Be interested to hear which county you are in that has 1/3rd FTTP coverage as I believe the UK average is about 1% - and BT don't provide all of that.

In reply to a post by ian72:

Be interested to hear which county you are in that has 1/3rd FTTP coverage as I believe the UK average is about 1% - and BT don't provide all of that.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/6989-cornish-cont...

I got my numbers slightly wrong - it was 1/4 FTTP county-wide as of 2015, but 1/3rd of Openreach FTTP nationwide and 1/3rd of certain areas of Cornwall.

Still, 1/4 of an entire county (without trying) is a commendable result for BT, especially in one as largely rural as Cornwall. It's just a shame they didn't push it further

Edited by deleted (Fri 15-Apr-16 15:59:59)

That has to be Cornwall https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/index.php?area...

I was just checking TBB stats and it dawned on me it was probably Cornwall. Cornwall were a very special case for FTTP and whilst you say it didn't seem to be a lot of effort I suspect you will find it actually was.

I know relatively little about the Cornwall project but am aware it was very different to the rest of the country.

Indeed - it dawned on me after I posted that and confirmed through your excellent stats...

Any ideas MrS why it was possible in Cornwall but not replicable to the rest of the country? I seem to remember the Cornwall project was pre-BDUK (or chosen not to go BDUK). Do you think it could have been done within reasonable funding/timescales for the rest of UK?

In reply to a post by ian72:

Indeed - it dawned on me after I posted that and confirmed through your excellent stats...

Any ideas MrS why it was possible in Cornwall but not replicable to the rest of the country? I seem to remember the Cornwall project was pre-BDUK (or chosen not to go BDUK). Do you think it could have been done within reasonable funding/timescales for the rest of UK?

Cornwall isn't BDUK (it's an EU/council led thing, without Westminster sticking its oar in), but from memory BT still had to contribute over 50% of the cash, so it's not about "wasting" someone else's money. Given that hefty chunks of the FTTP are in areas where FTTC could have worked just as "well" as any other area of the country (densely populated, not EO - though one of the "FTTC for EO lines" trials was also in Cornwall) it's clearly not all down to demographics.

If there's anything special about the Cornwall programme, then it is likely to be contractual - not technical - and something BT could easily extend or duplicate elsewhere if they so wished

Edited by deleted (Fri 15-Apr-16 16:17:15)

I understood you were moving to an area that had been FTTP enabled under BDUK, so should be all set.

Sorry if it's fallen through.

FTTC isn't going to get any quicker without vectoring. BT aren't going to spend a bunch of money on vectoring for the sake of an extra 20Mb when they're allegedly going commercial with G.fast and the odd bit of FTTP here and there in the not too distant.

Zero business case for retrofitting the ECI cabinets or the new cards in the Huawei.

In reply to a post by sor:

FTTP has been a viable technology for over a decade - e.g. Verizon's FiOS started rolling out in 2005 - which would have been plenty of time to get going and have a very considerable rollout by now. It's not as if BT had to start in 2015.

Unfortunately, in this country we prefer to find excuses to justify mediocrity, even if the excuses don't stack up - and G.Fast is no panacea, as it will need fibre to be run even deeper into the network to be viable, even if not to every home. FTTC hasn't eliminated that, merely allowed for procrastination

Verizon had a good reason for getting FTTP going - they wanted rid of the copper.

From what the public can see Openreach really, really, really like having the copper there. It's a steady earner. If they have made any attempt to negotiate its replacement with Ofcom we've not been privy.

When Verizon started with FTTP there wasn't really a viable alternative. FTTC/N was somewhat in its infancy. Not the case by the time BT belatedly joined the FTTx party, VDSL 2 gave the option to deploy speeds that were 'good enough'.

Not to mention that BT couldn't have made their FTTP rollout much more expensive per home passed or slow per home connected if they tried. Really did completely ignore the lessons learned elsewhere and decide that they knew best, something that they have only in the past months, commencing with the FoD2 trials and culminating in the trials in Haydon Wick, begun to address.

In reply to a post by ian72:

I was just checking TBB stats and it dawned on me it was probably Cornwall. Cornwall were a very special case for FTTP and whilst you say it didn't seem to be a lot of effort I suspect you will find it actually was.

I know relatively little about the Cornwall project but am aware it was very different to the rest of the country.

Cornwall is on the whole far more taxing than our cities would be, and certainly way more difficult, time consuming and expensive than any housing estate constructed with full ducting and swept-tees.

The only thing I can see that's 'special' about Cornwall's rollout is that someone else is paying a good part of the bill.

Taking Haydon Wick as an example over some of the early commercial deployment shows just how rapidly FTTP can be deployed to pre-ducted areas if using some sanity and paying attention to best practices used by smaller networks in the UK and carriers and incumbents abroad.

In reply to a post by ian72:

Indeed - it dawned on me after I posted that and confirmed through your excellent stats...

Any ideas MrS why it was possible in Cornwall but not replicable to the rest of the country? I seem to remember the Cornwall project was pre-BDUK (or chosen not to go BDUK). Do you think it could have been done within reasonable funding/timescales for the rest of UK?

Not Mr S but have spoken to altnet fibre planners to the extent of showing them the ducting plans for a part of this estate. They reckoned that, given the ducts in place, FTTP at £8 a month incremental wholesale revenue would've provided a payback within 7 years on condition it was deployed efficiently.

Ballpark £300 per premises passed, £500 per premises connected, uptake of FTTC has been around 90% so basing on that.

This assumed the copper lines would be kept in place. Removing them shortens the payback period further thanks to maintenance savings.