UK.gov flings £400m at gold standard, ‘full-fibre' b*&%*%£$%. Yep. Broadband

Meanwhile MP's friends (cough) trouser the cash.

Exactly what I was thinking ... set up a bunch of small ISP's to take the subsidies and lay some fibre so that they can later be bought out by BT/Liberty/Whoever ... not only do they get paid to lay the fibre, but sell on the operation at a profit.

We call that a win-win down here at the trough!

Re: Not competent?

Well, B4RN (rural) are charging £30 a month for unlimited 1Gbps up and down. No BT line required either.

They are, however, a not-for-profit, community run project. I consider them the "gold standard" ;-)

Re: Not competent?

Totally agree with you about Virgin-Liberty Media.

Here I am less than 15 miles from the old NTL HQ in Hook and the VM cable was laid before my house was built. Mine pad is an 'in-fill' house and VM say 'yes you can have our cable'. Well they should, the rest of the street have it and the cable runs past the end of my drive.

The VM engineer turns up and after scratching his head he goes away again.

They need to dig up the road, find the VM cable (COAX) and add a connector. They simply won't do this.

Ofcom are total W*****s.

So I am limited to a service with BT supplying the last mile or as in my case, the last 100 yards from the BT green box

The last OR engineer(sic) I spoke to said that because of the high density of VM subscribers my 'BT Green Box' is not scheduled to get Fibre this side ot 2020. I can fully understand that reasoning from an economics/ROCI point of view. Personally, it sucks...

Catch-22 at work again.

Re: Not competent?

Pen-y-gors,

Don't assume its all Fibre being installed by Openreach. A lot of work recently has been upgrading 0.5mm Copper to 0.9mm Copper to 'just' meet the Superfast Broadband targets for longer lines.

And that's the problem:

The Welsh Superfast Broadband contract was about using taxpayer funding for 'Fibre Superfast Broadband', yet quite a bit of what has occurred is improving the copper side of things, to transmit FTTC at slightly higher/longer distances by using 0.9mm copper, rather than 0.5mm copper to 'just' meet the contract threshold, BT (deliberately) never aiming to exceed anything (in terms of targets).

As taxpayers, we think we're paying for Fibre rollout, yet at times, we're really getting (got) more copper. Longer lines/New installations in Wales are still Copper. That needs to change.

BT are effectively sitting on their hands, waiting for further handouts for Pointless G.fast. It's obsolete before its even out of trial, and rurally, its as costly as Passive FTTP to achieve blanket coverage, because devices need to be carpet bombed each requires a decent smoothed Power source.

This is a signal to BT, get off your backside, move aside. Copper is a dead carcass, we're (the Gov) side-stepping you.

First intelligent decision by this Government, now for Openreach to be truely split, taking on responsibility for Operator virtualisation of (rural) Mobile masts wouldn't be a bad move too.

Let's hope B4RN is open to letting their model be the basis of further rollouts across the UK, because its a true success story, and should be copied. We really need to make sure this money doesn't go on highly paid people that talk the talk, but instead of physically putting cables in the ground. There has been far too much paid 'analysis'.

Crucially, this needs the public to be involved (if you really want true-Fibre having the public onside, helping with rollout, reduces costs immensely. Rallying local support is crucial.

The ones most keen to help should be rewarded first - make it a competition, but base the final winning roll outs on tried and tested B4RN methods), co-ordination is key, so that access to streets at time are upgraded, not house by house.

Hopefully these funds can produce 'best in class' approach to rolling out true Fibre to as many people as possible, but crucially lay the cables, even loosely unprotected across fields, ditches, riverbeds if necessary - use the revenue gained, to then go back and install these protectively, over time. This should be about laying Fibre, not money spent, talking about laying Fibre.

Re: Not competent?

> Govt Minister says he wants full-fat capable of up to 1Gbps - but how much will the subscriber pay?

I'm on Gigaclear at £40/mo for 100Mbps Up & Down, could pay £70 for 1Gbps, and they're trialling higher rates for more cash, too. On top of that is a use of an IP phone service, as I have no BT in my house and no intention of letting them anywhere near it.

