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back to article Openreach: Comms providers 'welcome' our full-fibre 'ambition'

Openreach reckons its 580 communications providers "have welcomed the ambition" to increase the UK's woeful fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) coverage. However, some folk remain less impressed. As revealed by The Register in August, Openreach has estimated it will need to fork out between £3bn and £6bn to invest in 10 million FTTP …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

    BT/Openreach are still making out full FTTP is difficult.

    The Welsh Superfast Cymru rollout has shown, that they can deliver Fibre via overhead cables via existing Telegraph Poles, with the caveat of having to avoid Overhead Power Lines (due the conductive reinforcement used within the fibre optic cable, not the fact the optical signal is affected).

    Much of this cabling has been attached to Telegraph Poles so quickly, locals fail to even notice when the work is carried out. The overhead fibre is delivered to Green Splitter boxes at eye-level on Telegraph Poles, near to properties, ready to be connected up.

    The end of year 2017 deadline for the Superfast Cymru contract is approaching fast. Communication regarding the rollout has been dire. Many have asked the question will rollout continue into 2018, but without an answer from either BT/Ofcom/Welsh Assembly. For years, enablement dates have delayed.

    But as the deadline approaches, areas like Ceredigion are currently swamped with Contractors, to avoid fines being issued for late deployment. By the looks of it, the loose coils of fibre that have sat there for 2-3 years or more, are finally being joined up, and builds are reaching the 'ready for ordering' stage.

    It's showing full Fibre can work, when BT is really pushed, but it takes a lot of effort to get BT to show its hands,

    When BT get to it (as they have been of late), even in the remotest rural locations, FTTP can be deployed rapidly and isn't the headache BT always try to make out it is.

    It seems BT mostly make it out to be more difficult than it is, in order to justify their massive wasted investment in Pointless G.fast, which is now looking more and more like a lame duck.

    Ofcom, we desperately now need a cut-off date for any new Copper installation. Enough is Enough.

    10 4 Reply
    1. Streaker1506
      Reply Icon

      Re: Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

      Staggers outside and wonders what percentage of the population will voluntarily say yes, I'll be happy to pay another £7.00 per month. If the ISP's are struggling to get more than 25% onto VDSL, what chance has FTTP got.

      Then the cost would need to be shared amongst those that take up FTTP, and we still end up with a 2 tier network. So unless everybody goes FTTP with the same wholesale cost, there will be major implications for the Business Case.

      BT are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

      S

      8 2 Reply
      1. Richard Simpson
        Reply Icon

        Re: Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

        I can definitely state that I do not want to pay another £7 per month.

        Currently I get 40Mb down and 10Mb up via FTTC and I could switch to 80/20 for a one off fee of £15 if I wanted. Everything seems to work just fine and I am not in a hurry to pay an extra £84 per year for extra speed which I clearly don't need.

        5 2 Reply
        1. M Mouse
          Reply Icon

          Re: Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

          Being very nosy, but who offers you the one-off fee for such an upgrade ?

          Being very, very, nosy, what are you paying right now ?

          Asking because my current home is limited to an "up to 38 Mbps" service though I can see a fibre cabinet from one of the bedroom windows and the takeaway across the main road has an estimate of double the speed available for me... Also, while Virgin Media offers service in this postcode area, the few strets around me are definitely not getting any service from VM now, nor is any service expected to come to fruition from VM during my lifetime.

          0 0 Reply
          1. Richard Simpson
            Reply Icon

            Re: Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

            I am with Andrews and Arnold. Currently I pay £35 per month for their VDSL service with 200GB download (which I don't get near using). A&A are quite an expensive ISP but they have truly fantastic technical support, are entirely happy with Linux based customers and appear to genuinely value my privacy.

            When I bought my current service you could have 40/10 or 80/20. Subsequently they stopped the 40/10 for new customers and offered 80/20 at the same price. Those on the old service could upgrade for £15. To be honest I have to admit that I don't know if this offer is still valid.

            0 0 Reply
        2. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

          Well you may in the future when more people use your cabinet, then you will suffer from cross-talk, this has happened to other subscribers. Then perhaps 84 GBP will become very attractive, and cheaper than buying a new build where FTTP is a requirement.

          2 0 Reply
        3. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

          Well, you can pretty much say goodbye to ubiquitous 5G then too, going forward, because it won't happen without a lot more consumer FTTP in the local loop to piggyback off cheaply, to keep the rollout costs of 5G reasonable.

