I've wondered about this a little, especially in the case of having a landlord or a maintenance company involved.

What you'd want is a kind of split, where the landlord or maintenance company takes something of the long-term risk, perhaps more directly with Openreach, leaving an individual owner or tenant to sit with a standard 12-18 month contract term with a standard ISP.

On a different front though... I suspect that the charge made for FTTPoD, to a single householder, is already set at a level that is a discount to what it actually costs to install the first subscriber in the area: BT will spend money to put in place a full splitter, full DP, full manifold, and over-specified ducting & BFT. But I suspect that the charge made for FTTPoD only manages to cover a portion of those parts.

If that's true, it makes it less likely to get much of a discount when combining the order.

Yes, the costs of FTTPoD only cover a proportion of the cost, i.e. BT is taking the gamble on further orders and the long term they will goto FTTP eventually, and I mean long term

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

and the long term they will goto FTTP eventually, and I mean long term

Agree fully.

We know the FTTC cabs have a 12-15 year payback, and I'd guess a 20 year lifespan.

I guess that the current product design for FTTPoD will continue until we have take-up akin to that we see today for FTTC - ie 15-20%. After that, it'd make sense to swap to strategic rollout in place of an ad-hoc one.

The interesting thing will be how fast or slow the market creates the takeup, and whether FTTdp gets to play an intermediary role.

its about bulk orders. The first installation is going to be a loss maker, its the same case with FTTC really, if BT enable a cabinet and only one guy orders it he is a loss maker. FTTP like FTTC is profitable eventually providing enough people in any given area order it. It may cost say 2k to activate the first customer but then if his neighbour orders it may cost £50 to activate the neighbour, bringing the average down to 1k each. Another 8 neighburs order and its down to £200 each.

Of course the chances of there been enough FTTP orders to get the numbers right is low for what I feel is 2 prime reasons excluding marketing, (a) FTTC rollout is occuring at the same time, FTTC is creating enough buzz and performance improvement for people to be mostly happy with it, and of course (b) the contract lengths plus cost. The question is how would FTTP playout if FTTC didnt exist as a product and FTTP was priced similiar or at least not much more than FTTC. I think it certianly would have decent takeup but BT have a higher outlay with FTTP so the risks are higher and of course they seem to have not nailed down rolling it out efficiently, reports of bodged schedules, install's been missed and so on. BT taking weeks/months to install FTTP for one properly whilst someone like verizon just pass every house and then install it in days when ordered. There seems something about BT's FTTP rollout which doesnt add up, either BT's network is in a really dire state making it diffilcult to get FTTP deployed or the procedure's are bad. The speed of the FTTC rollout seems out of character for BT as openreach are bad at almost everything else. Certianly I think one key mistake was trying to put FTTP in places like cornwall ahead of cities like leicester, leeds, manchester, birmingham etc.

Edited by Chrysalis (Sun 26-Jan-14 21:45:32)