We'll soon get to test demand as gfast has been installed all over the larger exchanges in my manor. Hundreds of them.

If punters don't buy gfast faster speeds like their not buying it where fttp and or Virgin is already available, do you advise massive expansion of fttp

I thnk fibre is showing all the signs of a bubble. Lot of noise, speculation, firms borrowing huge sums but few punters.

In reply to a post by billford:

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The UK has the odd thing of wanting BT to have like the GPO

I'm old enough to have long memories of the GPO... for all its faults, I'd rather stick with BT.

Indeed. To say nothing of why anyone older than 40 would think any government capable of running a large, complex and technologically advanced telephone network.

In fact it often amazes me how many people think the answer to any problem is government control. Is there anything any government has done that would encourage such optimism? Governments should be as small as possible and should only take over from private enterprise at the point of failure. They should be seen as an owner/operator of last resort. And BT is far, far from being a failure. Based on internet take up and usage over the last twenty five years it's actually shown itself to be quite capable.

In reply to a post by billford:

In reply to a post by MCM:

As I suspect would anyone who had to deal with the GPO through the 70s and early 80s. An appalling company where one had to wait months for simple new line installs - and that in central London rather than remote rural.

I was middling rural at the time... Newbury in Berkshire. I forget the exact date but it wasn't until around mid-70's that we got phones with rotary dials on them rather than picking up the receiver and waiting for the operator.

And they were Trimphones .

My family lived on a 'recent build' in Exeter in the mid 70s and we had a party line. And I wasn't allowed to call my friends very often because it was so expensive. I had one friend who moved to Plymouth and that was a once a month treat (and only then because the PO had a special pricing deal and dialling code for the two cities). Assuming I could get through. And assuming the call quality and duration was adequate.

Edited by Andrue (Sun 13-May-18 09:37:47)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

And also vastly over staffed - though 1970's did see big expansion of copper network, hence the pension burden

It's to be hoped, then, that the FTTP expansion doesn't cause the same thing to happen :-/

If you join Openreach today then I'd look on it as a 10 to 15 year career, i.e. once fttp largely all built they can scale back

In reply to a post by Andrue:

... a large, complex and technologically advanced telephone network.

If we still had the GPO any references to fibre would be passed to the dieticians at the Min. of Ag.

In reply to a post by partial:

We'll soon get to test demand as gfast has been installed all over the larger exchanges in my manor. Hundreds of them.

If punters don't buy gfast faster speeds like their not buying it where fttp and or Virgin is already available, do you advise massive expansion of fttp

The uptake of G.Fast will be minimal, as to get it you already need to be on at least 70Mbps FTTC. It will not test demand until it is rolled out to those who get far less from FTTC, and it looks like Openreach have seen sense for once by apparently dropping the idea in favour of going the whole hog.

To get G.Fast to the really slow FTTC areas they will be doing 85% of the costly part of the FTTP job.

I thnk fibre is showing all the signs of a bubble. Lot of noise, speculation, firms borrowing huge sums but few punters.

Signs of a bubble? Where do you get that idea from? You suggest we stick with last mile copper for ever?

If you mean gigabit fibre, then for the next five years you may have a point. Any forecasts of demand beyond that will be less accurate than weather forecasts that far ahead. Weather forecasts do at least have some sort of basic predictability. Climate.

Bubble - the £500m sale price of CityFibre - or £500 per FTTP customer even before you connect them. The money there is not on the consumer FTTP, but 5G nodes and the council/large business stuff. The danger is the speculators may start numerous FTTP operators in the hope of being hovered up, i.e. very good at PR and using up lots of cash but not delivering a lot. Now if burning cash gets the UK to a high percentage of FTTP that would be a good thing, but the probability is that this burning will happen in the urban areas i.e. overlap cable networks. The risk with the burning route is that it leaves lot of debt and consolidation and eventually a monopoly emerges with the classic price rises - e.g. Sky satellite TV

G.fast is a way of competing with Virgin Media in the short term, hence size of footprint since it will stop them saying 6 times (or similar) faster than BT and if the latency performance of G.fast is good it might win some back from the cable operator.

On FTTP - contrary to an Ofcom boss, if Openreach deliver the 3 million FTTP they are still in 2020 likely to be the largest FTTP operator in the UK. What happens then is a good question, i.e. will Vodafone take up their 5 million FTTP option, and will Openreach go even further with the FTTP rollout.

Liberty Global so far seems to be not too worried, as if it was DOCSIS 3.1 would be a UK priority.

Bubble also applies to some of the magic around FTTP e.g. zero buffering of video, maybe if you budget on 100 Mbps per customer at peak times, but at some point even with a point to point network capacity is shared. We've even seen some suggest no peak time slow downs.

To be fair, cityfibre do have a load of albeit badly installed network for that £500.

Will be interesting to see what the owners of Hyperoptic get if they sell as they are very light on physical assets.

Maybe Sky share my thinking as they have very deep pockets and appear to be keeping well out of the bubble.

Installing G.Fast or FTTP in areas that currently have low speeds is still not going to see people jumping from low speeds to top speeds. What it will mean is that it will allow people to get the 40/10 and 80/20 tiers at a reasonable cost - but that doesn't bring BT any more revenue than they get now on VDSL.

There is obviously demand for higher speeds but only from a small percentage of people. To build a whole FTTP network that only brings extra income from a small group is not cost effective. Personally I would upgrade to faster if I could but it wouldn't change my life and wouldn't really let me do things I can't now, I would just do it because that's how I am. Most people wouldn't bother - if they would then there wouldn't be many people on a 40/10 connection with a line that could do 80/20.