          People understand the concept of a 4G data communicating between a Phone and a 4G Mast but seem to lose sight of how the data is transmitted from the mast elsewhere. It's done by a fibre optic/or part microware backhaul.

          Mobile 5G is cloud-based in terms of signal processing/hand-over (to keep the cost of the hardware 5G cells lower, simpler - as you need far more/more densely populated cells, to get the data throughput 5G offers.

          Each 5G cell uses the fibre optic backhaul to coordinate cloud-based signal processing/hand over between phones/adjoining cells. Yes, you can have limited focus 5G in cities without FTTP rollout in the local loop, but I doubt it will happen elsewhere without pure FTTP rollout much deeper into the UK's network, so you can easily connect up 'piggyback' small street light 5G cells to the nearby laid fibre.

          If you don't want improved 5G mobile either then you'll be fine Richard. The point is, so much else in the future (e.g. self driving cars) will be dependent on a decent fibre backhaul. We have to start now, with some joined up thinking to match.

          Any talk by Ofcom of 5G is 'pie in the sky' in terms of the practicalities of 5G rollout otherwise, it just won't happen.

          1 1 Reply
          1. Richard Simpson
            Reply Icon

            Re: Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

            Well, I think what you are describing here Adam is a concept called taxation. Everyone pays something and there is some alleged universal benefit. This is of course a fine and wonderful thing IF the benefit is sufficiently universal. Sadly, many such benefits are not universal e.g. flood defences usually don't benefit tax payers on top if hills and schools are not particularly beneficial for the childless.

            Your 5G and driverless car examples seem from where I am sitting to fall into the same category. My mobile phone isn't smart in almost any sense of the word and probably doesn't exceed 2G and similarly my 1997 Ford Fiesta is working just fine and I intend to keep it in that state until I am too geriatric to drive it. Perhaps I will need a self driving car then or perhaps I will be too senile to care!

            In summary, I think that 5G is an excellent and clever thing and I am all in favour of it, provided that those who pay for it are those who want to use it.

            1 1 Reply
            1. Anonymous Coward
              Reply Icon
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

              "Sadly, many such benefits are not universal e.g. flood defences usually don't benefit tax payers on top if hills and schools are not particularly beneficial for the childless."

              So when the next flood comes and your hilltop cottage gets cut off from the rest of the world, you'll be OK with it if they don't reinstate the roads, electricity supply and anything else leading to your property that got broken as a result?

              People who are childless generally benefited from a state education, so that aspect of their taxes is repayment for that investment. The children being educated now will do the same when they're old enough.

              Next you'll be saying that you weren't sick this year, and you're not drawing a pension, so you should be let off your NI contributions.

              2 0 Reply
      2. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

        Line Rentals have gone up by more than £7 a month since Gordon Brown's muted idea of increasing line rentals by a levy of £6 a year (£0.50 a month) to potentially fund a Broadband USO of 2Mbps. We never did get the USO and what a pathetic USO that seems now in only 8 years, as is the idea of a 10Mbps USO.

        It needs to be at least 30Mbps because a 30Mbps USO forces fundamental changes in the underlying delivery platform by Openreach, towards a more reliable pure FTTP for longer lines of 500m or more.

        A 10Mbps USO doesn't. It uses (what is) a make-do "crumbs" approach still based on mostly copper/copper bonding, LRVDSL with little to no change, in the unreliable obfuscated, bamboozled "up to" delivery platform of legacy copper for longer lines.

        That's why Grant Shapps/Ofcom/BT set the figure of a 10Mbps USO, their self-interests means, instead of spending money putting in Fibre in the ground, they spend the money on a complex paper shuffling speed monitoring/a fine based customer merry-go-round of firefighting complaints, which fundamentally doesn't address the problem of unreliable slow broadband speeds at peak times, for those customers.

        These customers remain in exactly the same boat. Their copper will be patched and patched again so it 'just' reaches 10Mbps, replacing 0.5mm copper with 0.9mm copper etc. BT will up the potential call-out service charges (if the fault is on the customer's side) to put off those complaints.

        Ofcom increasing their monitoring role is not a sign of success, it's a sign a failure of delivery system/failure of privatisation. The more pure fibre rollout we have in the UK network the less we need Ofcom, no wonder Ofcom prefer to patch up legacy copper to offer a 10Mbps USO. It's in Ofcom's interest to do so.

