UK's Openreach admits 50k premises on 'gigabit-capable' FTTP network can't get gigabit speeds

Openreach has admitted that 50,000 premises covered by its fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network can only get speeds of up to 330Mbps rather than the much-touted 1Gbps. As of the last quarter, some 1.5 million homes are covered by the BT broadband division's FTTP network. The problem has come to light as more folk sign up to …

[Anonymous Coward]

330mbits??

Well that would be at least 10 times what Virgin can maker around here after 15:30 Monday-Friday. The infrastructre is basically old NTL coax and almost every home on the street is connected. It slows down an awful lot.

Then with the promise of 5G (see those flying pigs people...) who will need cable or FTTP in the future eh?

[MrMerrymaker]

Re: 330mbits??

My ex NTL area is brilliant. Just throwing this in for equality

[Guido Esperanto]

Re: 330mbits??

aye, 40 mins from Knowlsey here and only viable company for me to get decent bb with.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 330mbits??

VM customer here and getting 350MBps most of the time (when plugged into the back of the router)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 330mbits??

yeah VM customer, paying for 350 and getting 380-400 ... but only 9am - 3pm. After that its anything from 100mbit upwards. Of course VM blame everything but themselves. It's my wifi (which I don't use, ethernet everywhere only phones and tablets on wifi) or it's my router (Edgerouter that can easily do gigabit)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 330mbits??

Similar situation here, speed is generally fine. Connection drops out during the evening. More so if I use a VPN for some reason.

They regularly try to blame my router (Draytek Vigor 2960, easily handles everything).

No matter what router I use behind their garbage Hub 3.0. There's drop outs.

Spoke to a Virgin engineer recently though, the hub 4.0 is out of testing now...so there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

[MR J]

Re: 330mbits??

Most "engineer" types who come to your door have little to no real understanding of how the system works. They have a role and generally speaking they fill their jobs without too much hassle.

The Hub4 doesn't seem to be out for testing as they have not put a call out for people to test new hardware. If it is in testing then it's only in the early lab stages at this point, and you can be sure that means it's going to be probably next year before we see such a thing roll out to customers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 330mbits??

Congestion. It's all congestion. Any other excuse is smoke and mirrors to keep you paying.

[werdsmith]

Re: 330mbits??

I pay for 70 mbps because that’s the cheapest I can get (if they offered me 10 for half prices then I would take it) and I get 70 any time of the day. Often 75.

[K]

Re: 330mbits??

I recently upgraded Virgin's 500Mb/s package... It's fairly awesome when it hits that.

[Joe Montana]

Re: 330mbits??

Fibre is a dedicated cable to your property, NTL's coax is a shared ring covering a small area, 5G is a shared spectrum covering a wider area... You'll have exactly the same problem with 5G, once everyone in the area is connected up your share of the radio spectrum will be very small and performance will be poor, but the service will be very fast at first when it doesn't have many users.

[Anonymous Coward]

330MBs ? Lucky to get 3 ...

When I moved to homeworking, I was unlucky enough to have the broadband arrangements made by a moron. Despite my telling them I was in a VM fibre area (and had VM fibre boradband for home use) they insisted on ordering a BT line for the work connection.

So I had BT limping along sub 1MBps on one machine next to a 70MBps (later upgraded to 150MBps) VM machine.

Things came to a head when the IT department (who hated homeworkers) introduced a VPN that "required" 5MPBs. It took a few days of calling around but I finally got a written (emailed) confirmation from BT that they were never going to get beyond 1MBPs by 2017.

It's anecdotal, but the CEO hit the roof when he discovered that his £10million pile of bricks only got BT.

[macjules]

Re: 330MBs ? Lucky to get 3 ...

Don't live in Holland Park do you? Exactly the same around here. The BT connection is as good as dead (2Mbps on a good day, average 400kbps) while the Virgin one is over 350Mbps.

[K]

Re: 330MBs ? Lucky to get 3 ...

I feel you pain, my old boss had the same issue... constantly calling me to bitch about it!

