What They Said™

Bumpy road ahead. Buckle up. 100%

In reply to a post by candlerb:

What He Said™.

If anything, the Openreach rollout is picking up speed. Anecdotes about individual properties don't make a case, nor do the troubles of tiny individual altnets.

However, you can be sure that more of these are going to be getting into trouble over the next few months, with the combination of high interest rates, over-optimistic business plans, squeezed household finances and general consumer disinterest.

They will have to cut retail prices to the bone to tempt sufficient numbers away from copper-based services. The majority don't care about speed - they just want it as cheap as possible.

Yep, a few people i have chatted too over the last few months are happy with what they have and see no reason to move to fibre, as you said Price is the thing and I am in that group.
there was a time when I thought having higher speed would be a great thing, but things have changed, bills have increased, the cost of living have increased.
Openreach seems to move their backside as I have said before when other providers are in the area, or that is what seemed to have happened here.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Yep, a few people i have chatted too over the last few months are happy with what they have and see no reason to move to fibre, as you said Price is the thing and I am in that group.

I moved from an Openreach service costing £38 a month for around 38 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload, to a cable service for £41 a month for 200 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload at the end of 2019. Thankfully I did, as the next 12 months working from home would have been extremely painful. Price isn't the only attribute.

Thirding or fourthing this. People are going to discover that their own personal belief that a gigabit service should be delivered for less than £40 and that installation should be free isn’t compatible with a company staying healthy after they’ve had to invest in building a physical network. Hyperoptic are installing a gigabit service at a family members house for £33/month and coming to do a pre-installation survey - they can afford those costs as they are a relatively large company with an installed customer base that is generating revenue and paid off the investment already, a network trying to get their first 1000 customers is going to burn cash doing the same.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

I moved from an Openreach service costing £38 a month for around 38 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload, to a cable service for £41 a month for 200 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload at the end of 2019. Thankfully I did, as the next 12 months working from home would have been extremely painful. Price isn't the only attribute.

Price may not be the only attribute for everyone, but for a lot it is, certainly if they have looked at what they are using their broadband for and realise that they are not even getting the use out of what they have.
How on earth were you only getting 2Mb/s upload?

In reply to a post by jpm:

Thirding or fourthing this. People are going to discover that their own personal belief that a gigabit service should be delivered for less than £40 and that installation should be free isn’t compatible with a company staying healthy after they’ve had to invest in building a physical network. Hyperoptic are installing a gigabit service at a family members house for £33/month and coming to do a pre-installation survey - they can afford those costs as they are a relatively large company with an installed customer base that is generating revenue and paid off the investment already, a network trying to get their first 1000 customers is going to burn cash doing the same.

Zzoomm is doing free installation, well what they call standard installation., 1gig is around £40 a month, which compared to others is pretty good. A lot of providers using the Openreach network are doing free installation, I suppose they really don't have much of a choice.

In reply to a post by dect:

Could be we are just coming to the end of the financial year.

Openreach FY23 Q4 just closed at the end of March. The results will be published around 18 May.

Will be interesting to see exactly what the premises passed figure is for FTTP. We already know they passed 10 million by the middle of March. So the figure for the end of financial year should be closer to 10.1 or 10.2 million premises.

Not really slowing down despite the economic turmoil, industrial relations / strike issues.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

How on earth were you only getting 2Mb/s upload?

You don't remember the Openreach 40/2 FTTC product then.

I moved house in 2015, and took my Plusnet service with me. Because the line was only capable of 35M, I ordered the "40M" service. However when it was activated, I found it was 40/2 rather than 40/10. That's because the 40/2 wholesale product from Openreach was a few pence per year cheaper than 40/10.

So for the next few years, I had to buy an 80/20 service in order to get a higher upload speed.

Then Openreach changed the pricing so that 40/10 was cheaper at wholesale than 40/2. At that point, the Plusnet 40M service went back to being 40/10.

Aside: for quite a while, Aquiss were selling 40/2 on FTTP. They said it was one of their most popular offerings (something like 35% of FTTP customers took this), even though it was only £1 or £2 less than 40/10. They only stopped selling it because Openreach withdrew the 40/2 FTTP product.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

How on earth were you only getting 2Mb/s upload?

ancient cabling and crosstalk.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

You don't remember the Openreach 40/2 FTTC product then.

FWIW this was a service that had been in for ~5 years and was on the 80/20 Openreach product, and Plusnet was my 3rd FTTC/VDSL ISP.

My assumption as to why it degraded over time was more and more people switched from ADSL, increasing crosstalk. Poor cabling in the block of flats (from the 1970s builders) before reaching the openreach DP outside is my guess.

The final straw was a power cut for the area. Discussing on Thinkbroadband at the time the best suggestion was that "early on" users such as myself with modems/routers on 24x7 had managed to keep a lot of our original bandwidth, and "newer joiners" had grabbed what was available. The power cut caused all the modems to start from scratch, likely everyone now had their fair share of a pretty awful medium for predictability.

You can see why I want VDSL to go end of life... !

Edited by jchamier (Sun 02-Apr-23 10:54:10)

From what I can make of it, Hyperoptic's accounts appear to show a whopping operating loss.