How Long Left for Copper

With the increasing use of fibre in the network & the fact that much of BT's copper final mile is life expired and in poor condition how much longer is there for copper to remian in the Network.

The curent BT solution of overlaying the copper network with fibre is a pretty expensive solution as they have to maintain both a fibre network & a copper one plus it uses up more duct space. Copper is also pretty expensive it also means they have about twice as much capital tied up in underground line plant.

Logically they ought to be looking to only having a fibre network particularly when much of their copperline plant is very old

Until Fibre becomes mainstream and widely deployed.

I believe places which are enabled for FTTP still use the Copper Local Loop for phone calls at the moment.

Copper is usually seen as 'old' and 'degraded' in terms of Broadband speeds, but if you think of it in the telephony world, it still does its job well.

Copper will probably exist for at least another 20 years before it is nationally replaced with Fibre.

There was a recent post on here stating that more recent FTTP installs have had no associated copper pair.

the fact that much of BT's copper final mile is life expired and in poor condition

I'm not sure how or what you base that statement on ? Speculation would be my guess. How many on this forum alone, have we seen, where the 'life expired and in poor condition' pair to their house is now providing much higher speed services via FTTC.

Clearly a full FTTP roll out would be glorious, and fairly future proof, but no company has the finances to roll this out, and even if it did, I suspect it's shareholders would be concerned that they would be told to share it's new resource for a fraction of it's install costs, thus making any prospective profits even further away.

The only chance of a fibre to the premises based, full roll out, would be if the Government 'owned' and funded it, then re-couped the costs by charging CP's to provided service to punters over it. This will clearly never happen as it involves both 'common sense' and 'Government' in the same idea.

Maybe until every user in the country is prepared to contribute £200 or more towards the cost of running fibre to their premises.

The cost will be enormous and without it being recouped from the users there is no way it is affordable. Fibre to the cabinets - easy but from cabinets to pole, pole to pole and pole to premises is a labour intensive job.

Copper is their to provide voice services, it still works fine.

There's no reason to pull out copper for voice and replace it with fibre for voice. If people want fibre to broadband that's something else entirely and the customer should rightly foot the bill.

If its cheaper to provide just fibre for new builds fine, but there's no reason to start replacing copper, as I say its for voice.

And I'd also like to know where this "must of, expired/poor condition" comes from, says who?

If we were starting again sure, we'd use fibre, but we aren't. If people want FTTP for broadband that has nothing at all to do with copper and should be paid for.

I doubt copper will ever be completely removed. After all VM are going to be testing 1.5Gbps over copper coax cable and FTTC will support a few 100Mbps with line bonding. 10GBASE-T 10Gbps at up-to 100 metres using CAT 6A cable.

AIUI, a major requirement for a telephone service is the provision of access to the emergency telephone number, even in the event of a power cut. Currently that is achieved by means of supplying electrical power over the copper 'phone lines. That becomes more complicated and uncertain if fibre-only connections are installed without parallel copper. Furthermore, the issue is compromised by some VOIP services which offer no information as to the location of a caller. The emergency services ought to have some means of locating a caller who is cut off unexpectedly.

A very large number of people use mobile 'phones nowadays but they don't provide a fallback service if power to the local transmission tower goes down. It would not be practicable or reasonable to require all users of fibre-only connections to install UPSs and to have them compulsorily tested regularly. In addition there is the geolocation issue of using IP addresses, especially if they are dynamic, bearing in mind that every second can count in an emergency.

There is no such thing as a 100% solution but I don't think that a simple and obvious answer has been found yet for these problems, which will compete with powering a telephone over the copper line.

There is this 2008 Ofcom document with a home wiring diagram showing battery backup.

I would expect the current FTTC cabinets to have a 15-20 year life to deliver a return on investment.

I would expect LLU operators with kit in the exchange will be pressuring to keep the eside network copper for a considerable time. I would expect Openreach will be presuring to retire the eside network but that will toast LLU investment.

So I think the copper network will be here for the foreseeable future.

Copper doesn't care how old it is. It cares what it's insulation is. I would reckon on the copper network being in better shape now in terms of insulation and pressurisation than it has ever been simply because of the services it is successfully delivering. .

