Kitz Forum
Broadband Related => Broadband Technology => Topic started by: Bowdon on October 19, 2015, 06:16:11 PM
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This is more of a talking point really.
I remember in the information we got about G.fast, a big stumbling block was how is it going to be powered. There was various suggestions, even some kind of power charge-back from the customers.
I can't remember if a way was finally decided on by BT or not? I think they was still investigating at the time.
I'm wondering about this situation now as the big electricity cable that goes right past the cabinet I'm on is being dug up and replaced. They are literally digging up all the way down a semi popular main road, and also branching off in to other roads.
Unfortunately this as increased my ES's up to 300 a day, though so far my SNR as kept fairly stable (it even went up to 7.2 on the download, which for me is very good lol ).
I know its a long shot, but as anyone else noticed any electrical works being done in their areas? I visited that roadworks.org website which as some fairly accurate information, especially around my area.
Also according to my dad when he drove past the cabinet I'm connected to (its right on the corner of the road being dug up), there is now a big Fibre Connected sticker on there. It's an ECI cabinet, unfortunately :(
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There's been a lot of work to drop the power used by g.fast nodes in order that pole installs can be reverse-powered from CPE. I don't think Openreach would be very likely to use this.
Your ES increase is going to be due to increased electrical noise from motors & generators associated with the roadworks.
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As pointed out above, 'reverse-power' (IE: from the EU) has pretty much been ruled out from the last communication I saw. I put it in a post on here somewhere that it would likely be *'forward powered' using spare pairs in the existing copper cable.
*Of course, this is 'in trial' as we speak and may change ??
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The reverse-powered system seems like a nightmare. What if some end users suddenly decide to stop delivering amps? Because granny plugs in the vacuum cleaner and pulls out the mains plug into that funny little box?
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That is exactly the point they're veering towards 'forward-powered', or localised pillars. :)
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The reverse-powered system seems like a nightmare. What if some end users suddenly decide to stop delivering amps? Because granny plugs in the vacuum cleaner and pulls out the mains plug into that funny little box?
Unsurprisingly that was one of the considerations :D
An example would probably be best here :
Take a 16-port pole-mounted g.fast node - a not uncommon design in some parts of Europe. Each end-user powers their own port plus a proportion of the common components (fibre backhaul/etc). The node will require something in the region of 30% end-user connectivity (& hence power) to keep the back-end running so as long as 5 customers are connected then its not an issue. There will be a battery in there as well which will keep it running for a few hours with no CPE-supplied power but ideally you don't want to be putting lithium batteries up a pole because of the inherent fire risk.
The problem is getting the subscribers in the first instance to power the node - chicken & egg situation for Openreach no doubt - but things are done differently in much of Europe where the incumbent/dominant teleco will just upgrade infrastructure, move people across to it & then sell them exactly the same package in terms of speed/TV/phoneline they had before (if they don't want to "upgrade").
Reverse-powering small nodes in remote/rural areas is what its all about, hence me saying Openreach won't be using it (frankly people in remote areas of the UK are screwed anyway, they're going to end up with satellite broadband "ticking the boxes").
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(frankly people in remote areas of the UK are screwed anyway, they're going to end up with satellite broadband "ticking the boxes").
I am screwed in one sense, but it all depends on how desperate you are vs how deep you want to put your hand into your pocket. Multiple line bonding works for me beautifully, it's invisible, it simply costs.
I read an OFCOM-commissioned report into a test study to answer the question "is satellite even an option, or just an expensive horrible con?". The answer was surprisingly, that it worked well for some applications, and users didn't even whine as they expected to. Obviously for interactive applications and anything that requires low latency it is and always will be an utter nightmare. And as for usability for auntie reading Facebook, whether that is bearable or not depends on the funny black boxes in the system that muck about with the operation of TCP, prefetch web content, and all kinds of vital tricks, which work well to conceal the horribleness of the thing. Unless of course in cases where those techniques are unavailable, because of encryption, VPNs or whatever.
Satellite will get a bit better, but I just can't see it being sustainable, and the gap between the haves and have-nots will only widen if the government adopts this cop-out as a way of pretending they have done the necessary to help the last 5%. Give rural users RF, or better still, just bite the bullet, ditch copper and give FTTP to those in greatest need. Then let economies of scale bring the costs of true fibre down. Shared rate-limited FTTP services might be a nice option for users who don't need mega speeds, don't do TV or movies over the Internet, the just want something half decent that can't support the needs of a multi-user household.
