Virtual Tour of FTTP Broadband with BT and Openreach

If you're interested in the technical side of FTTP and want to know more take a look at this ISPReview article that contains a video thats really worth watching.

VIDEO – Virtual Tour of FTTP Broadband with BT and Openreach

Thanks that was interesting.

One of the punters in the comments from the ISPreview article, saved and then re-posted the equivalent YT "training" videos for Virgin Media/Liberty Global network, before they were taken down (after their corporate HQ got wind they were on open YT and panicked). Worth a look too...

Liberty Global HFC Tour v1.1/url]

Liberty Global FTTP Overview v1.1

Liberty Global Headend Tour v1.1

If we had some from CityFibre that would round out the trio of the BIG 3 😂 (Mind you CF would be somewhat similar to OR, so maybe a P2P network....)

What's the story with those trays labelled "XGPON [FUTURE]"? Is BT/Openreach preparing for multi-gigabit and/or 10Gb/s?

Jump to to 49:16 in the video for their "answer"

The impression that you get is that Openreach are installing a lot of excess fibre capacity, for example with 432 core ‘ribbon’ cable, certainly way more than is needed to deliver standard FTTP over GPON with 32 way splits.

They’ve hinted in the video that the fibre from the headend exchange to the ag node is multi service - that is it’s carrying FTTP but presumably also stuff like EAD. At the ag node FTTP carries on along the spine to the various splitter nodes.

If however Openreach over-provision the fibre running from the ag node to the FTTP splitter node that leaves them capacity (and options) to provide perhaps individual (say small business subs) the capability to have access to their “own” dedicated PON. It’s still stock GPON but rather than having up to 32 connections sharing - there is only one or perhaps two subs on the PON. Voila with QoS in place they could then offer up a ‘uncontended’ and potentially symmetric Ethernet service. Let’s call it Wholesale Ethernet FTTP 😉

I was a little confused at that point in the video as I always thought EAD had its own infrastructure and didn't come via an aggregation node that also served FTTP. Has my understand been wrong all along or are things changing.

Edited by deleted (Tue 08-Jun-21 21:49:12)

EAD does have its own infrastructure, but I'd be amazed if Openreach weren't planning on having the EAD-LA product use the fibre they're building out that already goes back to an exchange.

In reply to a post by jpm:

EAD does have its own infrastructure, but I'd be amazed if Openreach weren't planning on having the EAD-LA product use the fibre they're building out that already goes back to an exchange.

Thanks for clarifying

One thing I've just remembered is that RO2 exists, where fibres go to totally different exchanges over diverse routes, so the fact that EAD has a separate network is a valuable feature in a lot of instances.

To be fair that’s a high end enterprise product, I’d fully expect that to always have dedicated tails.

The Ethernet FTTP product definitely wouldn’t have the resilience of secure or secure plus, but pitched to small / medium business that doesn’t need (or afford) the bells and whistles of the “full” EAD product suite.

Price wise should sit between the top tiers of FTTP and EAD. If the customer had FTTP passing there should be no ECCs and they’ve already said they could deploy in 5 days if there is an existing ONT.

Strategically this gives them the capability to offer a symmetric, uncontended gigabit class service without moving to XGS-PON (which they appear to have kicked into the long grass for now anyway…). So if there is an decent supply of unused regular GPON ports at the OLT, add in a dedicated Cablelink, and plenty of fibre in the field, they can achieve the same net result, (actually better) for the relatively small number of customer that want a high bandwidth (Ethernet) service.

Edited by Pheasant (Wed 09-Jun-21 06:58:36)