price and undercut the competition, which obviously affects revenues and margin.
Or the harder (or easier) sell is to try and differentiate by service. The basics are just feeds & speeds and maybe SLA. But most customers (ie consumers) don't really care about the finer points of SLAs and just look at bandwidth & price. Enthusiasts & homeworkers might care more, but are a minority. So then being able to provide features like a fixed IP is a nice to have, but assumes provider has the address space and can manage that. Customers might expect an email service, but most probably now rely on gmail. Which also made me ponder a feature that used to be offered, ie personal webspace, but I can't remember seeing that bundled. Cloud storage is more of a thing, and good luck supporting that one.
Plus that's an additional layer of competition, ie AlphaGoo and Microsoft hooking consumers with their OTT services. Part of the FUN! of doing a fresh Win11 install is dismissing all the nagware to pay for O365, extra cloud storage, Gamepass etc etc.. Which is part of the good'ol 'Net Neutrality debate, ie OTT providers slurping all the value-add services, without paying for most of the connectivity costs.
Which is then back to the problem of overbuild and semi-stranded assets. Or as with Neos, attempting to compete by offering services like security. But that's additional cost, ie supply/install CCTV and alarm kit. Neos is part-owned by SSE, but no idea if that gives them access to SSE's field engineers to do installations. But there'd still be the competiton challenge, ie BT has offered security services for a long time and could just mirror the service. SimpliSafe spends a lot of money on YT advertising, and has a (very) basic service in the UK now, so maybe Neos (or another alt.net) could partner & bundle that service.
It's a huge challenge though, especially dealing with deeply entrenched incumbents. I've often thought that de-regulation was a bad idea, and utilities are pretty much a natural monopoly. So treat it as such, fibre all the things and let companies compete at the service level. But companies have spent billions, often duplicating existing fibre already.
" I've often thought that de-regulation was a bad idea, and utilities are pretty much a natural monopoly. So treat it as such"
That's been my argument with treating basic infrastructure companies the same way as any other for-profit company. If there's no Kraft Mac n Cheese on the store shelf, I can buy the store brand or live without. If the internet is out, there's issues with servicing customers, paying bills and all the other stuff we do now online that we used to do in other ways. The credit card company doesn't give a hoot that I wasn't able to pay on time due to my internet being out, they tack on late penalty and possibly ding my credit score. There isn't an immediate alternative and utilities are something that hard for most to do without. I've got to fix a small leak in the plumbing tomorrow and I'm trying to get stuff planned around needing to shut the water off. Hopefully it's only for an hour, but could be half the day if it turns into a bigger project than what I think it will be. It could be overnight since the hardware store closes early on Sundays so if I need parts,..... I think I've covered that by being able to cap things off so I can turn the water back on, but who knows.
That's been my argument with treating basic infrastructure companies the same way as any other for-profit company. If there's no Kraft Mac n Cheese on the store shelf, I can buy the store brand or live without. If the internet is out, there's issues with servicing customers, paying bills and all the other stuff we do now online that we used to do in other ways. The credit card company doesn't give a hoot that I wasn't able to pay on time due to my internet being out, they tack on late penalty and possibly ding my credit score.
I think this is where regulation gets more complicated because we've become reliant on being online. So the recent Spanish power failure was a good example of interdependencies. Power goes down, Internet goes down, payment systems go down, people can't pay for stuff or charge laptops & mobiles. Or EVs. There are also safety-of-life issues. So I have BT FTTH. The Openreach NID has a battery, the router doesn't, and voice is provided via BT Retail's router. So in a power outage, could I call 999/911/112?
I also have an alarm/alert system that uses both broadband and mobile, and there are people with home medical kit or alarm pendants that rely on both power and network. My stuff is on a UPS and I can go a few days without mains power by not using high-power devices, but that might be pointless if the network is down. That seemed to be an issue in Spain, where people reported the Internet down, which shouldn't really have happened. Spain's regulator (CNMC) should be looking closely at that, and various other country's regulators (FCC, Ofcom etc) do impose some regulations, mostly around emergency service access. Perhaps that should be extended to a generic Internet or mobile minimum SLA of say, 7 days power for all active components so the network stays up.. Which would be an additonal cost for incumbents and alt.nets.
Then as you say, there's the services. Regulating those for minimum uptime or compenstation for services being unavailable might be a good thing, but then there are issues around liability. So you can't pay a bill and might get penalised. Who's liable for the lack of connectivity, the networ or the service provider? The ISP isn't going to, or won't want liability for consequential losses, even though they may be responsible. Which is also a complicated contractual thing given end-user would have an SLA, the service provider would have an SLA but possibly via a different ISP, the peering or transit connection might or might not have an SLA. Transit contracts should, but peering agreements are often best efforts and less formal.
