Fibre companies---no real choice?

Most people talk about BT monopoly when discussing fibre broadband, but what are your thoughts about when things are the other way around? My rural home area has recently been told that fibre broadband is on its way.....but not via OpenReach. I have looked at the private company's proposed plans and it seems that fibre broadband will be made available if enough people want it.

Now...I'm thinking that there are several issues to this. First of all, if I switch to fibre, there will only be one company involved; in other words, I will have no choice of supplier. If anything goes wrong, I can't do anything about it....unlike when on ADSL, you can change companies if you're really having problems.
Secondly, the cost. The company is charging a fair bit more per month than my current ISP and phone-line combined, so immediately I face a price-hike if I switch. Similarly, with such a monopoly, I would have to suck the prices if they decided to increase them.

Thirdly...I presently run on ADSL, a rural 4Mb/sec, but it is actually quite good and my ISP is one of the few decent ones; been with them six years and have no wish to move.

Thing is, if this private company installs fibre here, then the chances of OpenReach fibre ever serving the same villages is probably zero, I imagine. Which means I have to either remain on DSL or abandon my ISP.

This household isn't into watching films, gaming or the other stuff that requires ultra-fast speeds, so is it really worth the bother and extra expense....and being stuck with one supplier?

You don't say where you are located or who the FTTP supplier might be.

Very likely at the moment you have a telephone line maintained by BT Openreach. That is one supplier who you can not make direct contact with. You have to buy a service via an ISP such as Plusnet, Zen etc, who then have to ask BT Openreach to fix any problem with the inevitable communication difficulties.

If you move to a non BT FTTP supplier then you do have a choice as you can always return to a BT based service. In the case of Gigaclear you may also be able to buy the service via a 3rd party if you really want.

Whether you think an FTTP service which will be faster and probably more reliable is worth what will possibly be an additional cost is up to you. I have had a Gigaclear service for the past 3 years and it has been fine unlike my phone line which often had problems.

In reply to a post by jollyjackdaw:

I will have no choice of supplier. If anything goes wrong, I can't do anything about it....unlike when on ADSL, you can change companies if you're really having problems.
Secondly, the cost.

You will always have the choice of moving back to a xDSL based service.

In reply to a post by jollyjackdaw:

The company is charging a fair bit more per month than my current ISP and phone-line combined,

How much is the company charging for their lowest speed tier, say around 30 Mbps? Can't imagine the company would charge huge amounts for such speeds knowing full well they wouldn't survive. Who is the company?

In reply to a post by jollyjackdaw:

Thing is, if this private company installs fibre here, then the chances of OpenReach fibre ever serving the same villages is probably zero, I imagine. Which means I have to either remain on DSL or abandon my ISP.

Not necessarily. Openreach FTTC/FTTP services cover many areas which are already served by other FTTP/cable operators such as Hyperoptic, Virgin Media etc. What does this say about your area? If it says something like "exploring solutions" then it means BT/OR haven't completely given up on your area wrt bringing FTTC/FTTP.

Many people would love to be in your shoes - even if it means getting a non-Openreach based FTTP service (potentially).

Edited by deleted (Mon 04-Jun-18 11:19:30)

Sorry to have not returned to this thread in the past day or so...I didn't get all the notifications of replies in my mailbox.
I'm in North Somerset. I am not well acquainted with the new fibre systems, hence my questions. I have managed to find out that the company installing the fibre is Gigaclear. The company that is offering the monthly rates is one called TruSpeed based somewhere near Bath. The standard connection offered is £47.50 per month. I've no idea whether they're the same or separate companies.
At present my ISP is £20 per month for ADSL, my monthly phone line rentail is---can't recall offhand, about £17 monthly (Post Office). So that's £10 a month less overall. Us old codgers tend to be a bit more penny-pinching.
As for swapping back and forth if things go wrong, well it's just a nuisance and I could really do without that sort of hassle.
On the whole, I think I'm going to pass it by. Maybe let others take it up and see how well it goes for them, in the locality.

The OpenReach site says "exploring solutions", that's as far as it goes.
The fibre network is via Gigaclear, but the connection packages are via a company called Truespeed, that I've never heard of, in Bath. There are only three connection packages offered; home, business and another one more expensive again; they dont seem to be an ISP for anything to do with ADSL, only fibre. So there's no "lowest speed tier" that I can see.
The home package is £47.50 a month, which is more than I pay at present for adsl and phone; as I said to the other respondent here, I tend to be cautious about increasing my outgoings when on a fixed income....I don't jump in with both feet, no matter how good the offer may look.

Thanks, its a lot clearer now.

TBH I'm surprised TrueSpeed don't offer anything lower than 200 Mbps for home/residential users as 200 Meg will be way overkill for many people. I've noticed Gigaclear's packages start at 50 Mbps but that's priced at £41 pm so not signficantly cheaper than TrueSpeed's 200 Mbps service at £47 pm.

