I think the tendering process showed that only BT could provide a wholesale network at a competitive rate. Most companies would have to start from scratch which would have been cost prohibitive. Virgin would essentially be starting from scratch where they didn't already have presence.

And none of the AltNets that I know of are wholesaling their products. For ISPs to take up a wholesale option there have to be enough users supported to make it worth their while. Had a second company got 30% of the intervention area it would have been too small a customer base for other ISPs to take up the wholesale option - ie the area is generally the 66% to 90% - so 14% of the country. If a company got a 3rd of that then they would only be wholesaling a customer base of around 5% of the country - not likely to be taken up given the burdens of dealing with a second wholesale provider.

If it hadn't been for EU procurement laws the likelihood is that BT would have been given the contract from the start and we would not have spent who knows how many millions doing EU procurements followed by local authorities then having to do their own procurements that could only select either BT or nothing.

I am kind of ignoring Fujitsu here as they never really had a serious impact on any of the procurements and dropped out before a number of the procurements happened.

Edited by ian72 (Thu 19-Feb-15 09:53:36)

To be honest even if you ignore that it was BT and you had another firm that had rolled out to around 60% of country in the running, versus one who had done a small scale trial in an urban area which one would you plump for?

If the talk of the Fujitsu plan is correct it was FTTH to 80%, the easy 14% above commercial then fixed wireless and satellite for the rest.

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

GFast from the Cabinet is pretty much a waste of timer. The benefits from it for most users are at best marginal

Is that a prediction like all the ones you made through 2012 about how Openreach were falling further & further behind on their upgrade plans? How'd that turn out?

On the contrary, I'd expect every cabinet to run g.fast in the end. Whether that benefits "most" users or not is immaterial - so long as it benefits *some*. I don't doubt that they'll have to add more nodes in the outer coverage areas though.

The point of the trials in Gosforth & somewhere-southern is to find out the dimensioning questions & answers.

Edit:
I just checked the properties on my cabinet. There are 351 premises listed on that cab, and I reckon the longest lines are 350m long. The best vectored VDSL2 setup should let every line get 130Mbps aggregate.

From the Sckipio-improved figures, this would get everyone above 200Mbps (aggregate), and half the lines at 500Mbps (aggregate).

Perhaps we should be careful of sweeping "waste of time" generalisation, eh? I'm not sure I'd describe this as marginal benefit.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

If the talk of the Fujitsu plan is correct it was FTTH to 80%, the easy 14% above commercial then fixed wireless and satellite for the rest.

It may be a lot less than 14%, depending on what Fujitsu intended.

Because BT and VM don't entirely overlap, BT's 67% got augmented by another 9% that was VM-only. 76% commercial.

Would Fujitsu have only done 4% by FTTP, or reassessed?

I did the quick calculations 26% over 100 Meg and 56% with the Skipio stuff.

That is from adding a node to every existing cab

I am the tip of the U for my cabinet, but the tail end of the U where the properties are nearer the cabinet but actual longer cable length as it loops round are about 600m according to my last engineer.

My issue is if BT sell these g.fast connections with no price premium, it made me annoyed that basically on adsl the uk market had someone on say a half mbit sync pay the same as someone on a 20mbit sync. I hope vdsl isnt going back to that sort of practice, whilst yes is now sync speed variances, there is at least cheaper 40mbit products now. Plus a poor fttc line would be considered perhaps 20mbit which is still 25% of the max, so much better spread on vdsl than adsl was. But cabinet based g.fast will increase that spread a lot.

Also there is the argument that if many cabinets dont have long copper lengths like yours 350m max, then extending the fibre should be cheap.

The question though is if it costs exactly the same to provide a Gfast 500Mb line as it does to provide a 10Mb Gfast line then why should it cost the consumer more? Putting in different pricing structures is a false economy (except where more backhaul is used but the person on the slow line may be using more data than the person on the fast line).

If there were separate tiers of tariff then the people that happen to sync fast must be able to access the lower price tariffs (as they currently can with 40) otherwise they get financially penalised for something they may not want/need.

thats a odd argument, traditionally you charge what you can get away with and if someone is receiving more they charged more. In business revenues have no consistent margin with costs, its about supply and demand more than anything.

Plus I disagree with you anyway that there is no extra cost, this is spread on the myth that peak traffic demand doesnt cost anything.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

VM I expect will increase their download speeds soon based on ignition's posts, but I dont see why they need to do it, all they doing is inviting new congestion on their network. I would rather see 100/100 then something like 300/30.

Upstream congestion gets way uglier way more quickly than downstream congestion. After the experiences with 100Mb/10Mb VM will continue to be somewhat conservative with the upstream speeds they provision.

Downstream is still the attention grabber, too. Upstream increases will come and are a work in progress, thanks in part to work being done to increase downstream capacity but also as a programme of their own.

Relative to BT VM spend a fair chunk of change per premises passed upgrading their existing networks,

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

VM I expect will increase their download speeds soon based on ignition's posts, but I dont see why they need to do it, all they doing is inviting new congestion on their network. I would rather see 100/100 then something like 300/30.

Upstream congestion gets way uglier way more quickly than downstream congestion.

The horrors of TDMA when the originators are spread along the length of a cable certainly don't help. For those interested in the discussion see the article here ( http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/05/docsis-the-u... ) and search for 'A bandwidth timeshare ' and especially the following section 'Timing and the speed of light'.

Edited by Andrue (Sun 22-Feb-15 19:56:27)