Which might go back to alt.nets. They could differentiate on SLA, but a good SLA requires a good network and support infrastructure, which costs money.. And customers (both business and consumers) often regard Internet connectivity as a commodity and buy on price.. At least until there's an outage, and then they may be forced to rethink how they procure a service they rely on. I've had many clients who've had major outages where we'd previously bid on networks, but lost on price coming back and asking us to do it properly. Can be an expensive lesson learned, but running a factory or critical service on an xDSL link is rarely a good idea. But also why alt.nets are important, so the ability to get a diverse leased line/fibre service from a provider like Neos is very useful.
"So in a power outage, could I call 999/911/112?"
While not a solution for everyone, any mobile phone, so long has there's enough charge for that one call, can call 999 even if there's no SIM installed and assuming the phone towers haven't run out of whatever limited battery backup they have (IIRC, battery backup is not mandated, or if it is, they forgot to mandate standards such as maintenance and a minimum operating time)
"While not a solution for everyone, any mobile phone, so long has there's enough charge for that one call, can call 999 even if there's no SIM installed and assuming the phone towers haven't run out of whatever limited battery backup they have (IIRC, battery backup is not mandated, or if it is, they forgot to mandate standards such as maintenance and a minimum operating time)"
The chain of things that all need power for something as complex as the cell network is quite long. It's also a sad commentary on people's common sense, but the first thing people will do in any sort of emergency where communications is going to be important is to start calling everybody on their contact list. The system gets jammed and any power backup gets taxed.
"But most customers (ie consumers) ... just look at bandwidth & price"
And how many of them bother to check real bandwidth? If the do,for most people who don't know how to connect to a router with an RJ45 cable that means they'll be measuring the speed of their WiFi.
"Isn't that...a good thing? "
It can be argued both ways. For basic infrastructure there is such a thing of too much competition. All of it will be shit and 3 of the 4 are going to call it quits in due course so it's back down to one that hasn't had the business to invest in the infrastructure to support the traffic that's getting dumped on them in big lumps.
"a patchwork of network overbuild,"
SWMBO would be very disappointed with any of her class who produced work with som many holes in it. FTTP roll out should either have been held back until there was better coverage of FTTC at reasonable quality or FTTP be required to deal with the existing not-spots first.
We're maybe two or three hundred metres from the cabinet. Although there's a fibre access point available at the corner of the garden we're not interested in anything more. A friend says she's connected to the same cabinet, a connection that must be about a mile of copper. As she's also about a mile closer to the exchange it's odd that she's on a cabinet so far away but there it is.
Just about every telephone post between the cabinet and the exchange has one of those fibre connection boxes on it but, of course there are none where she lives. Meanwhile there seems to be some contractor activity looking at the ducts which pass our house which I suspect to some altnet looking at duplicating what's already here.
'One thorny problem altnets face is Openreach shuttering local exchanges over the next decade, as it shu'ts off its copper network and moves to full fiber, Neos claims. Operators reliant on these locations face finding gaps left in their networks, and fixing these will cost them £1.4 million ($1.85 million), it says.'
What's this cost please? £1.4m for what?
Some of the altnets don't exactly help themselves. Consider our street :
I'd been watching as there was lots of activity around the town as both Fibrus and Openretch have been cabling us up. As it happened, Fibrus had their splitter on the pole first, and OR came along a few weeks later. And when out walking the dogs, I'd see people in various places with a splicer busy trying to tame a horses tail of fibres. Knowing how much "invisible" stuff goes on between "thing appears on pole" and "service actually available" I just waited.
OR actually sent me an email to say service would be available soon and I should start looking at what the ISP had to offer. Fibrus ... silence. As I rather fancied the Fibrus offering (particularly with the NFU discount, and allowing for the extra charge for fixed IP*), I waited a few more weeks. Then I emailed them to ask "can you give me an indication when service will be available - OR say theirs is, and properties round about already have Fibrus". An on the ball operator could have come back and said "engineering suggest about x weeks, but that is subject to change" - and if x was small enough I'd have waited.
How did they reply ? "Just register at /link/ and we'll let you know when it's live" - as if I hadn't already done that.
In the end, I ordered from Zen, and for personal reasons (i.e. when it would be convenient) picked an install date a few weeks later.
Eventually the sales guys came door to door - and I had to tell him "too late, OR are booked on Monday". They missed next door as well - but they'd just gone with Sky as an upgrade, a few weeks before me.
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