        A 10Mbps USO is the 'Throw a few crumbs to those complaining types', approach. It's already out of date before its even being legislated for.

        It doesn't set the UK up for the future, one bit.

        6 2 Reply
        1. anthonyhegedus Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

          30mbps is NOT a good goal for a USO. The trouble is that more and more services will come that will need more and more bandwidth. More devices in the home, and bigger, faster downloads required. I get around 30Mbps through this ridiculous half-arsed FTTC/VDSL technology. It's good enough for most things, but not quite good enough for 4K at 60FPS, and certainly not good enough for 8K video. So who cares? Nobody too much right now, but in 20 years time when the ONLY technology that'll work well enough to go up to gigabit or multi-gigabit speeds is fibre, and half the country is still on a USO of 10 or even 30Mbps, we'll lag behind the rest of the world.

          Put it this way: in 2017 the maximum speed I can get at home is 30Mbps (where I used to live, was 80, but I don't live there any more). In 1997, the maximum speed I could get was 30Kbps. That's a factor of 1000 in 20 years. Even at work, we only had 256Kbps.

          Though we can't get 30Gbps now, we know that fibre CAN do it. So why aren't we planning properly for that. If the only way is to add £7 a month to EVERYONE'S broadband bill, so be it. It's far less than the cost of not being able to compete with more forward thinking countries in 20 years' time. The trouble is ensuring that the £84 a year 'broadband tax' goes towards getting us nothing less than full fibre to every single building in the country, if needed.

          1 0 Reply
    2. Commswonk
      Reply Icon

      Re: Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

      @ Adam Jarvis: It's showing full Fibre can work...

      No it doesn't, at least not yet. At most it proves that it is physically possible to roll out fibre optic cables, but "showing that full fibre can work" depends on the take - up rate by users. Now in rural areas uptake might be quite significant, given that the choice will be between non - existent or totally crap ADSL / VDSL and fibre, but in areas where the ADSL / VDSL services meet users' requirements the adoption rate is likely to be a lot less.

      It is only a few weeks since I declined BT's offer of an increase in speed from 52 Mb/s to 76 Mb/s because the lower speed more than meets my (actually our) needs, and the additional £5 or thereabouts per month would not have been money well spent; it would have been utterly pointless expenditure. On that basis there is no way I want to pay an additional £7 per month to get a speed that is far in excess or what I (we) need. See Streaker150 and Richard Simpson above.

      The only way full - fibre is likely to achieve significant penetration in areas where ADSL / VDSL meets users' needs is either by marketeers lying to them about the speed they need (i.e. miss - selling) or by BT suddenly deciding that is going to withdraw copper - based distribution. If that happens it will be interesting to see how Ofcom reacts; is it a regulator, there to protect the interests of consumers, or a shill for the broadband industry? I don't know how long BT have allowed for the costs of providing FTTC to be amortised but I cannot see the business wanting to withdraw a service that hasn't paid for itself yet.

      It is only a few days since it was announced that subscribers without broadband will have their line rental reduced, so simply shutting down the copper network almost as an act of spite is unlikely to receive a favourable response. Will they have to pay a premium to have telephone over fibre without any accompanying broadband? "Taxing" copper (either in total or over a given length) will result in similar anomalies.

      2 2 Reply
    3. Roland6 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Sit on Hands, became show hands slightly, BT still act like the drunk blocking the Pub doorway.

      Re: Superfast Cymru and "BT get to it"

      Well this probably explains why the rest of the UK is a bit of a backwater; all the BT/OR engineers are busy in Wales...

      0 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Has anyone considered...

    The potential cost savings of being able to decommission the legacy copper network in the medium term?

    It may be cheaper to help users get on to FTTP once (if) take-up is high enough.

    4 0 Reply
    1. Commswonk
      Reply Icon

      Re: Has anyone considered...

      ....decommission the legacy copper network...

      Do you mean "completely" or only as far as broadband is concerned? Given the requirement to have a telephone service that works during a power failure "completely" looks like a non - starter. Although batteries in cabinets are a practical option, batteries at each individual user's premises are not; technically possible, certainly, but not a practical option given that the telcos would have to take responsibility for their long term support.

      2 3 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Has anyone considered...

        Depends on the batteries. If you need an array of lead acids to keep the phones running, then yeah, we have a problem. If you just need to upgrade to a handset that incorporates a rechargable PP3 for emergencies then it's no biggie.

