Spelthorne 25% FTTP
Waltham Forest 17% FTTP
Milton Keynes 11%
York 8%
Lewisham 8%
Newham 2.6%

A sampling of the Openreach availability in city areas

Prices are fine. They can stay where they are or rise in return for quality.

I imagine the big effect would be increased investment from Openreach to keep up.

Cornwall had ERDF money and some FTTP get done where its hard and complex and small places

not sure what that has to do with cities !!!!

more dense areas / FTTC much cheaper to do -- why would you do an FTT{P in a city where most will be apartments blocks and massively difficult to deploy and expensive

it was launched as Same time for everything -- has to be as part of the undertakings -- then a commercial decision what you as a cp do with it

In reply to a post by Squirrel:

You conveniently seem to have forgotten gas.

Also trains and buses.

I thnk this is absolutely spot on and the people to do it would be an independent Openreach (separated from BT and mutually owned by all the service providers)

I don't think we ought to leave the villages out at all.


The challenge would come in covering areas like the Pennines due to the terrain but in any case I think it should be done and maybe with a little public backing for the difficult areas.

It would help businesses to locate where they wished to rather than having to take into account the availability of high speed connections which are of course vital to an increasing number of businesses.

In reply to a post by arobertson545:

Vectoring isn't going to help massively with that, what would help I suppose is G.Fast but if you're going to run fibre to the DP why not just run it all the way to the home...

I guess the answer comes down to cost, and lead time.

Averaged everywhere, the cost of fibre between all homes and the DP makes up the biggest portion of the engineering cost ... including all the nasty parts such as MDUs and direct-buried lead-in.

It isn't a long distance, averaging 35m, but there are 28m leads needed. Conversely, there are only 4m DPs, averaging 350-400m from the existing cab.

But BT appear to be driving longer-range G.Fast, so I suspect they'd aim at 500k nodes, not 4m, averaging 250-300m from the existing cabs.

Still, I imagine the numbers allow for FTTP in easier, cheaper places.

As for lead time... if Openreach swapped to FTTP in 2018, you'd probably find a 15-year+ rollout is the result. Those places at the tail of the queue, likely today's notspots, will find they have to live with today's super fast solution.

One touted benefit of a hybrid solution is a faster rollout ... and BT think g.fast will still be a 10-year rollout. Will rural areas cope with 24Mbps for the next 10 years?

Vectoring helps too. Not everywhere, but some places, certainly. Perhaps 85-90% of premises. It helps speeds, sure, but better, it improves speed consistency and range.

techguy

service provider want cheap prices so they can make money

openreach support 530 + service providers in a equal and equivalent way of which circa 430+ not consume or sell Fibre (FTTC) only interested in copper broadband serviices

Interesting language in there ... A carrot, with a promise of investment money, rather than just the complaints of Sky and TalkTalk. However, there's a stick with the threat of going with VM instead.

A question for those who think Openreach should be split off: are you happy for VM to be left as-is? They'll become the closest thing we'll then have to a monopolist, without need to offer wholesale access, but the ability to still only cherry-pick, and no USO to offset this.

I'm concerned that the resulting market (at least the competitive portion) will lurch from being slightly lopsided in BT's favour to heavily lopsided in VM's favour. I think something needs balancing there, but I can't think what's best. Force VM to create their own 'Openreach' division? Split it off too? Merge it with BT's Openreach?

And I see that lurch to be unfavourable to rural areas. The current favour to BT in general is what justifies the USO quid-pro-quo, which is of primary benefit to rural areas. Splitting Openreach is likely to constrain the final third to forever depend on government largesse.

Vodafone's idea of FTTP investment is still only going to work for the existing competitive areas.

Companies roil out networks where there is a prospect of a return. Spending huge amounts of money in order to just provide competition isn't going to be attractive to any company. There are prospects for niche roll-outs (such as Gigaclear do) to some concentrations of relatively affluent villages, but that's a wildly different thing to a comprehensive rural network.

I there was money to be made, then it would already be happening. The reality is that networks will be loss making in many areas of the country. The phone network was maintained through a system of internal cross-subsidy through using excess profits in urban areas supporting more expensive rural areas. However, that phone network is old, and the monopoly system under which it was installed (over many, many decades) is not going to get repeated given the fragmented nature of control of telecommunication infrastructure in this country whereby operators can choose to "cherry pick".