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[Bowdon]

BT Reveal Massive UK G.fast Pilot and LR-VDSL Broadband Trial Areas

The CEO of Openreach (BT), Clive Selley, has today given a progress update on their plans to improve national broadband connectivity. Among other things this included improvements to their FTTP roll-out for new build homes, a list of trial locations for the 10Mbps USO focused LR-VDSL technology and a huge extension of their G.fast pilot to 140,000 UK premises.

Selley’s update comes at a time when BT’s network access division is under a spotlight as part of Ofcom’s once-in-a-decade review of the United Kingdom’s digital communications market, which has yet to reach a final deal with BT due to a conflict over the issue of Openreach’s governance.

In keeping with that Openreach’s boss was keen to show that the operator wasn’t just standing still and did plan to make big improvements. The result is that we today received a shotgun blast of important updates and we’ll go through the main ones first.

Openreach cranking up the ultrafast engine out of 1st gear

While the debate about what is best for the UK in terms of its broadband future continues with the public battle of the PR machines between BT/Virgin Media and the group behind the FixBritainsInternet campaign continues Openreach is still in the game of delivering connectivity and the CEO Clive Selley has announced some key changes for the coming year and beyond.

[WWWombat]

So Nokia (ex-Alcatel) have forced their way in as a supplier, eh? Interesting...

[NEXUS2345]

If I remember correctly EE signed a deal with Nokia to deliver a lot of their 4G infrastructure, which is likely the reason for that choice. Nice to see a different player as opposed to ECI again, and hopefully Nokia will be a worth rival to the Huawei kit.

[WWWombat]

Yes, EE has used Nokia for a lot of the mobile network infrastructure for a long time. That was one of the core bits of the original Nokia, well before taking over Alcatel-Lucent.

[Bowdon]

I'm a bit concerned what this means for ECI cabinets and G.fast.

Have ECI cabinets been used in the G.fast trials?

I wonder if Nokia is being brought in to help with the nodes, or if they will be building a Nokia cabinet in the future?

[NEXUS2345]

The brand of FTTC cabinet does not matter, as the G.fast cabinets will be extensions to the PCP, not the FTTC cab. The extensions will probably be built by Nokia, or we could see BT work with both to develop a common cabinet which supports both brands' DSLAMs.

[Weaver]

Please Clive, do some LR-VDSL in Heasta, Skye. 

I wonder what the network topology was like in Lewis before they did the Tolastadh LR-VDSL implementation? Was it an EO line-only situation? Did they already have any VDSL2, or what? Tolastadh is the northernmost settlement on the east side of Lewis, furthest away from Stornaway on that road. (Not counting An Rubha, the peninsula to the east of the Stornaway.) So in a way it’s comparable to my own situation, but in Lewis there is a continuous string of settlements all the way up that road (Bac for example), whereas in the case of Heasta, there's just nothing along the road at all for nearly four miles once you get away from the immediate area around the main A road at Harrapul on the outskirts of Broadford with not a single house before you get to me.