        0 0 Reply
      2. SImon Hobson Bronze badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Has anyone considered...

        Given the requirement to have a telephone service that works during a power failure "completely" looks like a non - starter.

        Actually that problem was solved many years ago. BT ran trails in a couple of villages where they completely removed copper and went all fibre. As far as telephony went, users really didn't notice anything other than a slightly larger NTE that needed a mains supply - but it had it's own battery to run a POTS phone for a day or two in the absence of power. The technology for making telephony all digital to the user premises has been around for a long time (c.f. ISDN-2) and effectively it's moving the digital-analogue conversion from a rack of cards in the exchange to a small NTE in the user premises.

        It was claimed at the time (by BT) that an all-fibre network would be more reliable and cheaper to maintain. I wonder how long it took them to bury that fact when it didn't suit their needs !

        1 1 Reply
      3. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Has anyone considered...

        For someone who claims to be a "comms wonk" your knowledge seems to be a bit outdated.

        FTTP operators worldwide have provided battery backups for years now - yes, they are practical and yes they are customer-friendly. The old sealed lead acid systems have given away to AA or D cells that are easily changed. Not going to keep things up if your power is out for days, but good enough to keep it online during most power cuts. In living memory I can only think of one time the power was out for more than an hour - and that's a planned outage when WPD were replacing cables.

        The reality is that most people who actually still use landlines, likely have a cordless phone anyway - not going to work in a power outage. Advice to keep a cheap corded phone in the drawer just in case is often not heeded.

        Copper is going away and no amount of whinging is going to stop that. Verizon's already doing it - their strategy is now "fibre is the only fix" for the copper that has been damaged by recent weather events, and working copper is being decommissioned in favour of FTTH. Totally understandable and IMO commendable. The luddites who think telcos will spend millions maintaining a network for their "low cost" ADSL might want to think again.

        From your other post you state that landline-only customers may not be able to keep their cheap service. Why not? BT's FTTP ONT has phone ports, technically no internet service is needed to make them work (it's VoIP over a closed network). No reason why BT Retail and other CPs can't offer that service. If they intend to force migration to FTTH they're going to have to provide roughly equivalent services.

        3 0 Reply
      4. Roland6 Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Has anyone considered...

        Batteries...

        I suggest you look at the Ofcom documentation concerning Battery back-up for full fibre/FTTP services where publicly available telephone services (PATS) is part of the service.

        There seems to be two areas of debate: who provides the batteries when an independent provider installs FTTP services and how long the batteries should last.

        In 2011 Ofcom changed its requirement from a minimum of 4 hours to 1 hour duration of the back-up facility should be 1 hour - which BT satisfy by a battery back-up unit (BBU) containing 4 consumer replaceable AA rechargeables of 2000maAh.

        Interestingly, the 1 hour back-up has been calculated to cover 74% of power outages; the 4 hour back-up covered 94%.

        1 0 Reply
      5. anthonyhegedus Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Has anyone considered...

        The requirement to have a phone that works with no power is based on what exactly? What about the huge numbers of people who have got rid of their home phone altogether (what's a home phone *for* exactly?)? What about people who have just a cordless home phone whose base station needs power?

        In France, if you get a new broadband connection at home, you tend to get switched over to voip. The voip works through the router. That needs power.

        Hanging onto this is hanging onto an old fashioned paradigm.

        1 0 Reply
        1. Roland6 Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Has anyone considered...

          The requirement to have a phone that works with no power is based on what exactly?

          The requirement is to have a phone line that works, it is up to the customer to provide a phone that can use the line... However, a number of reasons as to why providers must provide a working line are given in the consultation documents:

          https://www.ofcom.org.uk/consultations-and-statements/category-1/superfast-broadband

          What about people who have just a cordless home phone whose base station needs power?

          That's the customers' choice and problem.

          Hanging onto this is hanging onto an old fashioned paradigm.

          Is having a working phone system (albeit only for an hour after the power goes off) that permits users to make emergency calls, really an old fashioned paradigm. I get it that only a few may require this facility, but then like seat belts in cars, when you need them you need them.

          0 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A Tax on longer copper lines could work, either per metre or lines over 500m/250m-as the crow flies

    Replacing the legacy copper. One option.

    A Tax on legacy copper lines based on their overall length from exchange/FTTC cabinet could be an option to force BT to use more pure fibre FTTP, without penalising against G.fast, if BT still want to go that route for certain types of rollout i.e. tenements.

