Virgin understand the need to expand their coverage, They are fast reaching saturation point with their existing network and cannot get much more revenue growth from it.

By setting up a consortium they get ecoomies of scale together with a big existing customer base that they could migrate as well as opportunities to upsell

The negatives being the costs and of spliting the margin between Virgin & the ISP's and the potential for preditory behaviour from BT.

what really killing 3rd parties roilling out is BT's behaviour as well.

When someone starts a project in an area with no BT FTTC, BT suddenly find the area viable and then this puts of those companies.

In reply to a post by GMAN98:

Who's talking about 3?

1 could do 40 down 10 up from the start?

what on a 4.5mbit upstream channel? hardly. even on qam16 the upstream channel is still only 9mbit.

In reply to a post by GMAN98:

I bet Virgin would tho?

I see this as Virgin trying to get others on board in making a fuss so they are not the sole voice.

I see Virgin rolling out quite a bit, Sky doing some, TalkTalk doing very little if any

sky is the only one with the financial capability out of the 3. But there is not enough for them to gain from it as they use broadband to stop TV churn.

Any such deal I expect would be VM donating existing network with sky stumping up cash for work.

Edited by Chrysalis (Mon 11-Apr-11 10:57:18)

Which is why I would suggest that if the consortium roll out to an area BT shows no interest in they should get a period of excusivity to prevent just such BT action. To cable an are needs a great deal of capital investment. If BT as the incumbent UK operate then decide to move in as soon as they face competition with they existing customer base it tends to kill the business case.

If the consortium could have a period of exclusivity of two to three years to cover the investment cost then it becomes viable. Clearly there would need to be some regulation of pricing etc. All to often with community based Broadband BT move in which tend to kill off any chance of success

Personally I dont favour these small Broadband setups they are nver going to be really viable being to small and local to have ecomoies of scale and marketing of them tends to be poor and pricing high.

funny that BT may claim an area has low takeup etc. yet they do have enough customers to protect when the competition move in

Bob,

These areas of no interest. do we know that these areas are actually viable in terms of ROI? What I'm saying is, is it really ducting that is holding up rolling out into these areas or is it just the fact that there is a small wide spread user base which is why no-one has gone their before?

In these no-go areas is there an LLU presence?

What concerns me, and a growing number of others, is that we will still be having the same discussions in another few years.

In reply to a post by GMAN98:

Yep.... such is this cut throat industry.

BT have rightly or wrongly already priced FTTC very very low to compete with existing Virgin and LLU products.

Whether other ISP's rebrand BT's FTTC or put in their own cabling/kit they will struggle to compete in terms of pricing, not because of some elevated duct sharing pricing because of the low prices being charged to the customer by all ISP's

Why have BT priced it so low? Because the rest of the market does and they want to get people on their new product. Its a vicious circle really

Have BT decided to roll out FTTC because they're a modern telecommunications company embarrassed by their obsolete telephone network?

Well, no. That's not how BT works, is it. Sounds like a criticism of BT. But if you were them, you'd do the same.

Imagine: you want some market share back from VM customers who deserted years ago. So for that reason, and the economic viability reasons, you're going to go after VM cabled areas. Not exclusively, it has to be said.

But what you're asking is for someone to ditch VM telephone and broadband, but keep the TV service and pay more for it since you no longer have a bundle.

Then you want the customer to pay anything up to £150 for someone to spend perhaps three minutes in the exchange reactivating the knackered old phone line.

On top of that you then want to charge ever increasing amounts for the rental of that line, with call charges so high you might as well use a mobile.

Then, the customer can have the Infinity service installed (or other supplier) for some more money with no speed promises whatsoever, but which will definitely not compete with VM's 50meg or 100meg product. It will probably compete with the 20meg product for most people.

So to get the customer to do all of that there has to be an incentive, and it's price. That's all that's left to play on.

BT needs money to roll this out. But here's where the past catches up with them, since they're, what, 15 years behind Virgin Media, having milked the old phone network as a cash cow for years. Again not a direct criticism of BT. That's what a monopoly does. We (or rather the Government of the day) set up a structure which actively stifles innovation.

And so here we are now.

Infinity strikes me as a strike at LLU, which overnight is basically obsolete except for a few handfuls of people with short good quality lines where LLU can compete for downstream speeds. Of course BT's FTTC is Wholesale only at the moment. It would be, wouldn't it.

Gets the line rental back with BT too. The ads are hilarious - believe the most recent one is:

Infinity
Super-fast fibre optic broadband
Only from BT

It's true if that's one sentence. Playing the regulator again I see.

It is not necessarily super-fast, and super-fast fibre optic broadband is pretty old hat to cable customers.

BT is doing what BT does. "We" created this structure, not BT.

So, how else then, apart from taking OR away from BT or building the whole lot over again, do we progress?

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

The cable network was built for TV services, something which BT's network couldn't offer and thanks to the lack of investment over the years, cannot compete with

And VM can't compete with Sky when it comes to TV. If TV is the problem then Sky is the big killer. It's only VoD that causes Sky problems. As it turns out not that many people seem to want VoD anyway (unless you count things like iPlayer). But proper VoD would in any case make VM's network creak due to the shared cable.

The problem really...is that no-one needs what is being talked about and for sure damn few want to pay for it. There are a lot of people on sub 5Mb/s ADSL connections but really only those on less than 2MB/s have real problems. Until/unless there's real world demand (ie;not just content stealing fretard geeks in bedrooms) the situation will continue as it is doing.