Reply to post: Re: Cui Bono?

Re: Cui Bono?

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*

Agreed totally there..but only if done properly. All new developments in the last decade should have been fibre. A few of them were but only for voice services and ironically when ADSL came along they ended up getting copper overlay because ADSL is not compatible with fibre. Some more recent that did get a data service were exclusive (ie;no wholesale service so you have to go with the builder's ISP). Said ISPs were often poor quality and again people started asking for copper lines so they could take a service that way instead.

There certainly are advantages to full FTTP but we have to be practical. It's a very expensive proposition. Talk Talk say it's costing about £500 per property passed in York. So if we ignore the higher costs of rolling it out to less urban environments that's £500 * 22 million which is £11b. Unfortunately roll-out costs rise the less urban you are, quite dramatically as well.

What compounds the problem is that BT needs to get funding for such an endeavour but the cost and availability of funding depends on their assets. Trouble is if their biggest asset is the thing they want the funding to replace. If they talk up the benefits of FTTP they risk talking down the value of the collateral. The other issue is that their network is extremely good at what it was designed for (voice) and actually not too shabby at data.

As I wrote in another post a while back: It's like that ancient Vax you keep at the back of the server room. It chugs along day after day doing all that is asked of it. You try getting your CFO to sign off on spending several thousand pounds replacing it :-/