FTTP rollout losing momentum?

Edited by deleted (Fri 31-Mar-23 12:02:30)

In reply to a post by jpm:

What's probably frustrating for the affected residents is the lack of transparency, the reasons *why* they may have been de-scoped

In reply to a post by dect:

In reply to a post by jpm:

What's probably frustrating for the affected residents is the lack of transparency, the reasons *why* they may have been de-scoped

It would be a fools game to explain to residents why they have be de-scoped as that would give them a bigger range of reasons to complain. Deploying full fibre infrastructure to an area is a decision for the company providing the infrastructure as they are the ones paying for it. If the residents want a say then there are other payment avenues for them to pursue.

VM Gig1 - AAISP L2TP

In reply to a post by Thaumaturge:

There seem to have been a number of posts recently about planned FTTP installations that have been cancelled for various reasons (or excuses). For example here, here, here, here, and here.

Is this just coincidence, or is the steam starting to go out of the great national FTTP effort? Maybe the general economic situation means that the take-up rate is lower than some providers had hoped for, and they are having to scale back their ambitions?

Edited by Pheasant (Sat 01-Apr-23 18:30:41)

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

The only metric I pay any attention to are the Openreach KPI figures published in the BT Group quarterly report - (1) because they are the largest of any network (2) their rollout is truly nationwide (3) the snapshots are regular and trending is fairly clear (4) they are the bar that others set themselves to (whether they admit it publicly or not)

The trouble with quoting isolated, anecdotal examples from the smaller AltNets, like Swish, is that they are relatively comparatively tiny compared to the overall Openreach FTTP rollout and secondly they only regional rather than national.

You'll get a very distorted and mixed view with the latter.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

The only metric I pay any attention to are the Openreach KPI figures published in the BT Group quarterly report - (1) because they are the largest of any network (2) their rollout is truly nationwide (3) the snapshots are regular and trending is fairly clear (4) they are the bar that others set themselves to (whether they admit it publicly or not)

The trouble with quoting isolated, anecdotal examples from the smaller AltNets, like Swish, is that they are relatively comparatively tiny compared to the overall Openreach FTTP rollout and secondly they only regional rather than national.

You'll get a very distorted and mixed view with the latter.

What He Said™.

If anything, the Openreach rollout is picking up speed. Anecdotes about individual properties don't make a case, nor do the troubles of tiny individual altnets.

However, you can be sure that more of these are going to be getting into trouble over the next few months, with the combination of high interest rates, over-optimistic business plans, squeezed household finances and general consumer disinterest.

They will have to cut retail prices to the bone to tempt sufficient numbers away from copper-based services. The majority don't care about speed - they just want it as cheap as possible.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

What He Said™.

If anything, the Openreach rollout is picking up speed. Anecdotes about individual properties don't make a case, nor do the troubles of tiny individual altnets.

However, you can be sure that more of these are going to be getting into trouble over the next few months, with the combination of high interest rates, over-optimistic business plans, squeezed household finances and general consumer disinterest.

They will have to cut retail prices to the bone to tempt sufficient numbers away from copper-based services. The majority don't care about speed - they just want it as cheap as possible.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Yep, a few people i have chatted too over the last few months are happy with what they have and see no reason to move to fibre, as you said Price is the thing and I am in that group.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

I moved from an Openreach service costing £38 a month for around 38 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload, to a cable service for £41 a month for 200 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload at the end of 2019. Thankfully I did, as the next 12 months working from home would have been extremely painful. Price isn't the only attribute.

In reply to a post by jpm:

Thirding or fourthing this. People are going to discover that their own personal belief that a gigabit service should be delivered for less than £40 and that installation should be free isn’t compatible with a company staying healthy after they’ve had to invest in building a physical network. Hyperoptic are installing a gigabit service at a family members house for £33/month and coming to do a pre-installation survey - they can afford those costs as they are a relatively large company with an installed customer base that is generating revenue and paid off the investment already, a network trying to get their first 1000 customers is going to burn cash doing the same.

In reply to a post by dect:

Could be we are just coming to the end of the financial year.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

How on earth were you only getting 2Mb/s upload?

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

How on earth were you only getting 2Mb/s upload?

In reply to a post by candlerb:

You don't remember the Openreach 40/2 FTTC product then.

Edited by jchamier (Sun 02-Apr-23 10:54:10)

In reply to a post by jchamier:

FWIW this was a service that had been in for ~5 years and was on the 80/20 Openreach product

In reply to a post by jchamier:

The final straw was a power cut for the area. Discussing on Thinkbroadband at the time the best suggestion was that "early on" users such as myself with modems/routers on 24x7 had managed to keep a lot of our original bandwidth, and "newer joiners" had grabbed what was available. The power cut caused all the modems to start from scratch, likely everyone now had their fair share of a pretty awful medium for predictability.

In reply to a post by FibreBubble:

I'll be more interested in the takeup. We know Openreach is building faster than anyone else but can they keep their takeup better than anyone else.