The issue is, if VM is prominent in the area, BT have little motivation to invest, as competition will dent their returns!

[Pascal Monett]

"all of our current and future build"

Well, no, 50K of them do not.

And the solution seems simple : replace the stupid ECI kit.

Ah, silly me, that costs money.

[JetSetJim]

Re: "all of our current and future build"

That was my first thought, too. And it's not as if they have to dig up the street to do it as it's "where all the traffic comes together [in the exchange]."

Rip it out, attempt to get your money back as it's not fit for purpose (the purpose being to supply gigabit capable fibre), replace with decent kit.

On average, there seems to be north of 4,000 homes per exchange (5600 exchanges in the country, 25million homes, assumes they're all connected), so you're looking at around 12 exchanges worth of problem?

[Alan Brown]

Re: "all of our current and future build"

"Ah, silly me, that costs money."

We don't care, we don't have to. We're a monopoly.

[theblackhand]

Re: "all of our current and future build"

"And the solution seems simple : replace the stupid ECI kit."

OpenReach could be about to - they are hiring night migration engineers which would fit the profile of a ECI replacement. The scale (~25,000 cabinets) is significant as is the work required (no FTTC service between the start and completion of the cabinet migration):

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/06/openreach-uk-could-replace-eci-fttc-broadband-cabinets.html

[localzuk]

Re: "all of our current and future build"

So the issue isn't at in the exchange like it says in the article? Its at the cabinet level?

Your numbers don't add up anyway - why would 25,000 cabinets be needed to be upgraded for 50,000 premises? And why would it affect FTTC customers when the problem is with FTTP?

I suspect you're mixing up 2 different issues.

[a_builder]

Re: "all of our current and future build"

He isn’t actually mixing up the FTTP and FTTC issues. If there is ECI in the area they *can* share a common headend in the exchange.

So swapping out the headend would necessitate changing other goodies too in a coordinated manner.

I’m usually a harsh critic of BT/OR but for once they appear to be proactive on this. Probably as they want/need to be better than VM/Alt Nets to hold/gain market share and that means gold standard 1G

[the spectacularly refined chap]

Re: "all of our current and future build"

And the solution seems simple : replace the stupid ECI kit.

Ah, silly me, that costs money.

But they already have replaced the kit: ten years ago with what was appropriate at the time. I don't remember howls of anguish at the time along the lines of "But in 10 years time we won't be able to get gigabit". No, they were delighted then to have the fastest home broadband in the country. When they got their upgrade they naturally go to the back of the queue for future upgrades. Why upgrade these exchanges again when large parts of the country can't get even a tenth of what they have already?

Yes this does cost money. Whose money do you propose spending? If you say the shareholders take even a cursory look at the accounts: Openreach's capital expenditures comfortably exceed their annual profits already. If you want faster broadband you as a customer need to be prepared to pay for it.

It's easy to say you want faster broadband and someone else should pay for it, but it is Trump economics and divorced from reality. It's less easy to assert than a landline should cost £150/month whether you want that extra speed or not. That's what is required for the prolifigate levels of investment called for whenever these kinds of story come up.

[Lee D]

I will happily delay those "billions" to ensure you have minimum 3G, but also 4G, in the entire country. Also minimum 25Mbps fixed broadband in the same.

Pushing gigabit *poorly* with shoddy equipment into a tiny percentage of already-well-served homes isn't helping the rest of the country get decent speeds.

Last year I was quoted a speed of 3Mbps on ADSL, "up to" 10Mbps on VDSL, in a *large* town inside the M25.

By all means, make all new provision as fast as you can and with capacity to spare for the future. But how about we fix the people who can't use basic Internet services *first*, then worry about the people who can afford a new-build getting gigabit...

[Timbo]

"But how about we fix the people who can't use basic Internet services *first*, then worry about the people who can afford a new-build getting gigabit..."

Given that BT / Openeach claim to be spending "billions" on this new infrastructure, I'd say they are more interested in those customers who are willing to pay £30 or even £50 per month for Gigabit "promises", rather than update anyone on a < 3Mbps service to say 10Mbps...as this will cost money to do and no increase in revenue.

