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No Compete Clause in BDUK rollouts?

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jon_:
Hi All

Slightly left field question here, but if anyone can find an answer, you lot can :)

I live in a rural part of Wiltshire, way out in the sticks, too far away from the FTTC cab to get a VDSL connection, and approx 5K from the exchange so scraping by with 2-3M ADSL. We've been pestering Wilts Online for the past forever about what their plans are..

Phase 1 was upgrading the (too far away cab) to support VDSL.

Phase 2 is/was in conjunction with BT. It looks like BT will be soon deploying fibre via pole / duct and doing an FTTH/Infinity 4 rollout to two postcodes within our village. The rest of the postcodes were out of scope, as potentially are houses that aren't provided service via overhead cable - several are via buried cable...

Phase 3 has just been announced - Gigaclear have won the tender and will be rolling out FTTH to the postcodes that aren't covered in Phase 2, at some point in 2018/19.

If you map out the phase 3 postcodes, they are split by the BT ones in Phase 2, so Gigaclear will have to lay fibre across the Phase 2 postcodes. Does anyone know if there are typically no compete clauses in the contracts - so Gigaclear will be forbidden from putting in their connection points in the BT postcodes, or connecting people up from these postcodes as BT won that contract?

One of the concerns that some residents have with BT is that the cheapest FTTH packages are expensive (BT have quoted us approx £70/month for 80/20), and the setup that BT provide with a much lower upload speed isn't as attractive as GC with their symmetrical offerings. Also the residents that are supplied by buried cabled may not be upgraded to fibre as BT have hinted that it's too much effort to get fibre to the premise...

Any insights much appreciated!

j0hn:

--- Quote ---One of the concerns that some residents have with BT is that the cheapest FTTH packages are expensive (BT have quoted us approx £70/month for 80/20), and the setup that BT provide with a much lower upload speed isn't as attractive as GC with their symmetrical offerings
--- End quote ---
I don't know where you got that info but it's wrong. With FTTH you can order Infinity 1&2 for the exact same price as FTTC.

jon_:
Interesting - one of the other residents rang up BT, said they were getting FTTP very soon and they quoted that as the cheapest option!!

j0hn:
Infinity 1 & 2 are both available on FTTC/FTTH at the same price.
Infinity 3 & 4 are only available with FTTH, and obviously cost a bit more.
It would be very unfair to charge FTTH customers more for the exact same packages as FTTC customers.

jon_:
That's definitely not what BT told the person that spoke to them - however you are right - if you look at thinkbroadband you can see that those packages are listed for both FTTC and FTTP!!

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