In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Sky and others also might not like that unless the terms fit their own plans

I'm not sure I understand. What might Sky and the others object to? BT paying for a national roll-out or the Government funding a roll-out? In every case the companies involved are answerable to their shareholders who would expect to see a return on their company's investment or are you suggesting that Sky and the others don't want to see a profitable BT?

In reply to a post by MCM:

What has happened is that BDUK has gap funded, using tax payer and rate payers money, the installation of FTTC to areas where BT says it would not be commercially viable to upgrade. That is very different from saying that taxpayers have funded FTTC.

It seems to me that BT have been able to sit back and let BDUK cover their costs in certain areas. I suspect as BT knew they were going to get the money anyway (it was fairly obvious that was going to happen some time ago), they were able to make more areas "commercially unviable".

Is there any way for us to know which areas are actually commercially unviable as that wouldn't be realised until after the service was installed anyway.

Is there any way for us to know which areas are actually commercially unviable as that wouldn't be realised until after the service was installed anyway.

Not that I know of however the local BDUK programme should know as most if not all have claw back clauses in their contracts whereby BT starts to refund the subsidy when usage meets various pre-determined levels.

As for BT blowing money on sport, here I agree

That is where the split between Openreach and BT financially now and the split physically if that should happen would make no difference. It is BT Retail that paid for sports and therefore doesn't impact at all on the infrastructure investment of BT Openreach (assuming the reports of separate financials is correct).

So, even if BTR didn't buy sports it would make no difference to the investment made by BTO as BTR are not allowed to subsidise BTO.

Fibre is at an all time low cost-wise.

Fibre may be but labour isn't. The cost of installing fibre is going to be dominated by labour costs. The difficulties are around permissions to put trenches across private land or roads, blocked ducts, etc. The actual fibre is a small part of the cost.

The other big difficulty is getting the fibre itself into people's houses. That last few meters can cost a lot of money. Especially if you have to dig up an expensive driveway in order to lay the cable in.

Easy solution: run it overhead.

In reply to a post by ian72:

So, even if BTR didn't buy sports it would make no difference to the investment made by BTO as BTR are not allowed to subsidise BTO.

But the money for both companies comes from BTGroup so it would make a difference as that would be more money left in the overall account.

So that means installing poles. It also potentially means routing cables internally. There is still a cost to this.

No, it doesn't. They are not allowed to cross subsidise - they have to run their own accounts.

In reply to a post by ian72:

So that means installing poles. It also potentially means routing cables internally. There is still a cost to this.

I do wonder how many lines are currently overhead, because in that instance a lot less work would be needed.