I'd have thought it much better to get everyone onto Gigabit service, repay the investment in new equipment to provide this (at say 20m households at £40/month = £9.6Billion per year income) and in say a couple of years time, when everyone has FTTP, drop the price to £10 per month.

PS: If Openreach don't get this sorted out quick then I suspect lots of people will go with 5G and use a 5G dongle to get the web connections - or use a tether on a 5G mobile :-)

[Kubla Cant]

If Openreach don't get this sorted out quick then I suspect lots of people will go with 5G and use a 5G dongle to get the web connections - or use a tether on a 5G mobile :-)

The mobile signal I get at home is so weak that I have to use a picocell that connects via my broadband connection. I know 5G is magic, but I'd be surprised if it will provide a faster broadband connection under these circumstances.

[RegGuy1]

"drop the price to £10 per month"

You taking the piss?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, BT have said they will be turning off PSTN, ISDN2, ISDN30, LES, WES etc in 2025. This includes ADSL and associated services.

Therefore they are not going to invest in technology they intend to turn off completely in 6 years time.

[theblackhand]

Do you have any references for LES retirement?

WES/WEES is already retired (july 2018) and replaced by EAD.

I'm aware of PSTN/ISDN retirement in 2025 and hence the retirement of systems providing power over copper, but hadn't heard anything about the LES platforms.

As far as I am aware, the EAD platform is the intended ISDN replacement.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I will happily delay those "billions" to ensure you have minimum 3G, but also 4G, in the entire country. Also minimum 25Mbps fixed broadband in the same.

Pushing gigabit *poorly* with shoddy equipment into a tiny percentage of already-well-served homes isn't helping the rest of the country get decent speeds."

It's not just about the downstream speeds - the reality is that some of the equipment in the field is old (10-15 years by the time this rollout is complete), doesn't support the majority of features required (i.e. ECI struggles to deliver >35Mbps even when the line supports it), is limited by upstream bandwidth and new features will continue to be deployed that will nudge existing speeds higher.

The problem for properties that aren't able to get decent speeds is that the new equipment has the same physical limitations as the current Huawei kit. The only OpenReach solution is new FTTC/FTTP cabinets if the issue is line length which is then weighed against the number of customers and availability of a suitable uplink.

[ThatOne]

Slowness = Safety!

> Openreach is using Huawei head-ends for the rest of its network, which supports 10Gbps links. However, the ECI gear does not.

What??? Huawei? Remove them immediately and replace them by safe ECI ones. The safety of the western world is at stake!

[Loyal Commenter]

Re: Slowness = Safety!

It does raise the question: if Huawei can manage 1Gbps and spy on you, what is the ECI kit doing on top of that to slow it down?

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Slowness = Safety!

It does raise the question: if Huawei can manage 1Gbps and spy on you, what is the ECI kit doing on top of that to slow it down?

Fun fact. ECI originally stood for "Electronics Corporation of Israel". So perhaps best not to ask. They still make some nifty kit, but the installed tin is kinda old & I think pre-dates some of the OTN standards used by the Huawei kit.. Which is also cheaper.

(And 'only' being able to get 330Mbps is a fairly narrow subset of a first-world problem. Much of the first-world is still lucky to get 10Mbps.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Faster on my mobile..

11.5Mbps at home download, my mobile is over 40 and costs me half as much (unlimited data).

I can see our old copper cable swinging back and forth from the telephone pole, it's crazy how little investment has gone in over the decades and governments are allowing contracts to fall apart because "it's hard".

No **** it's hard, that's why the companies get paid a fortune.

[Cessquill]

Re: Faster on my mobile..

Back in 1990 it wasn't so hard since work was about to start rolling out a country-wide fibre network. Thatcher decreed it anti-competitive and pulled the plug. Politics aside, we could be so much further on if not for this. Shame really.

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Faster on my mobile..

