In reply to a post by MCM:

At times I feel this thread would be better titled "FTTPoD unrealistic expectations".

Or rename the product

"Fibre to the premises on request, but only if you ask nicely, wait patiently and pay handsomely"

though FTTPoRBOIYANWPaPH doesn't really trip off the tongue...

"Fibre to the premises on request, but only if you ask nicely, wait patiently and pay handsomely"

What's so different there, I would hope that all customers are polite and I see no problem in either waiting patiently or paying the full cost for a bespoke product.

The problem I feel I'm seeing here is some posters appearing to have an unrealistic understanding of the costs and time that such an installation involves. This from someone who suffered a near nine month delay in our AIO cab going live due to the local authority refusing to let BT run a duct across a side road.

In reply to a post by MCM:

The problem I feel I'm seeing here is some posters appearing to have an unrealistic understanding of the costs and time that such an installation involves.

The thing that annoys me is that in the European top 30 countries for FTTP installs per percentage of the population. The UK doesn't even make the list.

One of the cornerstones of western euripe did not even make the list of 30.

When Romania was in 5th place with 34,3% of people having access to it. Russia is 4th place in that list, and most of that is forzen deralict wasteground.

I doubt any of those Romanians paid £30,000 to get it installed.

So yeah it annoys me that people in poor eastern european countries all have this, but in the UK we need to wait until 2027 plus to get it here. I will be an old man. Or I need to pay £30,000 to get it now.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/02/uk-shu...

One of the reasons the cost seems so high, is the very large markups that openreach use. For example to supply self fit cable/fibre its £5.60/m, for an item that would cost less than 75p/m to buy as a retail customer.

Just doing a quick exercise with their price list just to connect back to the nearest cabinet (I know it might need to go further) would be around £90k.

In reply to a post by BranH:

One of the reasons the cost seems so high, is the very large markups that openreach use.

Or maybe, just maybe, the "large markups" is due to the high cost of labour & equipment in Blighty? Perhaps you expect the Civil contractors in this country to charge the same rates as their counterparts in Romania?

In reply to a post by Anth:

Or I need to pay £30,000 to get it now.

Or you could have paid a few £1000s under the old FoD pricing. But you took a gamble by expecting FoD to become cheap as chips which was never going to happen. You lost. Either pay the current prices or move on. No point crying over spilt milk

Rather than look at headlines look instead at how and where those populations live. The UK has far fewer living in flats with much greater numbers living in dispersed properties despite this broadband coverage in the UK is higher than for much of Europe. A big problem is people not being prepared to pay the true cost of supplying a product but rather wanting everything at rock bottom prices as exemplified by some of the posters in this thread.

Returning to cost, remember that a large proportion of end users both here in the UK and elsewhere sign up and pay for the lower speed tiers regardless of how that is delivered and similarly how many are content to remain on ADSL despite faster technologies being available to them. The proportion wanting much faster speeds is low and I believe it right that we should first try and improve speeds for those in rural areas, and others, who are stuck at the end of long slow lines rather than try to install much faster fibre in the centres of population where initially at least the take up can be expected to be quite low with many happy to continue to use services delivered by DSL.

Add that a number of those countries probably had limited technology rollout previously and so essentially are installing new connectivity to many premises rather than utilising existing technology. Comparing this with places like Romania isn't a good comparison - and it also comes down to how much tax payers money is being spent as some countries that have higher install levels of FTTP will have had a lot of tax money spent on it. Then there is the question of overall coverage - the UK has been seeking high 90's percentage coverage of the various Internet technologies for the last couple of decades and coverage of reasonable broadband is very high - I suspect some of the countries in the top 30 have higher FTTP penetration but probably have more that get nothing or next to nothing.

A straight comparison does not take account of all of the other many factors and any of these comparisons tend to skew to a particular political argument.

A general thread reply.

In reply to a post by MCM:

Rather than look at headlines look instead at how and where those populations live. The UK has far fewer living in flats with much greater numbers living in dispersed properties despite this broadband coverage in the UK is higher than for much of Europe. A big problem is people not being prepared to pay the true cost of supplying a product but rather wanting everything at rock bottom prices as exemplified by some of the posters in this thread.

Probably the main reason for the high quoted prices is because of the value of the work and labour being done to individually install FoD, and the fees being charged by certain councils. Whereas if they were mass installing regular FTTP it would be cheaper (apparently its cheaper to install FTTP than put G.fast pods on poles).

In reply to a post by MCM:

Returning to cost, remember that a large proportion of end users both here in the UK and elsewhere sign up and pay for the lower speed tiers regardless of how that is delivered and similarly how many are content to remain on ADSL despite faster technologies being available to them.

I ended with the last post on a thread dedicated to this topic I asked the question, if people aren't interested in higher speeds then why are people buying packages above 50MB on virgin media? If speed wasn't high on peoples priority lists then 50MB would be satisfactory for everyones needs wouldnt it? So why do they buy higher?

A lot of people are on ADSL technology because;

1. Their line is too long for FTTC.
2. Their line is too bad to get a decent FTTC speed.
3. They are getting a decent speed on ADSL but they wouldnt get much of a speed increase to justify paying more to upgrade to FTTC.

If they did pay to change to FTTC on the lowest package people would still be saying "well they chose the lowest FTTC package as they aren't interested in the speed". All this assumes that peoples lines are capable of reaching at least the top 10% advertised speeds of a package.

But lets move away from speed. FTTP isn't about speed. It's about a change of technology. Most of the old technical problems of interference, REIN, old ww2 lines, disappear when installing a new FTTP connection. It's a modern way of communicating.

Someone who oversaw FTTP developement in BT/OR didn't make the decision to start fully building fibre years ago. The 3 OR engineer people I've spoken to all say that every time they were digging up the road for something else they should also have took the opportunity to install fibre.

Why then are so many on FTTP buying the lowest speed package not just in the UK but also for example Australia? Most likely because they see no need for more or they wish to minimise their costs. Likewise with FTTC and VM cable where many opt for the lowest speed option despite being able to get higher speeds. Of course FTTP allows users to move to higher speeds when their use requires these whereas FTTC is limited. However my comments have nothing to do with whether we should go for 100% FTTP but rather what customers are prepared to pay for today.

Wanting faster speeds and being prepared to pay the cost of installing and supplying those speeds don't go hand in hand as shown by some posting here. I'm not against those wanting a bespoke system but those users need to understand that they will have to pay whatever it costs above whatever the supplier is prepared to pay much in the same way as we had to pay Openreach approaching £19,000 for our AIO cab.