Though I'm not sure if you can migrate direct to Gigaclear after you've completed your min term with TrueSpeed. Probably worth giving Gigaclear a call to get clarification.
edit: seems TrueSpeed have nothing to do with Gigaclear

Its still possible Openreach may bring FTTC/FTTP to your area but unless someone has a crystal bowl no-one can say for certain what their plans are for your area at this stage.

Edited by deleted (Tue 05-Jun-18 15:35:55)

Different companies.

Complain to OFCOM - tell them that when other companies lay fibre they should be treated similarly to BT Openreach. That they should make access available to any ISP, that they should have a "Chinese wall" between them and their ISP/sales side.

https://www.gigaclear.com/retailserviceproviders/

Gigaclear seems to have a number of partners.

But none of the majors and I wonder why..

In reply to a post by MHC:

Complain to OFCOM - tell them that when other companies lay fibre they should be treated similarly to BT Openreach. That they should make access available to any ISP, that they should have a "Chinese wall" between them and their ISP/sales side.

What about Virgin?

Their choice, so Ofcom as well as forcing fibre operators to wholesale would also have to force retailers to consume the services.

Are you sure it is their choice? You may well find that it is not.

That looks like Truespeed and nothing to do with Gigaclear. The cheapest Gigaclear product is £41.30 pm which is cheaper than Truespeed but not as fast. The biggest problems the likes of Gigaclear and Truespeed have is attracting enough customers to make a project financially viable. You may get nagged to join! At a separate location, I pay Vodafone just over £20 pm for an FTTC service and line rental.

Complaints have been raised before and BT and others are never given access to be ISPs on the Virgin network? OFCOM appear not to want to force it.

Well several well known providers have chosen to not use the Openreach FTTP service to date.

A lot hinges on the size of the market versus the cost of joining a different service and the confusion that can arise in marketing

Not to mention the cost of training support and provisioning staff to handle a product which is only available to a tiny fraction of the customer base.

I think that�s a bit of a cop out to be honest.

If staff training cost is such an issue, and so very few can use this product, then just train a couple of staff - simple.

Why limit what you can offer your customers ?

I doubt there�s much training required either. Zen are a smallish provider, but they seem to cope OK.

Just employ staff from Spain everything is perfect with broadband there apparently

ISPs work on wafer-thin margins. Do they want to increase their potential customer footprint by 2%, but add a bunch of complexity into systems and provisioning? I'm just saying I can understand why many would choose not to, especially those that focus on the budget end of the market.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

I think that�s a bit of a cop out to be honest.

If staff training cost is such an issue, and so very few can use this product, then just train a couple of staff - simple.

Why limit what you can offer your customers ?

I doubt there�s much training required either. Zen are a smallish provider, but they seem to cope OK.

I don't think its just additional staff training, its also the cost of changing their ordering systems. Obviously some ISPs don't feel the extra investment is worth it.

Btw Zen have informed me that they will be selling the new Openreach 0.5 and 1 Gbps FTTP services, though they haven't given a timescale.

And yet visits to Openreach fibre only estates hears constant questions about the ability to order service from TalkTalk and Sky ...

I think the picture is becoming clearer now. So Truespeed is just a company looking for fibre customers; just like any other ISP. Their advertising leaflet seems written in such a way as to suggest that the connections to the Gigaclear network have to be through them.
As said earlier, I think I'll leave it all alone for now. But thank you all for the information and links elsewhere; I've made a note of those for future reference.

should it not be part of ofcoms remit to ensure that isps offer all services to customers ie via fttc or fttp depending on how BT/OR or others have delivered it

In which case at what point would a regulator castigate a regional provider for not selling for example G.fast when in their main market area there is no g.fast available.

Forcing all providers to sell or services is a recipe for lots of complication and higher costs to the consumer and is likely to result in a cutting back of full fibre roll-outs and investment by Liberty Global

In countries with higher full fibre coverage this has been achieved with the reverse i.e. no wholesale requirements at all, even on the dominant provider in some cases for at least a few years.

No, Truespeed install their own fibre network in much the same way as Gigaclear. Their cheapest product is faster that Gigacler's cheapest product, but also more expensive which discourages customers such as yourself. Gigaclear would provide a 50Mbps service for £41.30

In reply to a post by threelegs:

should it not be part of ofcoms remit to ensure that isps offer all services to customers ie via fttc or fttp depending on how BT/OR or others have delivered it

That's just wouldn't work. Some smaller exchanges (some large exchanges too) have a very small FTTP footprint. There may only be a dozen properties with access to FTTP, but 10,000+ with access to FTTC. That means FTTC is economical but FTTP may not be.

