95% of UK to get Ultra fast Broadband by 2020

Not sure I believe this. My understanding is the OFCOM definition of Ultrafast is 300Mbs

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38062730

'BT boss: We will invest in remote locations'

That's nice, what about urban areas of Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester etc?

Post deleted by WelshWArrior

My feeling is someone has said wrong thing, or quoted wrong figures.

95% ultrafast for 2020 would be a BIG job, adding G.fast to every VDSL2 cabinet currently live would not achieve this figure, and roll-out to 2020 was previously only raised as 12 million premises. UK has around 29 million.

They will probably be left behind, if we analyse BT's FTTC rollout, urban areas were in the latter part of the rollout, I think political intervention always means now that rural is priority. BT have also realised its more profitable to wait for subsidies to arrive.

Politically since most urban areas have or will have VM available, then they dont care about BT rolling out in those areas.

With that said tho BT can achieve this with g.fast so it probably wont be FTTP anyway.

remember to include VM

Only if the Openreach 12 million does not overlap Virgin Media will 95% be possible and chances of that happening seem low and would have signalled by people like Clive Selley when doing the presentations before.

I've no idea how he thinks that's going to be achieved in four years. VM could no doubt manage to do their 60% of the country once project Lightning is complete and they've upgraded parts of their network. Possible OR's existing cabinet-based g.fast will also get to about 60%, and can be done in the timescale. There's a lot of overlap between the two, and I can't imagine that the total would be more than about 70%.

So that would need 25% needing either FTTP or some form of hybrid FTTrN. In either case, that 25% represents around 7m properties, which is a hell of a roll-out rate not to mention a goodly amount of capex. Certainly way over £10bn of capex given these will be mostly in the upper quartile of cost.

Ofcom could help a lot if the regulatory regime was changed for these areas and they didn't insist on national pricing and allowed a forced retirement of copper where it makes sense.

Alternatively the chairman of BT has got his "super" and "ultra" fast labels mixed up (or it's misreported, not having heard the exchange).

if they removed the national pricing then costs in rural areas would rise, that national pricing actually subsidises those areas.

So you saying the combined coverage of VM and FTTC right now is below 95%?

To enable cabinet based g.fast is a doddle compared to what they had to do for FTTC, its just adding a new cabinet and some g.fast equipment inside it.

For a cabinet to do ultrafast via g.fast you are limiting the range, so the gap between cabinet with pod and actual ultrafast speeds will be greater than the gap you have superfast. That could be filled with FTTP of course, but announced plans only talk of 40,000 to 50,000 G.fast pods, not the ~80,000 or more needed to do a 1:1 for all VDSL2 cabinets live now, let alone in another year.