Rural Area 5 Million

\The recent virgin/fujitsu hannouncement af=gain uses the ' we will bring broadband to 5 million people/businesses in the rual areas'. Who exacty are the 5 million? I live in a rural area in north east wales and get a massive half meg adsl. Am i one of the 5 million? Have heard that number banded about before, are we saying that in the uk there are 5 million rural users? Or are Fujitsu etc going to cherry pick 5 million of the most profitable areas? Should i at last be getting excited that decent broadband will be coming to a place near me?

your guess is as good as anyone else's, until they publish their plans.

The Welsh Assembly has a tender out which from memory defines some minimum standard of broadband for every business & home in Wales.

The 5m is about half of the "final third" 10m not expected to get Next Generation Access from BT or Virgin.

I'll take a long shot...

The final 10% of households in the UK will deemed hard to reach with next gen, so will get offers of satellite to meet 2Mbps USC.

If TalkTalk LLU has come to your area which is around 85% of UK households, and you are not on the likely plans for BT FTTC/P already, then the Fujitsu roll-out may well reach you.

What can skew things is if a council/authority is able to add funds into the mix, e.g. Cornwall is going ahead without any BDUK funding.

Given BT offered to match fund and reach 90% coverage using BDUK money back in December, and nothing has happened much, then I suspect similar will happen, i.e. lots of hot air until the second half of 2014

does VM's existing cable footprint count as next gen?

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

I'll take a long shot...

The final 10% of households in the UK will deemed hard to reach with next gen, so will get offers of satellite to meet 2Mbps USC.

that may be a bit embarrassing if they try to declare leftover urban areas as unreachable

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 20-Apr-11 16:54:19)

Yes

If those leftover urban areas are expensive to service per household then why is that embarrassing?

BDUK does not have a limitless pot, and has spent £50 million already, plus salaries

to be frank you can hardly call urban areas unreachable, unreachable is not the same as cost prohibitive.

The majority of urban areas will be cheaper to service than the majority of rural areas, as to why rural areas are getting picked ahead of urban will be for different reasons.

Since VM counts as next gen (kind of odd considering its been around for a decade) the amount of urban areas without is less then I was going to announce but the way things are going there will be urban areas in that final 10%, as not all missed out areas have VM.

The hard to reach areas are those where there are less then 10K lines scattered about. How many fall into that category may be hard to define. Probably only BT have any real idea and I doubt that level o detail is published. If you have to run 10Km of fibre to a cabinet serving 50 homes its not likely to be viable even with government funding

It's rumoured that the whole Fujitsu thing is because BT have not signed a contract with Fujitsu to provide BT with new DSLAM's. Because of the loss of this contract Fujitsu is trying to take away government funding that BT would have otherwise received. Chances are BT will end up signing the DSLAM supply contract to make Fujitsu stop this project.

The whole thing is unlikely to happen and if anything does I doubt it will be 5 million by completion, more like 1 million of the easiest.

Ah, my default position of utter cynicism looks like it'll win again.

That sounds like a good conspiracy theory as Fujitsu used to be one of Openreach civils contractors until Openreach decided to use just one contractor and opted for Carillion/Telent. They are also using Kelly group for some install work, so Fujitsu maybe trying to put some pressure on for a slice of the action.

A side note, Fujitsu do our Comms rack cabling and enablement nationwide, so they're already in our exchanges.