Ofcom at it again?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8582253.stm

Anyone know what this refers to? I thought Ofcom had already consulted with the LLUOs who'd said they had no interest in using the new fibre at this time. Wasn't that why GEA was being touted as the way to leverage FTTC?

Not read full report yet,

but depends on what fibre you mean. If it means ability to unbundle the fibre to the home then issues may arise due to topology used. The Openreach setup lends itself to bitstream unbundling, but not actual unbundling of physical fibres.

It may be refering to backhaul too, or some combination of these in an attempt to make offering LLU and future services more attractive in Market 1 and 2 areas.

Thirdly there is the issue of sub loop unbundling, which is considered too expensive to do at present (apart from in South Yorkshire).

Ofcom isfollowing its mandate of competition is king, and reducing BT's cut is good, and many will agree with that view.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Ofcom isfollowing its mandate of competition is king, and reducing BT's cut is good, and many will agree with that view.

I don't disagree with it (as a Be customer it'd be hypocritical and rather silly to poo-poo the whole LLU thing ) but really I was just a bit surprised. I thought Ofcom and the LLUOs and BT had already had this discussion.

I'll await your eventual news article - it's bound to be more informative than the BBC anyway

bit more at Samknows

The current GEA offering still involves having a phone line rental / facility, OFCOM's proposal would be for a broadband only option for for example another operator could provide a VoIP phone over FTTC.

At the minute you can't buy df direct from BT, Ofcom's proposal is that they are forced to provide it (within defined economic constraints) this is more for business services and internal network use rather than for deployment to residential users

In reply to a post by yarwell:

The current GEA offering still involves having a phone line rental / facility, OFCOM's proposal would be for a broadband only option for for example another operator could provide a VoIP phone over FTTC.

Ah yes. Interesting.

not sure I saw anything about mandating dark fibre in the consultation - is that what you meant by df ?

yup, df was meant to be an option as part of the PIA product but it seems that they've fallen for the GPON (as opposed to Active Ethernet) argument and won't me mandating that. Time to write a response...

Edited by boggits (Tue 23-Mar-10 14:34:04)

Load of nonsense anyway... On the one hand Ofcom have finally stated "the network that BT inherited as the incumbent operator gives it a significant competitive advantage."

In the next breath they are still going to allow BT to charge basically as they damn well please.

Basically nothing has changed.

On the one hand Ofcom have finally stated

they didn't say that, did they ? The word "inherited" for example is not in the OFCOM WLA document.

The democratically elected Govt of the day sold off something nearly 30 years ago that BT now owns, giving it the same advantage as Virgin Media has with its network.