Fibre to the Home

The government has now given a clear indication that its wants providers to start moving towards providing Fibre to the home

In Wednesday's Autumn Statement, Chancellor Philip Hammond will announce £400m funding for a new Digital Infrastructure Investment Fund.
Private investors will be asked to match the amount.

The money will be aimed at fibre broadband providers who are looking to expand.

The UK must move towards providing "fibre-to-the-property" broadband, rather than fibre to the roadside cabinet, the Chancellor will say.

£400m is a start but isn't going to go that far. I wonder if this is more recycling of past commitments or if it is "new money".

will be interesting to see if anyone decides to do anything about it -

Best guess, it'll allow BT to offer more competition to Virgin. Doubt it'll make any difference to anyone out of the cities.

Government involvement in a large IT project. I'm sure that will work out well.

No doubt pleasing the rural voters.

FTTP is welcome to me in Birmingham. To be honest FTTC is welcome, infact anything greater than 5mb would be lovely.

As someone in a rural area with an EO line that isn't being addressed by the current BDUK efforts, this extra money sounds encouraging.

However, it doesn't change the economics - providing FTTP to a small number of rural properties is simply not as attractive as a more densely populated urban area.

Therefore I suspect that this is actually a negative thing for rural businesses, which will simply become even more disadvantaged as their urban competitors get even better broadband and gain the competitive advantage that fast broadband promises.

When there was a speed differential of a factor of two or three there wasn't much of a difference. A factor of 100 makes a big difference to a business. By the time rural businesses have the promised 10Mbps in 2020+, their urban competitors will have had 100+Mbps for some time. Rural businesses will die, and the money that was supposed to help them will be responsible for the changes that killed them.

And are Openreach to be allowed to charge more to help pay back this private investment?

I cannot see investors willing to wait decades to see a return on their £400m. OFCOM will have to loosen the pricing screws on FTTH to see an adequate return on investment.

50% of the cost is being provided by the government and it is not limited to Rural areas. In a lot of rural areas the lines are overhead which makes it cheaper to install the fibre

NOTE: This is not money for BT.

Overhead fibre may be cheaper, depends on the cost of PIA2 and what premises you are trying to serve, i.e. rural areas are very much you need to visit to plan the most optimal routing.

£400m split 2 million ways is not a lot, add match funding, and still not a lot if ALL the studies on the cost of rural FTTH are correct. B4RN if I recall is at the low end of those at £800/premise passed but that is using lots of volunteer labour - the upside of volunteer labour is that it ensures high community engagement, but this also relies on ready access to fields to cross across rather than working alongside traffic on roads.