Openreach launch 55/10Mbs product

Openreach have announced that they will offer a 55/10Mbs product as part of their range from next month. They have been trialling it for a while.

GEA-FTTC and GEA-FTTP 55/10 Mbps fibre tier

To increase the choice of speeds available for end customers and enhance the options available to our CPs, Openreach is pleased to announce the introduction of a new GEA-FTTC and GEA-FTTP Bandwidth variant at 55/10 Mbps. This product will follow the same rules of our currently available tiers on GEA-FTTC and GEA-FTTP.

- The monthly rental price for the 55/10 Mbps tier is £8.40.
- This will be available to order on 16 January 2016 (R3050).
- All terms and conditions that apply to existing GEA-FTTC and GEA-FTTP tiers (i.e. 40/2, 40/10, and 80/2) will apply to 55/10.

A nice intermediate point that has been a while coming. Possibly from analysis of speedest data that BT has gathered.

Which ISPs will provide it though? Will Plusnet, for example, offer it as they only have 40/2 and 80/20 at present?

In reply to a post by MHC:

Which ISPs will provide it though? Will Plusnet, for example, offer it as they only have 40/2 and 80/20 at present?

Unless that's why they chose to withdraw 40/10 a couple of months ago? It would imply that they knew something ahead of BT's official announcement though :-/

In reply to a post by Andrue:

In reply to a post by MHC:

Which ISPs will provide it though? Will Plusnet, for example, offer it as they only have 40/2 and 80/20 at present?

Unless that's why they chose to withdraw 40/10 a couple of months ago? It would imply that they knew something ahead of BT's official announcement though :-/

I did wonder that too ... however BT retail have still offered 40/10. Maybe there is a regular meeting between OR and the ISPs where suggestions and requirement are openly discussed between between them?

It's very odd that it isn't 60/10. I can understand not doing 60/15, but there must be some interesting stats suggesting the 55.

my unsubstantiated guess is that there's probably a sweet spot that people will just pay for the 40 because they can't get anywhere close to 80 and 55 hits the nail on the head getting more revenue from that but still keeping those that can get closer to 80 on the higher tariff without wanting to drop down to the intermediate. As RobertoS said probably some interesting stats on the reasons surrounding it.

Isn't it just the same reason they offer 38 and 76 - it's what some percentage of customers are likely to get?

The midpoint of 38 and 76 is 57.

Probably true ... I would hazard a guess that it approximates to where D2 starts to run out of capacity. As lines get longer, uses will initially lose the top of D3, then as D3 is eaten into U2 starts to be affected. When D3 is exhausted, possibly around 50 to 60 Mbps or so, there will be very little drop off due to length as U2 is at the top end.

If Max Achievable stats are looked at there might well be a "sweet spot" somewhere around the 50 to 55 Mbps mark.

What it might also do is to cause some users to downgrade from 80/20 to the 55/10, if they are only getting low 60s.

Openreach do not offer 38 and 76.

I think they mean after overheads it is 38 or 76...