I wonder how much a phone line cost in the first 10 years of them being rolled out? I wonder how many people took up the service in the first 10 years? How much money was provided by the taxpayer to get telephone lines to the population? I don't have answers to these questions but it is that sort of information you would need to get even close to comparing telephone line under GPO to fibre under Openreach.

So what about those needed to plan the task, provide routing for the fibre, build its virtual paths, supply the tools, service the vehicle, handle the order from the CP, etc, etc, etc ..

It just isn�t as simplistic as you claim.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/289158/telephone...

Throws some numbers at the topic

Sale of BT announced in 1982 actual first public share sale took place in 1984 with remaining shares sold in 1991 and 1993

In reply to a post by RIO_Colm:

That's a good point. For leased lines, you typically get quoted an install charge early on which is (I believe) based on distance to the closest POP, then ECCs are for any unforeseen works - just had a 10 GB Virgin leased line quoted at £40k install before any survey at all.

FTTPoD is different - the so called install charge quoted by Openreach really covers the circuit activation and the entire install cost can only be given accurately from paid survey.

Mumba's case is interesting. That order was under the old 'fixed price install based on distance band' model, and although Openreach has the 'right' to charge further ECCs under that scheme, Cerberus advised me that they never came across a situation where they did so - or even mentioned anything about ECCs.

I suspect that someone forgot to mention that clause to the OR Surveyors and they just thought they were on fixed porice install regardless.

The Openreach Surveyor who did my FoD survey back in April 2017 was fully aware of ECCs under the old pricing structure. He confirmed verbally to me (unofficially) that ECCs wouldn't apply to my build and they only applied in cases where major additional work was required such as excavation on a public highway to install a new u/g duct. Also i think FluidOne informed me that Openreach covered the costs of the first 1K or so of ECCs, so minor additional work was not charged for under the old pricing.

I wonder if Openreach came to the conclusion that wrt installation costs, the old pricing model did not accurately reflect the work req'd on the ground? In other words a more detailed breakdown of costs was req'd rather than just providing a figure based on radial distance to nearest aggregation node.

Hi

I think the point is the costs seem very inflated. Openreach themselves have estimated it could cost £300-£600 per premise passed as part of their FTTP rollout to 10 million premises, so to then quote something like £39,000 for a single connection just seems a lot of money where a good chunk of costs are fixed, and Openreach keep the connection as an asset and benefit at some point in the future from that deployment passing x number of properties.

(Source: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/12/openre...

Of course they will cherry pick their FTTP rollout to the areas that are the cheapest to deploy to so reducing the cost, but the costs to plan, routing, virtual paths, tools, vehicles etc are similar.

Basically FTPoDemand is priced high to reduce the demand, as Openreach don't want to do it, they'd rather their resources were coordinated towards a larger rollout of FTTP where they can pick the area that will provide the most lucrative returns, that's understandable, it's a private company after all.

Regards

Phil

Edited by deleted (Thu 15-Mar-18 12:58:30)

Far as I know, the previous fixed prices installs were as a result of OfCOM asking for this, rather than BT OR deciding this was a sensible financial model to use.

The gradual unwinding of OR from BT gives OR more scope to negotiate their own terms I suspect, and we have seen a few direction changes from OR in second half of last year.

Example - they basically killed off the whole Dark Fibre project which would have forced them to rent you dark fibre that you could have used for your own circuits - and again I believe that was OfCOM pushing their buttons to open up the BT network.

Changes in terms for FTTPoD was one of the major other changes - and that may be construed as a clever move on their behalf. The Government are opening the cash bucket to support Fibre deployment. we've had wave 1 voucher test program, now DCMS have allocated first £95m odd for 'local government' type full fibre networks, and I'd suspect we have more to come including possible nationwide availability of connection vouchers for business and domestic.

Look at the signals - the other major change in FTTPoD terms is the forthcoming ability to do "linked orders" where clusters of businesses or domestic premises can raise a combined order. Now, take a housing estate with 100 houses who all get maybe a £500 voucher - that is £50k of FTTPoD install cost covered. See where I'm coming from.

There is probably more going on behind the scenes that any of us are aware of.

As I've said before - best advice right now is to hold and see what emerges over coming month or so. Too many big balls in the air and they are due to fall shortly.

I'm waiting for VM to go live, currently get 46/7 on FTTC, so an upload of 20 would be a big improvement, but I suspect they will increase the upload at some point to be able to compete on advertising with gfast.

Current places seeing FTTP roll out are at the request of the developers.... on some big estates with more than one developer involved you end up with bits being FTTP, and other parts copper/FTTP ...

Clearly NOT Openreach�s choice/decision.

Would it be possible for everywhere FoD is requested (an actual order) that OR also choose that area to build up their FTTP presense, killing two birds with one stone etc?

I guess the questions are;

What is the difference between installing FTTP and FoD?

Why is FoD estimates so high while FTTP is so cheap?

I always thought OR would have to do similar work for both? I know FoD would be like a first order. But isn't the physical work similar?

What is the difference between installing FTTP and FoD?

The difference is usually that you may cover 2km getting the fibre out with FoD, but only have 1 customer lined up and one manifold installed.

If it was FTTP the other splitters for connecting roads and the manifolds may be installed, so the time and effect covering 2km might cover 100 premises.

A massive amount depends on the actual area.

So physical work is same, but its the way the economics stack up and risk, i.e. where Openreach decide to deploy FTTP they've got their reasons, i.e. accounts believe a ROI period that fits their economic plan is possible.

Some of the places FTTP has been deployed in the BDUK projects is pretty amazing and one wonders how they got some premises inside the £1,700 gap funding limit, part of this is often down to the fact that as doing the wider area anyway, the few high cost premises are evened out.

If FTTP is as cheap as some suggest, then a thread like this with people upset at high Openreach quotes should be awash with sales people pestering people to build their competing FTTP network in the area.