The government shouldn't even think about using the satellite con as a get-out to say they have a viable answer. Even though the Ofcom study said it is not as unusable as users expected and is fine for a very limited number of applications, there needs to be a realisation imho that multiple-user households or, god-forbid, small businesses are out of reach, and the satellite ridiculous costs for feeble performance and scary traffic-shaping are not going to go away. I think as the word gets out, if the government start talking too much about this, people will find out what a nightmare it is that is on offer and word will get around and then the con will evaporate as users I've satellite a bad name.
Unless someone comes up with a split land-line plus satellite architecture that works on VPNs, gives a fast low latency channel together with a bulk load booster channel, then imho satellite is going to shrink to a niche market, like satellite phones versus 4G phones.
The government should simply wake up and say real fibre plus long range RF and to hell with the cost, it's only like electrification of a country or building roads or railways. It's time to upgrade national infrastructure and give everyone 50Mbps if they want it, over real FTTP, or else RF that is not permitted to be ridiculously oversold, and has strong minimum performance limits despite the shared nature of the services.
Whatever needs to be done to force both the price of fibre per metre and the installation costs down, let's make it happen. It shouldn't be up to the whims of commercial companies whose decisions don't and can't align with the national interest. Treat it like electrification and the network owner(s) need to be like the national grid and the electricity utilities, coordinated and with a requirement to deliver a minimum guaranteed service to the nation never mind what they would prefer to spend.
A final thought. The cost _savings_ that fibre brings need to be considered. Copper is so ridiculously unreliable, users are stuck with zero performance guarantees, a service that works when it feels like it because it so vulnerable, and network operators are having to employ thousands of engineer just to keep mending the stupid thing. Fibre is fit for purpose, last-century phone wiring is not, yet BT cleverly keeps on pushing and pushing and tending the life of this obsolete medium, simply because the copper network is one of its three core monopoly assets, something that it owns and which no one else can build. Let anyone start laying local loop FTTP and require Openreach to terminate it as needed at controlled standard costs which are regulated and with requirements for future-proofing that are mandatory. There are a lot of costs to be saved in not having to continuously mend the thing and not having to deal with grumbling confused customers worrying about why on earth performance has gone bad again because of an attack by DLM having a bad day.
Phew, I feel better now. Truly apologise for the ridiculous length of this post.
[Moderator edited to fix the broken quotation link.]
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@Weaver
Totally agree with the words but do not see it happening any time soon.
BT will not pay out of their own pocket and the Govt will not fund it because they are still juggling everything else for the 'debt'. [I will not go there or this post will never end ;D]
The argument has been made again & again, just spend the money to get it done for the long term good of the country.
All Govts are short term in reality, no matter the rhetoric, they do not want to shoulder the costs and possible consequences, while giving the next govt any possible advantage.
[rant]
There should be a commitment on all govts to spend a certain amount on national infrastructure and for there to be independent assessment of what needs to be done.
The usual 'British way' is to ignore any big spends for as long as possible until it is so big it almost 'self deselects' because no govt can now afford to touch it with a barge pole.
At that point we open it up to the 'Private Sector' to suggest solutions for the least cost. [Near 'Least solution' for the 'least cost' in reality]
The least cost is agreed and then 12 months after contracts are signed the 'winnner' announces that true costs are now 5 times the original budget.
Contracts are of course so badly written that there is no penalty for this 'Error' for the 'winner' and the govt has to agree the new costs or cancel.
We end up paying 'more for less' and the wheel turns .......... rinse and repeat ..... Ad Nauseam :D :D
Sound familiar !!??
[/rant]
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As always, to add balance to the 'debate' ................... it is very likely, only the very low percentages of the UK populus that will require this fabulous, all-singing, all-dancing, fully-fibre network ...... and the gig-speeds it will deliver.
There's not a hope-in-hell any Government in power are going to roll-out a national programme to uplift the existing network, it would be political suicide with cuts being made in other departments that ARE needed, such as ALL emergency services.
I'm pretty sure if a poll were cast whether Joe Public want 1Gig broadband speeds, or a Police Service that can put boots on the street, the result wouldn't be in favour of BB speeds.
I fully understand there are needs (such as Weavers), and there are Geeks (such as ...... you know who you are ;) ), but BT are NOT here to make a loss, they're in it for profit ..... like any sane business would be.
