Before getting too excited about the 0.5 and 1 Gig tiers on FTTPoD I would wait until Bt Wholesale start selling these products. Openreach price lists mean diddly squat if BT Wholesale decide not to sell the products. For example Openreach announced Wholesale price lists back in late 2016 for the native FTTP 0.5 and 1 Gig services. Guess how many ISPs are selling such services at present ? That�s right: zilch.

Edited by deleted (Fri 16-Feb-18 18:38:50)

I don't believe you can regrade to the top two speeds because it requires infrastructure build.

Andy, perhaps you could confirm my interpretation of the 01/02/2018 price list linked to please?

It looks to me as if the "fixed connection charge" of £92/£500 is on top of the survey/estimate/build costs, as per Notes 4 and 5. This just means the "distance band plus a potential further cost following survey" has been abolished. Not the multi-thousand installation cost itself.

I get the feeling this is not being realised by some posters.

Who has been saying the high cost for the on demand build charge has been abandoned?

That's what I just came back to clarify, but note that I did say "not the multi-thousand pound cost itself". I decided I had better add to that, something like what follows.

I'm expecting it to be simply an individual estimate per installation, typically in the same region as the earlier "banded plus" ones. My point was exactly the question you ask, as some may be reading that price list as saying it has been abandoned, when it hasn't.

It has just become a blank space - "OR will insert a big number here for each quote". That's what Notes 4 and 5 say, and in fact the estimate can be changed in the final planning stage.

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 16-Feb-18 20:52:45)

I can't really post the documents, so I'll try to explain the costing now.

Customer contacts ISP for a FoD quotation - they use BTw/OR systems to provide an estimate, which should be fairly accurate. If the customer accepts the estimate, the order progresses to a quotation.

OR conduct a full survey for the quotation. This will be based on the ECC Price List. If the customer accepts the ECC (build) cost, then he would have to pay this cost. If the customer rejects the build cost, then he would have to pay for the survey (£245.14 +VAT). The survey charge is only payable if the order does not progress.

If the order progresses to the build stage, OR will build the network for as many premises as possible. If a FoD order is placed for a single premises, then OR will provide a discount of £700 (first PON) + £50 (for a single premises) on the final build cost. If an order is for multiple premises, then OR provide a discount of £700 (on the total build costs for all orders) + £50 for each premises included in the order. For multiple premises in an FoD order, the total build costs would, I guess, be essentially split by the ISP (but that is up to them).

I've been told the cost of ownership is not expected to change over the lifetime of the FoD contract (12 months vs 3 years) for the majority of premises.

AFAIK the Huawei HG8xxx only support GPON (downstream rate of 2.488 Gbit/s, upstream rate of 1.244 Gbit/s).

I've seen pictures of likely XGPON NTEs in a trial deployment which are ECI (probably, no identifying marks but certainly ECI styled) and ZTE - these only have copper ethernet customer connections, so still likely to be 1Gbps.

I can't see much likelyhood of higher speed client connections being offered, the main driver for XGPON (downstream rate of 9.95328 Gbit/s, upstream rate of 2.48832 Gbit/s) will be to reduce the contention as more clients subscribe to services with 330/500/1000 download speeds.

That's great Andy, thanks.

The killers are:-
Cable (fibre or copper) including any jointing required from 01/04/2017 to 31/03/2018 £6.27 per metre plus Vat.
Cable (fibre or copper) including any jointing required from 01/04/2018 £7.54 per metre plus Vat.

On top of those, any groundworks/ductwork applicable, which appear to be an order of magnitude greater.

I assume the above apply, along with the footbox and such other charges, replacing the distance band prices.

I didn't know there was a standard ECC price list (D'oh!). That will be very useful to anyone seriously interested in the product.

I do think the FTTPoD price list itself should have a link to the ECC prices in the main table rather than seemingly covered by Notes 4 and 5 plus the "Other charges" footnote to the notes .

Serious money!

Yep. The head end needs to be told the serial number of the ONT, and what services/account should be associated with it .... thus providing the ordered product.

On gigabit capable hardware which can actually keep up with the data rate you can achieve TCP throughput of ~940Mbps with full-size packets which takes into account the TCP, IP and Ethernet overheads/framing.

You don't get 100Mbps or 1Gpbs actual data throughput on EAD circuits (100Mbps via 100Base-TX fast ethernet or 1Gbps via 1000Base-SX/1000Base-LX fibre), I can't see FTTP/FTTPoD being any different.