I find it unlikely that other areas would charge significantly more, but could see it being up to double that for the harder to reach villages, and even more for a one off isolated house in the boonies somewhere - unless the govmt actually deliver on making broadband of reasonable quality one of the universal rights that attract subsidies when installing it, unlike the shite that is guaranteed at the moment.

Re: BT not competent?

"I'd argue that it's government that's not competent."

Yeah, just about sums it up - British governments actively working against the population for decades.

Re: Get the basics right first.

"His point was that they are set targets for delivery by the bean-counters who manage the funding, and they want to see new connections, not improved connections for existing customers"

I wasn't just looking to point the finger at BT but they have history here...

I absolutely understand that for the accountants the potential returns are the key, which is why the government needs to mandate a minimum speed or bean counters won't do the work.

Mum's estate was built in the 1960's when Ally was cheap and copper expensive, Ally is fine for voice so they used that through the estate, but its bad for data. Add in to that years of wiring fixes, cuts and re-soldering joints, and general age and weather degradation, and the only real means to fix is it to re-wire the estate. That's a large outlay but unless there is some legislation to force the issue (sort of like the post office has to deliver letters to everyone in the country) it won't happen.

4/5G may be an answer, but at the moment Mum has no change of fast broadband and FTT(anything) is just a dream for her.

Re: Get the basics right first.

"His point was that they are set targets for delivery by the bean-counters who manage the funding"

But who made the original promises? If it was the bean-counters then they should keep them. If they were made by someone who didn't have the authority to implement them they shouldn't have made them.

If a schedule is made and published it should be with the sign-off of everyone involved, including the finance. And that everyone should then consider themselves bound by it. Yes, there could be external reasons why it can't be kept - fire at the exchange, for example. Accountants should not be external reasons.

Re: Availabilty vs cost

Blanket Coverage with FTTC was never the plan.

It was always designed to only cover a subset of the exchange area, to 'cherry pick' the easiest areas, and its just going to get even worse with G.fast, because you need upto 25 G.fast nodes in a 2Km2 area to get blanket Ultrafast coverage.

Each G.fast node requires a decent very high quality (expensive) Power source. Blanket rollout of G.fast isn't cheap either.

Yet we're constantly fed the line G.fast is cheap, true FTTP is expensive. The Goverment seem to have seen through BT's own propaganda today, and side stepped them.

Pointless G.fast is not the best Ultrafast Broadband solution for the topology of the UK, especially rurally. It's a solution that is technically biased towards BT's existing Copper Carcass infrastructure.

If you aim is blanket coverage, G.fast is not the answer.

If your aim is to obfuscate, use 'upto' speeds, have a technical method to artificially 'restrict' Broadband to pretend its a finite resource, so you can have a tiered charging structure, for faster services, then BT's approach is the correct approach for BT, there is no denying that, but its not the right approach for UK plc.

Re: Availabilty vs cost

" BT are really dragging their heels if they can get away with it"

Why would they deliberately do that?

I dont know - round here they would be better off pulling fibre through rather than the two or three attempts at repairing the 'copper' every year. It could be they are waiting for the government to give them a grant to do it. I dont think you can expect rational decisions from BT and Openreach. I'd guess the fibre is already in place from the amount of fibre they have installed - but they dont seem to want to connect it.

Re: 5, 6, 7, 8G...

Are you one of my neighbours!

I can only use my mobile indoors near some of the North facing windows, no internal mobile signal otherwise

Re: 5, 6, 7, 8G...

The trick is to use fixed microwave links rather than "mobile" technology. I've got a 10meg connection for £20 a month through a dish on my roof to a mast some distance away. You don't need a fixed phoneline with voip so its even cheaper than it looks. I'd get 30meg for £40 if I was closer to the mast. No throttling or bandwidth limits either. Perhaps wouldn't work as well in a city, although its great where I live, which is disturbingly flat.

To give you an idea of the scale of what these guys are doing http://www.boundlessnetworks.co.uk/coverage/. The do seem to cover at least parts of Preston so... It might make more sense to fund companies like this in a lot of places (geography permitting).