Edited by deleted (Mon 25-Apr-11 21:51:40)

how much bandwidth do we need is the real question? Then we can look at delivery mechanisms to see if they need changing. frankly 6meg is more than enough for me, 1 meg was fine 5years ago this only became too slow because websites got bloated. Lets assume that adverts on these sites suddenly turn stereoscopic 3d HD etc, how much would I need then?
I dont really need to stream tv to every telly, I have sky and freeview for that. Id say if ISPs could give me 20meg actual speed I would have enough for a very long time. 40 is simply overkill and fttc will deliver at least double that within a few years on a single pair.
The lines are far from outdated / poor condition, with the new testers lines have to be almost perfect to pass - there may be the odd ali run or buried cable causing problems for engineers but if it all goes tits up it gets replaced with shiny new copper. The problems people get here are not a true picture of the whole network - just because 50% of posters are having issues and are seeking help it doesnt mean 50% of customers arent getting a service.
Distance from the dslams is an issue in some places - but to me it seems more reasonable to add additional remote dslams where required rather than wholesale rebuilding of the network.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

how much bandwidth do we need is the real question? Then we can look at delivery mechanisms to see if they need changing. frankly 6meg is more than enough for me, 1 meg was fine 5years ago this only became too slow because websites got bloated. Lets assume that adverts on these sites suddenly turn stereoscopic 3d HD etc, how much would I need then?

No change if you use a decent ad-blocker

Indeed, thanks for the reference. I see that the document identifies on the last page that the "Key challenges" for voice services are:
(i) Primary Voice Service Obligations,
(ii) Emergency and Lifeline Service, and
(iii) Battery Backup Ownership and Management.

Since these are described as " challenges", it implies that wholly satisfactory solutions have not yet been found. I am trying to suggest only that.

In reply to a post by RandomJointer:

I would expect the current FTTC cabinets to have a 15-20 year life to deliver a return on investment.

I would expect LLU operators with kit in the exchange will be pressuring to keep the eside network copper for a considerable time. I would expect Openreach will be presuring to retire the eside network but that will toast LLU investment.

So I think the copper network will be here for the foreseeable future.

Surely a bigger reason the copper e-side network has to stay is because FTTC cannot carry the phone service?

Or do you know something we don't? Are you suggesting the current FTTC cabinet kit could use its fibre for the phones as well?

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by RandomJointer:

I would expect the current FTTC cabinets to have a 15-20 year life to deliver a return on investment.

I would expect LLU operators with kit in the exchange will be pressuring to keep the eside network copper for a considerable time. I would expect Openreach will be presuring to retire the eside network but that will toast LLU investment.

So I think the copper network will be here for the foreseeable future.

Surely a bigger reason the copper e-side network has to stay is because FTTC cannot carry the phone service?

Or do you know something we don't? Are you suggesting the current FTTC cabinet kit could use its fibre for the phones as well?

I believe this (FTTC "PSTN" equvelent service) is being researched, and is not seen as a technical impossibility.

It may be a decent plan actually because:

a. it will free up duct space, for future fiber plans;
b. allow redundant copper cables to be sold (it's more than £5000 a ton I think);
c. the FTTC scheme still provides a copper pair to the customer premises, hence avoiding power outage issues for emergency calls.

All in all seems like a good idea?

Except for the LLU copper issue of course!

Still agree with the copper "realists" though. There's no rush. If its properly installed & maintained then copper is fit for purpose and provides value for money by virtue of the fact that its already insitu, as is the kit that supports it be that pots, dslams etc etc.
I simply don't subscribe to the "rip out all the copper and replace it with fiber" nonsence as it's just not feasible.

Edited by deleted (Wed 27-Apr-11 18:54:28)

Funnily enough, I had the opportunity to talk the with The Big Enchilada very recently for a morning and his or her feeling amongst other things I am struggling to remember was copper has 15-20 years left.

Last time I saw him or her, 5 or more years ago he or her was thinking dongle was the future for broadband and copper was a declining business.

In the meantime we are witnessing £2.5Billion investment in fibre and copper and copper business is actually increasing despite five year old forecasts.