I reiterate ...... there's hardly anybody out there that I meet on a daily basis that is even bothered about G.fast speeds, let alone FTTP. It's only the comparative few on forums like ours that talk about it.
PS ...... this is going slightly OT, apologies to Bowdon. :)
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Well that went OT fast :D
Regarding "National Infrastructure" type stuff :
You might want to take a long hard look at the Aussie NBN programme, how its morphed & been twisted by civil servant beancounters. To cut a long story short it's turned into "screw the country people, let them have satellite" while the urban areas appear to have felt the weight of whoever lobbied hardest (usually the incumbents for that area - whether commercial or political). Started out as a "get fibre to the premises" project and is a mess now.
The simplest answer (which is what NZ has done) is to have a commercial national infrastructure company totally independent of any retail/business telecos. You want an infrastructure company which sells infrastructure to end-users but leaves the services over that infrastructure to others. Anything else & you end up with political interference - Ofcom in the UK to keep BT in check, the whole bloody Aussie parliament down under :D
We digress & I never intended the thread to get diverted into bashing Openreach (if that's where we are?) - the reverse-powered g.fast nodes were never likely to take off in the UK/Ireland as mains power is likely to be very close by in all but the rarest of cases. That's not the case for a lot of Europe. One size doesn't fit all etc :)
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@rizla
I know the NBN pain well ..... have friends in OZ who give me the full SP at regular intervals ;D ;D
NBN is the textbook way NOT to do any National Infrastructure project.
BTW ... No bash of Openreach as I know they are a *Private* Commercial Entity that is focused on Profit for their shareholders, like every private company.
Hence no spending money for the sake of it.
National Infrastructure is a govt responsibility which if too often ignored as it costs too much and risks are too high. (Political mainly) :( :(
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I very much appreciate what BlackSheep is saying. The government IMHO should simply be coughing up what is needed and handing it to BT. In return BT carries on being the guardian of sanity and coordination of the asset and is required to offer access to other parties. The electricity utilities and national grid, as I mentioned before gives something of a guide.
BT should not be required to bankrupt itself in order to give Bugatti networking to everyone. True fibre pipes can be shared access so in rural areas low speed hut highly reliable and relatively distance-tolerant networking should be available, in the sense that you do not get crappy performance charged for at the same rates as high performance, just because of where your house or office building is. It is an outrage that comms companies can charge the same for a 0.5 Mbps service over copper as a 7 Mbps service. BlackSheep is right about not everyone wanting gigabit symmetric pipes into their living rooms, surely a number of people don't even understand what these numbers mean in practice.
But where I differ from BlackSheep, possibly, is that I don't see fibre as being justified simply by offering very high throughput to people who aren't interested in it and don't want to pay for it. Fibre all the way is just sanity, for users and for BT. Its reliability, relatively length-independent service offerings, no interference or crosstalk, these things we all know and BT could have happy users instead of whinging ones, which means happier shareholders and could get on employing their staff to expand the network rather than rushing round spinning plates trying to mend the service all the time. Apologies to BlackSheep if I have misrepresented opinions.
Also the move to fibre means an avoidance of temporary yet expensive technology swap outs, with hardware being pushed out with enormous effort only to be obsolete before it's even deployed because of the lurking alternative that is glass not copper.
BT have got better things they could be doing, and have plenty to get on with. For BT to gain a 25%-100% throughput jump by a technology swapout is marketed as impressive. Ethernet (so-called) technologies have historically delivered 10-fold speed jumps every n years. Perhaps it's not worth bothering with deploying anything unless it gives a 400% or 1000% speed factor jump. Helping BT to avoid short-termism by having fewer of these small and possibly fairly unimpressive jumps saves the country money.
The government is banging on and on about why somehow everyone will make more profit from having a faster internet connection, utterly ridiculous. Auntie Bettie will be so impressed when she waits 150 ms for her web page to come from Facebook, yet gets the page content transferred in 200 us as opposed to the old tech generation that took 500 us. Dad will be so pleased that he can now download "Fast and Furious 12" in 5 s instead of 8 s. It will change his life. I suspect politicians vaguely believe the hype they are pushing out. Again I am agreeing with BlackSheep, the need for very high throughput is a niche one.
Nurse, where are my pills?
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Ha ha ....... it's all just opinion, Weaver ..... and good input from all above.
