I'm not denying that existing FTTC needs to be improved. Many people, self included, struggle to reach any more than 20s of Mbps, and that's not enough. These are the people I think BT should be trying to help.
There you go, if you had FTTP you would have the speeds you'd ordered presuming no congestion elsewhere.
But this (subject of this thread) is about a new, ground-up, development. Surely all it would take would be careful positioning of cabinets, to ensure everybody there gets perfectly good FTTC?
I wonder if the real issue might be, for ground-up new developments (whole new towns), Fibre might a actually be as cheap, or cheaper than copper.
Exactly, laying fibre to you or me is very expensive because the roads have to be dug up in a lot of cases, and peoples drives and gardens, unless of course you're fed by poles - we're not. On a new estate it is built fully ducted right into the house. So which is cheaper - installing FTTC cabs, power to them etc, or simply pulling fibre through those ducts straight into the properties. By using fibre you don't get all the ongoing maintenance issues you get with copper either, so cheaper long term as well.
Leaving the consumer to foot the bill for additional costs of terminal equipment with backup batteries and I think (may stand corrected) increased energy costs vs FTTC modems?
You only need
back up batteries for the ONT to enable a land line phone to work, the large majority of people won't have back batteries for the broadband equipment, and a lot won't even have a land line, we only have dect phones (very rarely used) and no battery backup for the base station even though I have a UPS for all the network gear. We 4 mobiles in the house on two different networks. I doubt the ONT is any more expensive to run than a modem for FTTC, although you'll need a two box solution like many of us have anyway.
If it was a choice between FTTC and FTTP I know what the large majority of us would choose :-)
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/63912/bt_group_plc.pdfEdited to add battery backup links