Your suggestion would force every ISP who rely on their own GEA links/backhaul to purchase a 1 Gigabit GEA Cablelink at every single exchange with any FTTP presence. That's £521 exc VAT (That has recently dropped from £2000 exc VAT)

Until there's a much larger FTTP footprint across the UK then a number of the larger ISP's who use their own backhaul won't be selling it.
The likes of Zen are happy to use BTWholesale backhaul so it's easier for them to sell the product.

For the likes of Talktalk and Sky they would be selling a product that's only economically viable on a very small number of exchanges.

Edited by j0hn83 (Thu 07-Jun-18 18:43:55)

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

In reply to a post by threelegs:

should it not be part of ofcoms remit to ensure that isps offer all services to customers ie via fttc or fttp depending on how BT/OR or others have delivered it

That's just wouldn't work. Some smaller exchanges (some large exchanges too) have a very small FTTP footprint. There may only be a dozen properties with access to FTTP, but 10,000+ with access to FTTC. That means FTTC is economical but FTTP may not be.

Your suggestion would force every ISP who rely on their own GEA links/backhaul to purchase a 1 Gigabit GEA Cablelink at every single exchange with any FTTP presence. That's £521 exc VAT (That has recently dropped from £2000 exc VAT)

Until there's a much larger FTTP footprint across the UK then a number of the larger ISP's who use their own backhaul won't be selling it.
The likes of Zen are happy to use BTWholesale backhaul so it's easier for them to sell the product.

For the likes of Talktalk and Sky they would be selling a product that's only economically viable on a very small number of exchanges.

forgive my ignorance but what difference is there between data from or to an exchange being fed to fttc or fttp surely they can both share a fibre link to a larger exchange

It is my understanding that FTTP connections need a separate GEA cablelink from the FTTC cabinets.

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

It is my understanding that FTTP connections need a separate GEA cablelink from the FTTC cabinets.

GEA Cablelinks connect to an L2Switch which aggregate both FTTC cabinet back haul and FTTP GPON.

In a given handover exchange there will typically be 2-3 of these, with a connection to each required to cover the whole served estate, else you would end up to the subset covered by the switch you do connect to.

G.Fast will be aggregated on newer, faster L2Switches, with new adds of FTTC and FTTP services added there instead. There is a 10Gb Cablelink requirement for this however, 1Gb is not permissible for obvious reasons.

In essence, a GEA Cablelink carries all three of these GEA types, there's no difference in handover; by design. (Also FVA, Multicast).You definitely don't need a separate cable for each type.

In some less common cases there will be a dedicated L2S for FTTP, but this isn't a rule, just a case of timing and dimensioning, so in that case yes you effectively do need a cable just for that.

So would an ISP who sells FTTC and already has a GEA cablelink and does their own backhaul need ANY additional equipment in an exchange for FTTP?

With the current pricing and increasing traffic I don't see why anyone would buy a 1 Gigabit GEA cablelink.
10 Gigabit GEA cablelinks have come down so considerably in cost on the past 12 months that they make much more financial sense.

There was a time when the FTTP services were delivered over their own dedicated cable link, don't recall the date of the change that allowed mixing but was in the last year or so

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

So would an ISP who sells FTTC and already has a GEA cablelink and does their own backhaul need ANY additional equipment in an exchange for FTTP?

With the current pricing and increasing traffic I don't see why anyone would buy a 1 Gigabit GEA cablelink.
10 Gigabit GEA cablelinks have come down so considerably in cost on the past 12 months that they make much more financial sense.

Nope, it's just single or double stacked VLANs.
Most ISPs feed that to a PTA PPPoE concentrator.
Others terminate it as native Ethernet with the highest care levels and you have EoFTTX, closest thing to EFM/SDSL replacement today.

The "mainstream" competition just don't want to train their staff & change their ordering processes, plus deal with the inevitable "why cant I have 330Mb" questions when they only have 1Gb backhaul in some cases.

Wasn't that long ago that the 10G CL cost £10k.
Plus you can only get 1G cablelinks on ECI L2S's, so there's still a few of them.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

There was a time when the FTTP services were delivered over their own dedicated cable link, don't recall the date of the change that allowed mixing but was in the last year or so

This will be an artefact of building over time.

In the early FTTP roll-outs they had their own L2S, but OR have added a lot of the new FTTC cabinets into the free slots of these previously FTTP only L2S's now, so most CPs consuming FTTC will have a connection to these.

Few exceptions of course, in areas where FTTC roll-out is suspended/saturated.
There's still restriction to pair them to respective Huawei/ECI estates.

They don't re-arrange which L2S cabinets or FTTP PONs are homed on, as there is no obligation on a CPs to take a CL for every L2S in an OHP, so re-arranging would be unfair for those selectively connecting to L2S's on demand, as some of us smaller players tend to!