BDUK and 2Mb USC Service Technologies

All,

Has any BDUK rollout actually gotten to the stage of upgrading areas to >2Mb with 'alternative technological solutions', and what were those solutions?

I can't find anything apart from BET that's been considered for >2Mb.

In every project that has cared to mention it, the 2Mbps work has been left to a single phase, and placed as the last phase in the schedule.

I guess it partly comes down to the fact that they don't know exactly where the 2Mbps work will need to be done until they've done all the previous phases - at least done enough detail to be sure of where the actual SF coverage will get to.

I suspect, therefore, that those projects who get their round 2 funding agreed soon enough will then push the 2Mb phase until the end of round 2 deployment.

North Yorkshire was the project with the earliest finish date (Oct 2014, IIRC), so was the one most likely to hit the 2Mb phase first. However, they've recently agreed to add a significant chunk of funding (£8m, mix of BDUK, ERDF and NYCC) which will take an additional year to implement. They hadn't agreed that BT would get the work, last time I looked, but in this council reportyou can see some interplay with the 2Mb phase whatever happens. That delay takes them to the start of the 2015/16 financial year, so the round 2 funding will be available... and the 2Mbps phase might get pushed back again.

There's an interesting-ish transcript from a Westminster debate on Rural Broadband/North Yorkshire from January: NY Transcript. It has a little on the 2Mbps/final 5% issue, but nothing of substance - which I think shows both the state of play and the way that politicians expect the 2Mbps issue to continue to be pushed back. A good status update for the SFNY project though.

I also came across some slides from BT, presented to NICC in December, that give a picture of technology options that they think are possibilities for extending SFBB to rural areas, as opposed to the 2Mbps solution (ever heard of an NGA Amplifier?). I imagine every solution that takes NGA deeper becomes a solution that reduces the need for any special 2Mbps solutions.

Take a look at this presentation, page 18.

The presentation is full of pretty pictures but it is fantasy, at least for genuinely rural areas.

OR were provisioning a leased line to a hotel next to where I live - see my post in Broadband Not-Spots. It took their contractors 5 visits, 8 holes in the road and several teams of very wet operatives to clear the duct and lay the fibre over a distance of 800m in duct that was obviously blocked in many places. It would have been simpler and probably cheaper in the long run to have installed new fibre either on poles or in new duct for the 12 km between us and the nearest town. That is what Telecom Italia have been doing in an area where I stay in the north of Italy - and they are squeezed for money!

A large part of Openreach's problem is the poor state of their copper network and the older parts of their fibre network. Of course, they are not going to replace this all within 5 or 10 years, but bits of add-on technology are just band-aids for a system that needs a more coherent program of upgrades.

I'm not sure it is fantasy, but it certainly isn't deployment-ready fact either.

That was kinda my point - that BT's status is this:
- They are still deploying standard FTTC solutions, with a few additional PCPs for EO lines
- They are still in the "thinking about, but not ready to deploy" phase about how to deploy NGA-capable equipment deeper in the network.

For the first phase, they can make reasonable guesses about where USC equipment might be needed. However, If they're not yet sure about that second phase, then they certainly aren't ready for figuring the USC phase.

it is also is possible that actually what looks to be usc area - may not actually be that way as more a more detailed view of what inftrastduture is actually availalable in some of those lcoations