Kitz Forum
Announcements => News Articles => Topic started by: roseway on November 14, 2014, 07:13:22 AM
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BT has asked OFCOM for permission to absorb their Wholesale division into Openreach to save costs.
Telegraph article (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/telecoms/11229857/BT-plans-to-scrap-2.4bn-Wholesale-division.html)
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For faults this may be a good thing as its one less step in the ladder between the consumer and engineer so the engineer's are more likely to get detailed notes.
I think the reason LLU isp's dont like it, is then openreach will takeover what BTw does and that means openreach itself will be a competitor rather than just supplier.
Personally I dont have a big issue with the proposal.
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Good find Eric, thank you for posting. This I believe will greatly benefit the customers and ISPs. I would be happy for it to proceed, but how the LLU providers will take it is a different matter, so it will be interesting to see what OFCOM say.
Since FTTC, then the blur between Openreach and Wholesale has got confusing. It seemed ridiculous that BT wholesale and BT Openreach were each buying products from the other.. and certainly as far as fibre is concerned, it just added another layer of confusion for the EU.
Prior to FTTC the boundary was much clearer and didn't matter as much, but with FTTC Ive long suspected that its the 'Chinese wall' that stops the ISPs being able to make any changes or reset the IPprofile.* Merging the two should make fault procedures simpler for both the EU and the provision side of things much easier for the ISP.
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* The current situation is that BTw controls all the profiles via NCAS & the OSS (http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/DLM_system.htm#DLM_grahic). The SP hooks into NCAS and can make configuration requests.
However with FTTC, Openreach becomes a customer of BTw so only BToR has access to the OSS to perform any changes and the ISP has no direct access. Same as any third party/white label supplier has no direct access to DLM and has to go via whomever they purchase from.
Further evidence that Openreach is a customer of BTw is also shown in the fact that they don't use the normal stability levels (http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/DLM.htm#dlm_stability_level) and instead use the custom thresholds which is why we see E/Secs rather than SNR parameters and all the confusion between Standard /Stable/Speed.
These additional layers only serve to complicate things for the ISP and EU. So yes I believe merging the two would be beneficial to the consumer.
Please note the DLM page is still being worked on and not yet live. - But the diagram shows what Im trying to say, whereby when BToR becomes the customer of BTw, then it breaks the chain where the dotted orange line is for any config changes.
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sadly tho kitz ofcom work on the idea that they are only there to enforce fair competition, they have the belief that alone benefits the consumer, so they may not look at this in the same way me and you do.
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Yep.. Ive no doubt that the LLU providers will kick up a fuss.
Theres some that say OFCOM is in the pocket of BT and others that say they are in the pocket of Sky/TT/Virgin. Which ever way this goes then the accusations will no doubt fly... and little consideration given as to what is actually best for the consumers :(