From my observations, BT and Sky are really gaining momentum on selling fibre. They are also selling a lot of sogea which has major operating, repair and labour savings on copper that can be diverted to fibre build.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

The message was mainly aimed at Zyborg47, but in your case it could have been dodgy cabling, or a dodgy line card in the cabinet. FWIW, I was getting 30-35 down and 4-5 up.

That sounds like something that came out of a cow's behind. (Phrased to avoid TBB expletive checker). These are all separate lines. Bandwidth isn't "shared" between them, and crosstalk isn't first-come-first-served: it affects both parties equally.

My best guess is that the lines had been slowly degrading, and the power outage had caused DLM to notice these bad lines and put a lower cap on them.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

You don't remember the Openreach 40/2 FTTC product then.

I moved house in 2015, and took my Plusnet service with me. Because the line was only capable of 35M, I ordered the "40M" service. However when it was activated, I found it was 40/2 rather than 40/10. That's because the 40/2 wholesale product from Openreach was a few pence per year cheaper than 40/10.

So for the next few years, I had to buy an 80/20 service in order to get a higher upload speed.

Then Openreach changed the pricing so that 40/10 was cheaper at wholesale than 40/2. At that point, the Plusnet 40M service went back to being 40/10.

Aside: for quite a while, Aquiss were selling 40/2 on FTTP. They said it was one of their most popular offerings (something like 35% of FTTP customers took this), even though it was only £1 or £2 less than 40/10. They only stopped selling it because Openreach withdrew the 40/2 FTTP product.

In reply to a post by FibreBubble:

I'll be more interested in the takeup. We know Openreach is building faster than anyone else but can they keep their takeup better than anyone else.

From my observations, BT and Sky are really gaining momentum on selling fibre. They are also selling a lot of sogea which has major operating, repair and labour savings on copper that can be diverted to fibre build.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

How on earth were you only getting 2Mb/s upload?

You don't remember the Openreach 40/2 FTTC product then.

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

My prediction is that basically all altnets (apart from some of the bigger ones like cityfibre and hyperoptic potenitally) fail this year and most of the builds get cancelled at some point.

Higher interest rates mean massively higher costs for these builds as it takes a while. At close to 0% central bank rates it was cheap to throw all this money in. Now they're not, the costs of financing the install will have went up enormously.

Secondly, and probably most importantly, takeup has been absolutely atrocious. GNetwork has covered nearly 500k properties but only has 10k customers from their figures from end of 2021.

It's clear most of these altnets have no idea how to attract customers to their service. Cityfibre and hyperoptic got this right - cityfibre can get customers from big brand name ISPs and customers probably don't even know they are using cityfibre. Hyperoptic also worked with loads of apartment buildings and often had it so you could enable it the day you moved in, whereas other providers took weeks.

Best case is they start being bought up by someone like cityfibre to expand their offering (I think this is more likely). Worst case is they get totally shut down - I can see this happening with some of the smaller ones though.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Never heard of 40/2m, as far as I know Plusnet offered two when I Joined, one up to around 40 and one up to 80. and what ever the uploads were for them.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

To the consumer, they sold (and still sell) a single "40M" service - or "36M" these days.

But Openreach sell (and still sell) both a 40/2 and 40/10 wholesale FTTC service. There were times when Plusnet would buy the 40/2 one, and other times when they would buy 40/10.

You "never heard" that this was happening, and they didn't shout it from the rooftops, but it certainly did.

As for FTTP take-up: your anecdotes about what you see in your surrounding streets don't mean much. The aggregate quarterly stats from BT show strong take-up from their customers.

Admittedly some proportion of that is forced, either because it's FTTP in areas with terrible copper connectivity, or it's in areas with copper stop-sell, but right now those are still in the minority.

Some of it will be due to sweeteners from the ISPs to the customers, since the ISPs have offers from Openreach that require them to meet FTTP take-up targets. For example, I notice from another thread that Plusnet are offering you FTTP at a lower price than FTTC. Now is a very good time to take it.

Take-up amongst the smaller altnets is likely lower, but they are very secretive about those numbers because they show how poorly their investments are performing and how exposed they are financially.

In reply to a post by blfamily:

I see CF have updated their info and BT are no longer a partner.... Thank god Zen is and I am looking forward to that.

In reply to a post by drefsab:

Just to add my 2 cents... I just had an email from openreach saying they are no longer planning full fibre to my house. They had only emailed me less than a month ago to say they had planned it.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I live in an area where people are slightly better off than other parts, so if they are not bothering here, then the poorer parts will struggle.

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

That's a big assumption and the complete opposite of my experience.

In my experience broadband take up is and has always been higher in lower income areas compared to higher income areas.
The same applies to taking higher/Ultrafast tiers. Take up is higher in lower income areas vs higher income areas.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

I guess it's like 20 years ago, when you'd be discussing which houses were the ones to get satellite dishes first. FTTP is somewhat less visible though.