    For blanket Ultrafast "up to" 100Mbps+ G.fast to work, it requires much shorter copper lines < 250m/125m-crow flies. As a ballpark figure, G.fast doesn't work for anyone on 2 pair copper lines longer than 500m/250m, so tax any line longer than that. Make the tax incremental over the next 7 years till 2025, so the longer BT takes to shorten their length, bring fibre closer to the subscriber, the more it costs them.

    It would be a better approach than limiting/regulating the margin BT can make from "up to" 40Mbps FTTC lines, as Ofcom has currently proposed.

    This could simply start with a tax on BT on any legacy copper lines longer than 500m, with an even higher tax on Aluminium (so aluminium is replaced first). It could offer tax incentives in order to force BT to scrap the copper in longer lines (realising the copper's scrap value) to offset the tax on those longer copper lines.

    We have to level the playing field as regards location, in the UK, in terms of Broadband availability.

    The weasels at Ofcom have got it so wrong at the moment and it's such a cop-out by the regulator. The regulation of Broadband shouldn't be technology agnostic, as Ofcom currently define it.

    Broadband should be location agnostic, but not technology agnostic, so people can work and live anywhere (within reason) while still having the best broadband speeds London has to offer, that has to be key, going forward.

    Broadband has shown its importance to the UK economy in a very short space of time, we need to embrace that fully, the UK as a whole, can't afford not to, even if BT thinks it can, for it's own benefit.

    We also need a method to automatically move any customer to the best delivery platform available for free for 12 months, with the (hidden) option then to downgrade after 12 months, back to the lower price, so they can test new technologies like pure FTTP, to see how it benefits/allow customers to get used to it/try it out.

    4 3 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A Tax on longer copper lines could work...

      I share your dislike of the often-flaky copper/aluminium sweating technologies, but there's a problem with your suggestion of taxing long lines. The government already impose business rates on cable deployments, whether they're aluminium, copper, fibre or unlit fibre. Smaller operators have to pay the amount based on their deployed assets, wheras BT (and VM, IIRC) have no idea of the full scale of how much legacy cabling they have so they pay based on an estimate. The smaller operators argue that the effective tax rate BT pay on their infrastructure is much lower than they have to pay - if true they're effectively subsidising their large monopoly-owning competitor.

      With this in mind, a new tax based on the length of individual wires hasn't a snowballs chance in hell of working, because they still won't know how much they need to pay. Even setting a higher business rate for copper versus fibre would be problematic, given that BT would still just be guessing a figure and presenting it to the man from HMRC, over lunch at the Ivy.

      Oh, and forcing people to upgrade to higher priced comms, with a hidden option to roll back after 12 months if they didn't need the benefits of the new technology? Not sure that's going to be a wildly popular move.

      1 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: A Tax on longer copper lines could work...

        "With this in mind, a new tax based on the length of individual wires hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of working, because they still won't know how much they need to pay"

        Not true.

        Line Attenuation, DB loss of a line is just as good in terms of calculating the line length. It's a figure shown by most routers like Netgear etc. Ofcom just needs to declare a maximum line attenuation, and state a yearly reduction plan to reduce the copper line attenuation to the equivalent to the line attenuation required to deliver an Ultrafast G.fast Broadband* connection of 100Mbps, over the next 7 years, so most fibre is either brought closer to the subscriber or the subscriber is moved onto pure FTTP.

        This can be built into the Web Portal of the BT Home hub, to remove the technical aspect, so customers are made aware that there line is below par, based on the current line attenuation figure.

        *If BT are going to promote Pointless G.fast at least make sure every single BT line is capable of sustaining a 100Mbps G.fast connection before promoting it, in terms of line attenuation.

        As said, the more lines BT have, that are incapable of achieving this, are taxed at higher rates incrementally, annually, so the quicker BT reduce the line attenuation of all lines, the less they pay.

        It's shame BT management are so inept. There has never been a better window of opportunity for BT to replace its obfuscated, bamboozled "up to" legacy copper network. Copper scrap values are high and interest rates are historically low. That window is already starting to close, as interest rates start to move up.

        Sitting on their hands acting like the drunk blocking the pub doorway (waiting for handouts) means BT may have missed the opportunity to get much more reliable network for the UK's future.

        Now it's likely, it will have to be forced upon them, Fibre rollout is coming whether they like it or not.

        1 0 Reply

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