will there be cities in the final "hard to reach" 10%

BT have stated the last 10% will be "hard to reach", will there be cities in these hard to reach areas?

One wonders how quick BT billing would react if said 10% became 'hard to pay the bill'.

I guess "hard to reach" is effectively "expensive to reach". And that is always going to be the sparsest places.

So if there is a small and widely spread city, then yes. But otherwise, I guess not.

Looking at the smallest cities in this list, I can see that Canterbury (42,500) & Lichfield (30,000) are already in the plans... and even Ely (14,000). Bangor (20,000) and Truro (19,000) are too, but they might be caught in the NI and Cornish roll-outs, rather than qualifying of their own right.

Ripon (24,000) may well make it. Wells (10,000) is possibly borderline, but St Davids probably needs to organise some prayers.

There's still hope for Nottingham & Leicester yet. I suspect that the reasoning is more to do with manpower

Bangor NI? Not 20,000 people here...closer to 60,000. One of the first ADSL exchanges, got SDSL early, LLU and now FTTC on it's own accord.

I suspect the Bangor on the site is the Welsh one.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

One wonders how quick BT billing would react if said 10% became 'hard to pay the bill'.

Quite quickly - they'd probably withdraw their service completely from those customers. Same as any other company trying to make a profit. Even BT's voice USC doesn't require them to provide services to customers that don't pay.

NGA is not a 'human right'. It's a service that BT choose to offer in exchange for money. If a customer won't or can't pay enough money then BT don't provide the service. Why is this so hard for some people to accept?

There's no malice on BT's part here. It's just cold, hard financial planning. If the people you allude to live in an area where BT doesn't feel it can make sufficient profit to justify the investment then the investment doesn't get made. There's no point getting arsey about it. The last time our telecoms industry was operated on a 'not for profit' basis it ended up on the point of collapse. At least now almost everyone has an adequate service and it looks like 90% of us are going to have a very good service within the next few years.

Edited by Andrue (Wed 15-Jun-11 09:43:52)

In reply to a post by Andrue:

In reply to a post by camieabz:

One wonders how quick BT billing would react if said 10% became 'hard to pay the bill'.

Quite quickly - they'd probably withdraw their service completely from those customers. Same as any other company trying to make a profit. Even BT's voice USC doesn't require them to provide services to customers that don't pay.

NGA is not a 'human right'. It's a service that BT choose to offer in exchange for money. If a customer won't or can't pay enough money then BT don't provide the service. Why is this so hard for some people to accept?

There's no malice on BT's part here. It's just cold, hard financial planning. If the people you allude to live in an area where BT doesn't feel it can make sufficient profit to justify the investment then the investment doesn't get made. There's no point getting arsey about it. The last time our telecoms industry was operated on a 'not for profit' basis it ended up on the point of collapse. At least now almost everyone has an adequate service and it looks like 90% of us are going to have a very good service within the next few years.

so that cold hard financial planning is enabling small seaside town sheringham which will be half empty every winter and has no areas for 10s of miles around it enabled?

You keep repeating the same its down to costs etc. this rollout clearly has other factors than costs involved.

or I will apologise if it turns out you are one of the decision makers and hence know the thinking of this.

obviously you cannot comment if people will pay the price but you seem to have forgot that bt infinity retails for the same as adsl prices, around the same price as VMs lowest tier product.

Personally I find their decsion baffling, they dont have a monopoly in leics or nottingham, its not as if BT can say you pay this price for an obselete service tough luck, the customer can simply go to VM, and looking at VM's signup situation in leics since they enabled the area seems to suggest that is exactly whats happening. So FTTC retails same price as adsl and and aroun VM's lowest tier product, VM have had excellent signup (proven people will pay the price), area was first city outside of london to get adsl in 1999, early for 21cn. Suddenly not viable for FTTC. Not affluent enough, labour area, ducts that are a wreck, long indirect zig zagged runs to cabinets.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 15-Jun-11 13:29:00)

are nottingham and leics the only 2 big cities left untouched? I assumed it be more then that, if its only those 2 then thats odd.

although derby now has 1 inner city exchange planned, and probably a few outlying ones, all 3 areas still have a very low % overall planned.

I think you're right.

So Bangor, Wales, is a city at 20,000 and Bangor, NI, is a town at 60,000. I guess that's a relic of the way that we define cities.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

NGA is not a 'human right'. It's a service that BT choose to offer in exchange for money. If a customer won't or can't pay enough money then BT don't provide the service. Why is this so hard for some people to accept?

I don't consider it a human right, but I do believe that lesser services should pay a proportional amount compares to better services. That's fair.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

obviously you cannot comment if people will pay the price but you seem to have forgot that bt infinity retails for the same as adsl prices, around the same price as VMs lowest tier product.

At the point of retail sale, you are correct. But at the wholesale level, the price of FTTC is definitely higher than ADSL. Undoubtedly the choices being made at the retail level are governed by a desire to get custom back from Virgin.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

Personally I find their decsion baffling, they dont have a monopoly in leics or nottingham, its not as if BT can say you pay this price for an obselete service tough luck, the customer can simply go to VM, and looking at VM's signup situation in leics since they enabled the area seems to suggest that is exactly whats happening. So FTTC retails same price as adsl and and aroun VM's lowest tier product, VM have had excellent signup (proven people will pay the price), area was first city outside of london to get adsl in 1999, early for 21cn. Suddenly not viable for FTTC. Not affluent enough, labour area, ducts that are a wreck, long indirect zig zagged runs to cabinets.

I seriously doubt that the area is "not viable for FTTC", and so the reason it is lower down on the roll-out plans is almost certainly something different.

Given the way that we seem to have seen FTTC get installed when it is due - with a large number of people working in a small area, aiming at getting the exchange converted quickly - it seems likely that BT's project plans are based around a kind of "blitz" plan.

That means they need to have the right skilled people all targetted into one area at a time... and I suspect that it is the way that they do this aspect of the plan, and related to the time needed to train those people, that means that the roll-out is ramping up in a disjoint way.

The thing is - somewhere has to be first, and somewhere has to be last.

Our exchange was early with ADSL, late with Max, really late with 21CN/2+, and relatively early with FTTC. That shows that, whatever is driving the order of the rollouts, it isn't just the nature of the customers, their affluency, their politics, or the competition with Virgin.

Perhaps their reasoning is that you *were* early on 21CN, so it is someone else's turn. It could be as simple as that!