>Back in 1990 it wasn't so hard since work was about to start rolling out a country-wide fibre network

Yes but it's BT, they would have found some way to spectacularly fuck it up if given the chance. Besides the tech from then would most likely have been quite obsolete by now as the current article amply demonstrates and they would have still shafted rural users.

[Cessquill]

Re: Faster on my mobile..

The tech would need upgrading, obviously, but the fibre in the street would be sound, surely?

Of course it was was ambitious and wouldn't have been as perfect as the article suggests, but it's got to be better than what we have now.

[Roland6]

Re: Faster on my mobile..

>The tech would need upgrading, obviously, but the fibre in the street would be sound, surely?

Sound probably, but given the advances in fibre since the early 90's, questionable as to how useful it might be in supporting multiple Gbps traffic.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Faster on my mobile..

"Besides the tech from then would most likely have been quite obsolete by now"

The tech from then has been obsoleted several times over, but we're still using fibre laid down then - at much higher speeds.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Faster on my mobile..

Luckily the PCF has been ripped out. Less scrap value than even the old aluminium cables though.

[wyatt]

I've recently had Fibre run to my house by Openreach via Zen. I didn't got for the 330Mb package due to cost, I wonder what the maximum speed is that I could get out of my circuit? Uptake looks to be low looking at the poles near me, not many connections but then there is VM in the area to chose from.

[Gio Ciampa]

Ah... so that's who Zen uses for the fibre installs... (I have an ADSL account with them)

Shame that the nice new shiny (ish) fibre to my place was installed by Virgin, or I'd have switched by now...

(cue my traditional "national fibre grid" rant in 3... 2... 1...)

[Anonymous Coward]

We'd be happy with 330 here is Aus - the best we can get is 100 - and that only if you are very very very lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

Up to

"Openreach has admitted that 50,000 premises covered by its fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network can only get speeds of up to 330Mbps rather than the much-touted 1Gbps."

Is that up to, the same as my BT Openreach "up to 13Mbit/s" when in reality it's 3Mbps?

[FlossyThePig]

Re: Up to

The speedo in my car says "up to 150 mph" in reality I can't get more than 30 mph* in town.

*I could get more but there are other restictions, Plod, etc.

[anthonyhegedus]

It's an absolute disgrace the state of our country's cobbled-together-with-bits-of-copper-and-aluminium network. But one thing that puzzles me, is how are Openreach going to get rid of all POTS telephone lines by 2025. What are they replacing them with, and how will this work, in practice? Or is it just BT doing it, and they'll put in some god-awful router with VoIP capability so you can plug your phone into that?

[ibmalone]

You forgot charge you extra for this additional service...

[localzuk]

Realistically, that is probably their plan for anywhere they don't FTTP.

The cost savings of being able to turn off the POTS network will far outweigh the cost of updated routers/shipping phones that connect via SIP.

The power savings alone make it worthwhile. They shift the power requirement from their exchange to your house.

[SImon Hobson]

BT did trials many years ago where they de-coppered entire villages.

Basically, the setup is to use fibre to the premises which needs an on-site NTU to convert from the fibre to something the average user can deal with (ethernet for the network connection). It's trivially easy* for the NTU to include a Voice-over-something adapter to simulate a real phone line so the customer sees "just a plain phone line" while in reality it's all bits down the fibre. Since it's a closed system, it's easy for the provider (BT OR) to run VLANs (or something similar) so that the voice channel gets a guaranteed bandwidth etc, and also since they provide both ends, they can avoid the problems some users experience with VoIP. The NTU for a pure fibre connection is mains powered anyway, so no problem** with the battery feed to the simulated POTS socket(s).

Remember that all our voice traffic is now digital anyway - once our line gets to the exchange, everything is digitised; and if you use ISDN then it's digital from your premises, but over copper for ISDN-2. Putting a something-to-POTS adapter in the FTTP NTU is just moving that digitisation point a lot closer to the user.

IIRC, BT said at the time that running such a network was/would be cheaper as faults would be less and easier to diagnose.

* For some level of "trivial". In the grand scheme of things, it's quite a minor problem to solve.

** Well there is the issue of when the mains goes off - for which they fitted small batteries in the NTUs used in the trials.

