I think a lot is nervousness on the Council behalf as they are scared that if they give out information it will raise expectations and then people will complain when things don't happen - ie exactly what started this thread.

So, Council's just do not want to be caught in the same situation as Openreach especially as they are in the hands of BT in actually delivering this stuff.

I'm not saying they are in the wrong, But I do feel that all the money that government has given to Openreach to rollout superfast fibre has been wasted on trying to improve an old infrastructure that will keep costing them even more after they are finished...

FTTP is the way forward, I also think that a Radio system would be better... with obviously some improvements like better latency and more solid connections.

But I know there's a lot of holes that can be poked into that, and that you all will.

But surely you can't blame me for thinking the way I am.

And I was just about to start poking holes...

Here goes anyway.

FTTP - yes that would be great, but nowhere near enough funding to get the coverage so either more people would have gone without or more funds would have had to be found.

Radio - I wonder if the latency is partly because you are running at the speed of sound rather than the speed of light and therefore it will have higher latency unless you have a very tightly packed array of transmitters/receivers (which would then be very expensive).

I may be completely wrong and there may be other factors that could be positively influenced but would likely require expensive R&D and lots of time to get it past regulations to make it happen.

Exactly....

But you understand where I'm coming from right? (Upgrading an old infrastructure)

Yes, but understand the reality of maximising existing infrastructure and not over extending finance for something that has a very long payback period.

I know.... I'm just living in a bit of a dream world thinking that the job would have been done right the first time round.

Also wouldn't extending and upgrading the HFC (Virgin Cable) network in most areas of been better with upgrading to docsis 3.1 in future...

Or would I be correct in saying it was the highest bidders that got the contracts for areas and Virgin was not one of them.

I am not sure if Virgin ever were in the bid process or if they dropped out at some point. It was an "open" tender so Virgin had the option - given EU procurement they couldn't force someone into the process.

I am pretty sure that with BT Group there will be those keen to put full fibre infrastructure in place, the interesting point is that if you look beyond the rhetoric, the way the aggregation nodes are done to feed each fibre cabinet these AG nodes can be extended to provide GPON at a later date. Of course then the argument is over whether GPON is a dead end and full Point to Point fibre should be deployed, and the moans about the fact that GPON products are usually not symmetrical in terms of bandwidth.

Given the deadlines and money allocated and scale of intervention a FTTP heavy roll-out was never likely, though some areas are going to get FTTP from the BDUK project in their area.

... all the money that government has given to Openreach to rollout superfast fibre ...

That is only infill. The major part of the rollout is financed entirely by BT Group. They have to find the money themselves

Virgin Media would have had to open up to a wholesale access model, and while the downloads on their network are high extending to areas with no cabinets would probably have been even most costly that FTTC, since they would have to run fibre to the new cabinets, and the coax to every home that wanted it. Range of cable cabinets is actually less than the range of VDSL2 too, so more cabinets for the more densely packed areas