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...

So is it 55/10 or ...?

I don't think his theory holds up.

Probably a cash cow for those people who are quoted as being able to 48-51 but go for 40 because it is closer to their quoted speed

I can see why they've done this, I am yet to get FTTC but should be able to within the next few weeks, I have estimated the distance from cabinet to be around 550-750m and based on that should get somewhere between 35-55mbit, I would hope the top end, but if given the option of 40 or 80 I would have gone with 40 now I would definetely go with 55 instead.

What's your upstream estimate?

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 believe it was actually 40/20 - where Plusnet gave you 80/20 but throttled it to 40/20 - this is my typical speed test Link

In reply to a post by Kenneth:

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 believe it was actually 40/20 - where Plusnet gave you 80/20 but throttled it to 40/20 - this is my typical speed test Link

They did at one time provide the openeach 40/10 and a artificially capped to 40mbps 40/20 (openreach 80/20 product) via their internal IP profile, They have put some who where duped by them onto the 40/10 product, but only after they kicked up a fuss about loosing their upstream speed , lets face it 2mbps is not really FTTC speeds is it?

Edited by tommy45 (Wed 16-Dec-15 22:11:53)

To be precise:-

When I joined Plusnet their only FTTC product was 40/2.

Their 80/20 trial came along some time later and I went on it. When the 80/20 product went on open sale the 40/2 was dropped and replaced by 40/10.

Much later they dropped the 40/10 and introduced 40/20, by supplying the 80/20 capped to 40Mbps throughput within their own system.

Recently they dropped that and replaced it with 40/2.

The early products had data allowances. The later ones were/are all unlimited usage.

I upgraded to FTTC April/May this year - I think the 40/20 was the only 40M choice I had - and Ironically for a while I was on 2/20 as it took a few days for their system to upgrade from my ADSL profile

55/10 is good but 80/20 remain the same why not 95/25 openreach?

I would like to see higher upstream on the 80/20 ie 80/30

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

To be precise:-

When I joined Plusnet their only FTTC product was 40/2.

Their 80/20 trial came along some time later and I went on it. When the 80/20 product went on open sale the 40/2 was dropped and replaced by 40/10.

Much later they dropped the 40/10 and introduced 40/20, by supplying the 80/20 capped to 40Mbps throughput within their own system.

Recently they dropped that and replaced it with 40/2.

The early products had data allowances. The later ones were/are all unlimited usage.

Some of that was before my time with them,didn't know that they had sold the 40/2 before, but i was aware of some of the older products being usage capped But there have been a number of customers who where on the 40/20 plusnet capped product, who after re contracting found that their upstream plummeted to a measly 2mbps shortly afterwards , when plusnet changed the openreach product that they had been on, without their prior knowledge, according to forum posts,the changes in openreach product wasn't relayed to them, some after complaining have since been provisioned on the 40/10 product (that they no longer sell)
Personally i can't see why they don't sell all the FTTC variants

Edited by tommy45 (Thu 17-Dec-15 00:29:36)

You're right of course about the cockups when people renegotiated their 40/20 subscriptions at the end of their 18 months - they were not told they would be downgraded to 40/2. That was really dirty by Plusnet.

they are really trying to save what 20p per customer ? (40/10 to 40/2)

i guess they was finding that people was actually using the upload i guess and they had to buy more capacity

This is probably a reaction to VM upping their bottom tier to 50mbit.

the gap between 40/10 and 55/10 is small, I am surprised its not replacing the 40/10 product.

In reply to a post by Kenneth:

I believe it was actually 40/20 - where Plusnet gave you 80/20 but throttled it to 40/20 - this is my typical speed test Link

No, both their 40/20 and 40/10 products have been withdrawn. They now only offer 40/2 or 80/20 and will not let you have the other unless your line can comfortable sync above 40Mb/s.

Although one or two people have managed to get 40/10 or force 80/20 by being obstinate and of course those already on a 'prescribed' service are allowed to continue on it.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

You're right of course about the cockups when people renegotiated their 40/20 subscriptions at the end of their 18 months - they were not told they would be downgraded to 40/2. That was really dirty by Plusnet.

Even more dirty PN actively pursued people coming to the end of their 40/xx contract and encouraged them to renew their contract without telling them about the speed drop.

If it replaced 40/10 there would be a price rise, as carrying the extra peak traffic that might result could result in a higher bill from BT Wholesale

In reply to a post by leexgx:

they are really trying to save what 20p per customer ? (40/10 to 40/2)

Because the change was from a 40/20 product to 40/2 (at retail level), the underlying Openreach product change was from 80/20 to 40/2. That amounts to around £3pm + VAT.

Monthly prices, all +VAT:
80/20: £9.95
55/10: £8.40
40/10: £7.40
40/2: £6.90

And that excludes the BT Wholesale costs too

In reply to a post by MHC:

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

Interesting point - there will indeed be some sweet spot that gets highlighted because of that gap between D2 and D3.

When I've looked at vectoring speeds, there seems to be a "knuckle" in the graphs around 650m, which I guess is a likely location for this - and that probably represents speeds around 55Mbps in an unvectored world.

There's another "knuckle" around 1600m - presumably for the gap between D1 and D2.

I suspect that the choice for 55/10 at wholesale is that it lets retail ISPs market an "up to 50" product.

Oh ... there's also this graph:
http://postimg.org/image/bly6o16cl/

Extrapolation of the shape of the blue line - if subscribers didn't choose a 40Mbps package - suggests that the median FTTC line speed would be around 60Mbps.

Perhaps the choice of a 55/10 package is to get a chunk of those (about 50% of all subscribers) who obviously have stuck on a 40Mbps package to choose something just a little higher... There might be 30% who could benefit.

Finally, I recall the Shropshire BDUK project revealing that the average speed within their project was 50Mbps - showing a slightly longer line length than the commercial average.

There's definitely room for this level of product.

I was wondering about the Max Achievable - maybe BT has been pulling user data from the modems ... another source would be DSL Stats so maybe some analysis of the figures there might show something

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

I suspect that the choice for 55/10 at wholesale is that it lets retail ISPs market an "up to 50" product.

There might be a technical reason about which of the D and U bands could get used. But I believe it is as for the reason above, simply so that the product can be sold as 'up to 50' to match VM. A normal user does not want/need to know about the overheads and just wants to see their speedtest result indicate 50Mb.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

No, both their 40/20 and 40/10 products have been withdrawn. They now only offer 40/2 or 80/20 and will not let you have the other unless your line can comfortable sync above 40Mb/s

I believe the 40/10 was withdrawn when they introduced the 40/20 - I don't recall being offered 40/10 when I signed up for FTTC in April (or 80/20) and posts in this thread imply only 40/20 when they went 40/2

Correct. See earlier post.