Is the commercial rollout on-hold given BDUK ramp up?

Perhaps just me being cynical but seeing as OpenReach are getting real money for BDUK why would they continue with their commercial rollout?

There is real pressure, from a publicity perspective, on them to be seen to be delivering to the BDUK so again the commercial rollout would seem to be the easy target to get the resources to deliver.

Mark

The commercial programme is supposed to be pretty much finished. Final mop ups.

The potential problem with BT for BDUK is that if it gets over a percentage of take-up then they have to profit share with the local authority. If it is going to be a commercially viable exchange then better to take all the profit yourself as the risk/reward ratio is good for commercial rollout.

But is it?

At least in my area, Staffordshire, the majority of the Exchanges are AO, but I find it very difficult to actually find many areas/cabinets that are actually live.

For my Exchange, Blythe Bridge WMBLY, I can find one cabinet, although perhaps I'm not looking in all the right places.

As I said, it is "supposed to be". Guess some are running late. Which causes BT problems anyway because they need to move their resources to meet BDUK targets but are potentially still clearing up the commercial programme.

Hi Mark,

I actually think there maybe a little bit of truth in this, which always gets our BT account manager to go quiet whenever I bring evidence up locally.

We have seen a number of commercial cabinets literally get pushed back now 9 months from the expected live date, just as BDUK monies got released. The BDUK cabs have been selected, installed, tested and provisioned for service in the same areas.

I do agree, that pressure from a number of Local Authorities is restricting in parts engineering resources to complete commercial cabs.

After all, its easier to spend someone else's money

you woud expect the BDUK to take precedence at the moment remenber the initial timeine for the commercial programme was 2015/2016

Edited by deleted (Mon 08-Sep-14 19:33:23)

I believe in some areas there are penalties if BT don't install the BDUK cabinets to schedule. There are obviously no such penalties for the commercial rollout, so it makes sense that they're focussing on BDUK work.

In reply to a post by ian72:

The commercial programme is supposed to be pretty much finished. Final mop ups.

The potential problem with BT for BDUK is that if it gets over a percentage of take-up then they have to profit share with the local authority. If it is going to be a commercially viable exchange then better to take all the profit yourself as the risk/reward ratio is good for commercial rollout.

so why is some parts of the city I live in still not got FTTC? i do not mean the out skirts, I mean the city centre.

I have no idea as I don't work for openreach. Maybe they aren't financially viable for some reason (perhaps blocked ducts going under busy city streets that they can't close to fix)? Maybe they are EO lines that won't be dealt with till later? Maybe they are in the final 10% that won't get anything for now (that 10% is not necessarily just rural)? Or maybe the commercial programme is not as complete as BT projected it would be.

Obviously this is all supposition as I don't have any knowledge of Openreach decisions or indeed of what city this even is (not that I could answer even if I did know what city it is).

Because at no point was the promise ever given that every cabinet would be enabled in the cities.

A roll-out that reaches two thirds of UK premises means 1 in 3 don't get it via commercial, so clearly some were going to miss out.