[anthonyhegedus]

I set up FTTP for a customer recently, and they got a little battery with the kit. Don't know how long it lasts, but it gives a dial tone during a power cut

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats this BT company?

Mmm.. I live in North Yorkshire in the rather nice village of Clapham.

Due to BT struggling to get anything to the village, the village decided to go with B4RN (sic). We lay the cable and B4RN do all the techie heavy lifting. Due to having fibre to the home, I can see it, I get a nice 880Mbps download and slightly faster 890Mbps upload.

We no longer have BT in the house and indeed don't have a landline.

The days of BT screwing me over for line rental, for crappy "up to speeds" are all long gone and I pay £30 per month. Most people in the village are on the system and we have unlimited bandwidth. I'm thinking hard about putting a server in for the village based on FreeNAS as we have such good bandwidth it's like being on a LAN. With this much capacity we can think differently.

[Andy Livingstone]

Re: Whats this BT company?

My feelings exactly. I dumped BT and its Group associates and live a much happier life.

[Andre Carneiro]

Re: Whats this BT company?

Out of interest, what would you be "serving"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Whats this BT company?

A number of the villagers are older and struggle with some aspects of IT. We could backup their Mac's or PC's for them.

One villager is passionate about local history and has 4,000 scanned pictures of the village going back a long time. We can back it up, but make it available to other historians.

I can give people access to technology to help them, beyond backups and restores, so we could add in things like Decks on FreeNas for people. We already have the Friends of the local school website in a free DropBox account, but that's limited to 5GB, so I have a Nextcloud folder which is limited to 100GB (only because I wanted to put a limit on). It could be 1TB. I have 14TB (six 4TB drives) free.

I did think if we could use share and host multiple instances of Zoneminder, but it turns out that

1) The FreeNAS jail version doesn't actually work

2) It needs a lot of CPU, far more than my FreeNAS server actually has available :)

I host that on a VMWare server now and use FreeNAS for the Zoneminder storage.

People can share things quickly and easily with circa 900Mb/sec.

We're not supposed to give people access to the network who aren't customers, but they turn a blind eye to free wifi in cafe's. I give walkers free wifi who pass by the house as well on a guest network.

[Mike Pellatt]

Re: Whats this BT company?

I did think if we could use share and host multiple instances of Zoneminder

Immediately has visions of Hot Fuzz and the Neighbourhood Watch

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't think of that :)

Ha, I never thought of that, rather apt though.

To be honest, I was interested in tracking my three cats and seeing how far they roam along with the delivery drivers who claim to knock but never do

[Anonymous Coward]

What fibre ?

FTTP would be lovely, if I could get it.

I wrote to my local council and asked why their broadband plans for the town don't include fibre, and I got back a reply about how they had invested tons of money into "fibre" (read VDSL) and that if had been left up to the corporations we'd have no broadband at all.... I just couldn't believe it. The broadband that exists in our town comes from Sky, Virgin media, Talk Talk and BT. There's no fibre that was paid for by the council.

FTTP seems to be either for a) Rich nobs in London/Cambridge b) People in pilot towns who don't care about fibre anyway or c) farmers in getoffmyland middle of nowhere country.

Two years ago, I asked for a quote for FTTPoD and was given the astronomical figure of £33,500 (ok it was a desk survey not the actual one). When it was announced that the wholesale price had massively decreased a few years later, I checked again and was given a better but still daft quote of £18,000 so I guess im stuck with dodgy virgin media that sometimes does it's full speed and other times does 1/4 of it, oh and 4 days ago it was out completely for 8 hours...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What fibre ?

BT is taking the piss. They will not invest in the infrastructure as it costs money. It's time to tell BT to fuck off and do your own things.

We abandoned BT in the village and have 10x the capacity for £30/month. We lay our own fibre and link in to the backbone/ I pay £30 a month and get 880<bit up and down and unlimited download capacity. I downloaded 500GB of ISO's the first weekend just to see if anybody said anything. They didn't.

BT is an expensive dinosaur, think different!