Forecasts from 5 years ago that saw copper skilled people being laid off then copper skilled people on the bench then copper skilled people being taken on and trained up. Then copper skilled contractors making up all over the place, Copper skills are still where it is at despite the perceived wisdom.

My view is reinforced that FTTP is inevitable but years away. Fibre is the next 15 years as an overlay. That is what the investment is working on. That is my thinking of the ROI.

I also think that the demise of copper has been repeatedly over forecast. It's there. it's paid for, the providers are happy to pay the low prices for it. I see no appetite for CPs to raise prices and put forth products that are the same thing for higher prices to pay for investment.

Who in their right mind would invest in fixed telephony services when mobile is where telephony is at and data is where mobile is at?

The projections for mobile shows data not voice projections. The shock for me is the data on mobile isn't the much talked about throttled p2p or FaceTube, it's youtube, it's iplayer., it's video. It's where fibre and copper can compete easily.

Things are changeing fast.

Twenty years will do me, I'll be long gone. But these things change very quickly and the Big Enchilada also shape shifts quickly.

Edited by deleted (Wed 27-Apr-11 23:06:14)

Tieing in with that was a post a couple of years ago in the midst of the O2 Access total screwup, where performance fell off a cliff, leading to it being allowance capped and later traffic managed.

The poster said O2 support had told him they were going to scrap Access rather than invest in more Centrals etc., and move to a "mobile" broadband solution. We all thought that sounded ludicrous.

I did a bit of research later and of course found out about LTE. Telefonica Espana had apparently been trialling it for a while.

IIRC a couple of weeks ago bandwith for LTE in the UK was announced as either now available or on its way?

It really does strike me as hilarious, that "the wireless" (ie radio), and television, which released the world from expensive cabled (with whatever technology) connections, are rapidly becoming the only justification for such cabled networks to exist.

Equally amusing is the fact that as cabled delivery of these is increasing, from source to transmission center is becoming more and more "wireless".

I still say 20 years from now we will all have comms chips implanted and connected to our brain or cns in some way. We already have experimental technology enabling eyeless people to see, and being able to shut your eyes and watch a 3D TV show in your head isn't a huge leap from that!

How do you mean Polemonkey (re: FTTC "PSTN" equvelent service) do you mean instead of copper voice from a FTTC to an exchange and fibre to an exchange it would just be fibre to an exchange (carrying data+voice) and power coming from the exchange? So you loose the copper uplink to the exchange?

decades, much of the network wont have any FTTC at all anyway, and even the bit that does still needs it for voice services.

In reply to a post by GMAN98:

How do you mean Polemonkey (re: FTTC "PSTN" equvelent service) do you mean instead of copper voice from a FTTC to an exchange and fibre to an exchange it would just be fibre to an exchange (carrying data+voice) and power coming from the exchange? So you loose the copper uplink to the exchange?

Yeah that's what I summised. The copper/fiber parallel network is medium term, but temporary, nevertheless.

In case you were wondering why I used the seemingly convoluted term "PSTN equivelent service", it's because I was trying to avoid confusion by differentiating it from VOIP. We'll still dial STD numbers to make regular voice calls, won't need a modem/router/IP address etc. to make calls.

From what I gather, the idea is to extend telephony to the cab just like they have with the DSLAMS (well, RDSLAMS so I don't get told off )

Presumably this could be achieved by moving MSANS into the cabs, effectively transforming the cab into a mini exchange.

(I don't think they'll waste duct space with power though, this will be sourced from a local main I imagine)

Edited by deleted (Thu 28-Apr-11 20:50:17)

Copper will be around for an awful lot longer yet. My local exchange has over 43,000 users with no sign of any fibre roll out in the forseeable future.

Not as easy here.

My neighbours (in houses) apparently have FTTP (or Cabinet). According to a BT Engineer that was in here last year.
The Flats here, where I am, has copper that runs straight to the exchange. It used-to-be good for faster than average speeds, but Fibre would be better. It WILL take a long time for them to get round to put it in here.

Can't complain really. Much. Well, maybe just a wee bit. Though, on thinking about it more seriously, I may even speak to a Support Group, or just start one for hard-done-to Tweakers or summat? BWAAA!1

lol.