I'm not saying anything should be banned.
I know what your saying, it's just frustrating when there is no real competition in this area of nationwide roll out,I think it was a bad move allowing the situation of one sole company to be bidding in the bduk project never mind still continuing on that basis.
I know the limitations of the technology and the financial hurdles that must be involved.
Just having a go at the fact that fttc can be considered by some people as "good enough".
In 7-10 years time we'll be sitting on fttc going, for goodness sake, is this still all I can get?

I know what your saying, it's just frustrating when there is no real competition in this area of nationwide roll out,I think it was a bad move allowing the situation of one sole company to be bidding in the bduk project never mind still continuing on that basis.

There were 2 companies selected. And it was realtively recently that Fujutisu announced they would stop bidding. Some contracts had already been let when they made the announcement. At that point BDUK could have pulled the tender and retendered. To be able to retender for a new framework would have taken probably 12-24 months. And only after that would local authorities be able to use the framework.

So, the choice was :
1) carry on and use BT
2) restart the tender process and delay the rollout by probably 24 months
3) not use the central framework and make EVERY local authority run their own EU procurement (at significant expense)

2 would have resulted in even more complaints about UK lagging behind the rest of europe/world.

3 would have cost many millions and would probably have still ended up with BT winning most of the bids as they are one of a very few companies able to provide any risk mitigation for the government contracts (and they have existing networks in place that reduce the investment needed).

So, we ended up with the first option. The rules that are forced via the EU for procurement and state aid meant that it was pretty much inevitable from the start.

And any suggestions we are lagging behind the rest of europe or the world are wrong. We don't have the FTTP coverage that some other countries do. We don't have the lowest cost. However, we do have very high coverage of usable and adequate services and with the build of the network there is potential for incremental change as and when the business case stacks up.

The fact that FFTPoD can exist as a service means that it is an option for moving to an FTTP service where the infrastructure itself is already in place.

If you dig deeper it becomes interesting, i.e. outside the big cities the situation is often worse than the UK rural areas, but the low cost of FTTB i.e. running copper Ethernet around apartment blocks that many many more people live in produces high FTTP coverage figures.

Lots of Europe has lots more true FTTH/P but lots does not. So in terms of average speeds that people actually buy we do not fare so badly.

Invariably where things are working well, people are just getting on and doing it rather than trying to fight the system, be they competitors to an incumbent or municipal roll-outs.

FTTH is the gold standard, but given the level of moans about street works in the UK, I can see a widespread FTTH roll-out having all sorts of delays and people refusing to allow their home to be connected.

http://www.coolwebhome.co.uk/estimate/ lets you play with some different scenarios across the UK. Base line figures represent roughly currently state of play.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

http://www.coolwebhome.co.uk/estimate/ lets you play with some different scenarios across the UK. Base line figures represent roughly currently state of play.

I have had a play and got the UK average speed up to 85Mb/s!

Does this win a prize?

Results
The number of fixed line broadband customers is: 27200000
The average speed for cable customers is: 94 Mbps
The average speed for FTTC customers is: 51 Mbps
The average speed for cable customers is: 370 Mbps
The average speed for ADSL/ADSL2+ customers is: 9 Mbps
Based on the figures you have entered the average speed is 27.2 Mbps

Gigabit internet and can't afford faster disks? #firstworldproblem

In reply to a post by simon194:

Maybe in Europe but there are quite a few countries outside Europe which are way ahead in both FTTC and FTTP coverage. Latvia and Lithuania both have more than 80% FTTP coverage.

(Note: Lithuania and Latvia are both in Europe, as well as Estonia. The baltics are no further over than Finland)

FTTP and FTTB (at high speeds) tends to be prevalent in countries where flats make up the majority of the housing stock of the country. Simply because it is easy to connect these, with considerably more bang per buck.

According to these statistics on housing in Europe, the average across the EU is that 46% of residential properties are flats.

Latvia has the highest percentage, at 72%, while Lithuania is 5th highest at 59%.

Meanwhile, the UK is third lowest in that table at 18% (with only Ireland and Norway lower).

It probably helps that Latvia and Lithuania have a combined population that is still less than 10% of the UK; they match Manchester plus Birmingham, or half of London.

These are significant factors in both the cost of an FTTP/FTTB rollout as well as the duration.

Property outside Europe is a similar story. South Korea, for example, has 60% of the population living in apartments, from a figure of 1% 40 years ago.

So the answer then is to get all of us brits to leave in high rise apartment buildings rather than in our semis and detached houses. I have a feeling that most brits would rather not turn the landscape into blocks of flats/apartments.

Absolutely not.

But so many people point at other places, and ask why we can't have X when (relatively poorer) country Y can manage it. How come *they* make "smarter" decisions than us?

It turns out that the answer is never so simple.

My post was to point out how unlikely it would be for Brits to want to live in apartments just to get fibre. It is a pointless comparison and in the end there are positives and negatives to choices around town planning. We are not going to radically change this just to raise population density to make comms infrastructure cheaper