UK third worst in Europe for fibre-to-the-premises – report

We were in the same position - all direct Exchange lines. BT/Openreach got round this by building a green cabinet outside the exchange and FTTCing from that. Get about 34mbs downstream so not brilliant but certainly not bad!

>Openreach - I often wonder what they actually do.

Take your money and give you excuses.

BT is the problem and not the solution.

You didn't miss it

It's just not there.

Such a shame.

Re: Help

I missed the link to the Study. If its UK 1.8% what was the highest?

Well, the study has some relevance, but for customers the question is not what technology is deployed, but how well it works. If you look at the widely availble reports on average internet connection speeds, you end up (even with latest data) with a map not too dissimilar to this. That's from 2015 and latest available data pushes up all of the figures shown by about 15% or so across all countries, but that map gives a nice graphical view that is still accurate in comparative ranking terms.

The facts are inconvenient for many, but actually, the UK and Openreach (for all our carping) are doing comparatively well when you look at the data from the comparable EU economies. So perhaps optimising copper isn't such a bad thing after all. If the money turns up for either G.fast, or universal FTTP, that'll be grand, if it doesn't then you lot might be glad that they're doing what they are.

Makes no difference to me of course, suckiing data down my 200 Mbps VM pipe. Did you know that when you download data at that speed, it makes a woooshing noise? Of course, silly me, you won't know that on VDSL. Bwahahahahahahahaaha!

Re: Help

It would have been nice to have a link to the report, or even to tell us what the top were getting so we could see how badly we are performing (if we are), or even a table to illustrate that better.

That would be far more useful than happens with other articles where Twitter or Facebook 'grabs' are included to repeat what's just been quoted as having been said - which adds absolutely nothing to an article.

Given the lack of information; I am not convinced FTTP is a useful metric or even if we are performing as badly as the figures and our ranking makes it look

Re: Help

Links:

IHS Markit press release:

https://technology.ihs.com/595739/growth-in-european-high-speed-broadband-availability-and-4g-lte-coverage-progress-confirmed-by-ihs-markit-and-european-commission-study

EU Report:

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/study-broadband-coverage-europe-2016

Whilst I've not read the report yet, although it isn't a peer reviewed scientific paper, as it is an official EU report, I would hope its data gathering and conclusions are reasonably rigorous.

The UK needs fast fibre to copy over the corporate data centre over to the new premises in France.

London’s tech elite discuss Brexit Britain with French PM

Already beating Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland in terms of average speeds. Will it be OK to post that on the side of a bus?

I hadn't checked for ages on availability for mine but you prompted me to. Mercifully, I have Virgin fibre for my broadband as BT's offering has always been dire where I live. So, let's see what is on offer today shall we:

Estimated speeds

1Mb-3.5Mb

512k Lowest assured download speed

Oh, and I also get the 5 months blah blah for fibre message too. I'm a little South of you, on the Wirral, if anything changes in the next 5 months I'll be suitably astonished.

Korea is rolling out g.fast to improve coverage cost effectively.

The headline speed figure doesn't tell you that coverage outside of cities is very poor. Easy to have a high average speed if you don't cover rural areas.

Re: Judging from the steam...

Could someone dream up some ropey reasons how that pic is at all relevant to the article?

The only reason everyone in England does not have FTTP is graft and other corruption, imho.

Actually it isn't. The fundamental driver is that the old copper last mile network is owned by BT, who took over the (really, really rubbish) state telecoms provider AND its underfunded pension liabilities. Because the pension scheme provided final salary, index linked pensions, BT have to earn sufficient to keep the Ponzi pension scheme (designed and agreed when a state owned entity) afloat, and that suck continuous amounts of cash out of the business. They recently closed off the generous pension scheme, but the liabilities have a bad habit of continuing to rise, as RPI outstrips CPI, and as old buzzards refuse to die for longer.

What should have happened is that the tossers of government should always have accrued for pension liabilities, instead of assuming that somebody else can pay for them - but that wasn't what happened, and the result is that BT took on those promises of jam tomorrow.

I think the requirement to wholesale hurts investment. The Canadian telco gets a much better return on investment because every customer it connects buys Internet from them. In the UK, Opebreach build and Sky and talk talk make the money.

Re: Why is Openreach like a Duck?

You're forgetting the other restriction which is that there has to be power near the termination to run the NTE - most phone master sockets in the UK are in hallways or by front doors, where there's no nearby power socket.

Once you start installing mains spurs or trying to run fibre unobtrusively and safely inside the home the costs soon start racking up I'd imagine.

how does Openreach get free power? Glass is a reasonably poor conductor. What would they be powering?

Re: City of culture

From everything I have heard, they do a pretty good internet service there, for a good price.

Is a monopoly in an area that bad if they are still investing and keeping up / exceeding the performance in the rest of the country?

Re: The Old Green Copper Ropewalk

Future revenue?

The lack of new revenues from rolling out FTTP is one of the major commercial problems. Most people will simply buy the cheapest thing available and very few will pay more. When there's a full rollout of FTTP I expect the revenue won't change at all - people will only take it if it costs the same as the copper service they already get.