Rob

[hoola]

Re: What fibre ?

Maybe I have missed something, just exactly what is also this speed (not bandwidth) being used for?

We appear to have reached the fairly stupid situation where people play broadband top trumps. This is regardless of whether the service that is provided is used to capacity or is even relevant.

All networks are subject to some form of contention and just putting fibre, Gb or whatever achieves nothing in the long term. Just what the hell do people think is going to happen in the exchange when 25,000 connections at 1Gb all try to download the latest cat movie, sports game or porn collection?

There is always going to be constraint as there are finite amounts of money and diminishing returns. As other posts have alluded to, sort at the real ancient dregs before fitting all the newest kits in arrears that are already well provided for. The trouble with that is that it does not make headlines.

[deanb01]

Absolute shower

BT seem to half-complete jobs, then move onto the next technology. I'm still waiting for FTTC on our street, in a suburb close to Manchester. The exchange is digital, and half the estates streets have been converted. Seems BT reached some internal target to state that our village is now 'Digital' and moved on. I'm a homeworker stuck on ADSL+ - refuse to get Virgin, the only other option, as neighbours report theirs going down on a regular basis, and their modems suck. Seriously considering 5G when it reaches us - heck, even a 4G connection would be better than what we've got at the moment.

[Michael Jarve]

On the one hand, I'd give a kidney for even 1/10th of 330Mb/s where I live. On the other, if they're actually advertising 1Gb/s service, and customers are only getting 1/3 of that due to obsolete infrastructure, someone needs a kicking in the pants.

[Andre Carneiro]

I don't think they're actually selling any Gigabit services yet.

If memory serves right they're only just starting to make some 500mbps services available.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the Toothless Regulators still have jobs...

OpenReach bullied everyone else off the big contracts for BDUK and got by far the biggest slice of the £780million on offer, then let rural areas and urban blackspots down by leaving them till last or not servicing their needs at all (5G is on the way after all), then goes on to stiff the areas it DID win by not putting kit in place for people to benefit from the speeds available...

"...And STILL the undisputed black hole of the UK Telecoms sector - BT 'Candy from the mouth of a baby' O-o-o-o-penRrrrreach!..."

[Roland6]

Re: And the Toothless Regulators still have jobs...

>OpenReach bullied everyone else off the big contracts for BDUK

I think you will find that the terms of reference set by the politicians for BDUK, meant that pretty much only BT would be willing to sign the contracts. Ie. BDUK was a effectively a state handout to BT that satisfied EU laws.

[Persona]

50k premesis

What would be interesting to know is what percentage of the 50k actually would be prepared to pay for 1Gb speed.

I'm lucky enough to have FTTP at home but only opt for the cheapest tier that gives me a very adequate ~60Mb. YMMV but I suspect the vast majority of customers wouldn't choose to pay for the fastest service.

[TheresaJayne]

and yet, where i live (within 5 miles of Heathrow) if anyone on our estate wants Broadband they can have a max of 5mb down as there is no FTTC as the cabinets are full and there is no plan to upgrade the area until at least 2025, People are turning to Virgin in their droves and are paying for 100mb/s but they are also only getting ~40mb/s if they are lucky. and yet just 1 mile away in the center of town a single block of flats has HyperOptic offering 1gb broadband, (and there is a T1 linked data center less than a mile from my location, BT think because you have 1mb/s or more that counts as broadband, (for stats my neighbour was paying for 40mb/s and was getting (according to BT and speedtest.net) 1.5mb/s down 0.2 mb/s up as they were 400m from the nearest cabinet (yet there is one against the back garden hedge...)

[Flywheel]

Difficult decision

Openreach is using Huawei head-ends for the rest of its network, which supports 10Gbps links. However, the ECI gear does not

Lemme see now .. you can have all the speed you ever wanted, and more, by installing Huawei kit but there's the [alleged] risk of [alleged] spying and incurring the wrath of (y)our soon-to-be PM Bojo. Or you can be slow and steady, stick with ECI and have none of that. Difficult decision, that.