Reply to post: Re: Cui Bono?

Re: Cui Bono?

It's obvious from the relatively low take-up of top tier services that there is limited demand for speed. People want something better than 'crap speed' but that's all.

Indeed. But ... there are economies in scale from having everyone on the same system. So while many users have no need of FTTP - going "all FTTP" would create economies of scale meaning that it would be cheaper for them to have that than copper. AIUI, BT have even gone so far as to run trials where they've converted entire villages to FTTP and removed all the copper. True, it would cost money and take time, leading on to ... Also, AIUI they claim that an all copper network would be cheaper to run as many of the faults that occur on the copper network just wouldn't happen (no corrosion in a properly made fused fibre splice !)

I published a link last year to a Thinkbroadband article that pointed out that it would take more telecoms engineers than currently exist and a couple of decades to complete such a project. If BT had actually gone that route then most of the population would only now be moving from analogue modem to FTTP.

And the same argument will still hold in a couple of decades ! I'f we'd been putting in FTTP as a matter of policy for all new developments*, then there'd be a lot of FTTP already in, economies of scale would have got the costs down (like they did for ADSL and are now doing for VDSL), and the task would be getting smaller rather than larger. Just think, if all new housing estates built over the last decade or two had FTTP as policy then that would be all those houses now already on FTTP and not part of the "too big to tackle" process of retrofitting it.

* When I write developments, as well as new estates etc, I also include wherever BT/OR has had to extent it's network - eg where it's run out of copper and had to run new bulk distribution cables from the exchange to service rising demand for lines.