Again, IMHO I would imagine BT/OR have looked at various global models regarding, 'infrastructure v pricing' ?? It's not like they've just decided last week to become involved in telecoms ;) ;D.
Yes, it could be argued they are scraping the last breath out of their legacy cables, but then again ..... why not ?? This is what I sometimes find hard to understand with some of the comments in threads gone-by. For every decision made, there has to be a proven business case for it, the powers-that-be don't just throw a load of chicken bones on the table and see what it tells them, they will have proven, factual data covering every aspect of the proposals.
With that in mind, and the large-scale trial that is currently on-going with G.fast, I would hazard a guess the roll-out of this technology has been scrutinised and passed (on paper) as fit for service for the vast majority of EU's, and of course on a business level as being profitable ??
If and when it does get rolled-out nationally, then the percentage-copper left 'in circuit' will be dramatically less, which in turn should see a decrease in EU's faults being raised ? It will be a win-win for both OR, the ISP's and EU's alike. :)
These are just my thoughts, but as mooted earlier, I attend on average 20-25 broadband faults per week and barring a very select few, most are just happy to have 'Always on' (IE: Stable) Broadband ....... they are generally not bothered about the speed so long as it works. So the Gig speeds will be above comprehension to Mr & Mrs average, especially when the difference in price gets tossed into the conversation. :)
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@BlackSheep you and I are I think very much in agreement, but looking at the same thing from different directions.
I am asking the government to do the right thing in the public interest, in the interest of fairness, efficiency and international competitiveness. The government's interests cannot possibly align with those of BT, which exists to create profit and shareholder value, this is nothing to do with what a certain section public needs, and why should it be? BT are not in the wrong. Government needs to act like a (much bigger) BT customer, bring a load of cash to BT and say, "we need this, please build and run it for us". This is of course already happening, but it has IMHO not been done properly and this is government's fault, not BT's. I hear what BlackSheep is saying about government having to find the funding. For this the government just needs to put their minds right and scrap a few crossrails then let the bean counters do what is needed however. Government needs to enable BT to do the right thing, despite the lack of a standalone business case, if that makes sense. Government being a giant customer for BT, that's the way it needs to be done, and makes it make sense for BT. (Again, not new.)
I have no idea why government up here thinks it's justifiable to let things sit in cryogenic suspension for > 9 yrs and counting, as nothing has changed since 2006 when ADSL Max was introduced and gave me a speed improvement from 0.5 Mbps to 1.75 Mbps. and there it sat, and continues to sit, while the decades roll by. People up here haven't got the money to be the right kind of high-paying business customers for BT that BT wants and needs in an area. This is neither BT's fault nor their problem. It's just that in Edinburgh, there the politicians sit with 50-100 x more bandwidth per pound and think that this is justifiable.
Ofcom should look at enforcing charging per performance delivered. So like electricity, you pay for what you get, you don't pay a flat rate for whatever some random conductance electricity cable happens to be able to be able to provide, depending on where your house is. If you get 10 times (21 Mbps / 2 Mbps) less performance from a pipe then it should not be charged for at the same flat rate as some other geographically luckier citizen. The analogy fills out into equating J delivered vs Mbps delivered (BT) and bits delivered for CPs. Government should enable BT to move away from this current insane model, which is simple and makes commercial sense, but is unjust. It's partly a matter of education of the public and of politicians who are all fortunate city-dwellers.
No one ever seems to talk about rural EUs' _costs_. The government just bangs on about silly speeds and tells rural users both - a) you should be buying these (possibly non-existent) non-existent high speed services, it's good for you, or b) you can't have any new service worth a damn, so go and choose option a or b based on postcode lottery. People up here are thinking about where to build new houses when their chosen spot might deliver 0.5 Mbps at 14 times the cost per bps as compared to a luckier random site 4 miles away. Meanwhile, government works to _increase_ the west-coast vs east coast speed per pound variability from a previous 14 x to a new 30 x - 50 x, and uses taxpayers' money to do this. (comparing ADSL1 0.5 Mbps to FTTC de-rated according to higher EU's charges for FTTC, very rough arithmetic.)
Many thanks to BlackSheep for continuing informed, sane, and detailed comment.
And huge apologies for I suspect being one of the worse culprits for going wildly off-topic here.
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Its worth pointing out that the difference in govt spending between east & west coast Scotland has improved dramatically since 2007.
In the past (1970s-2007) the west coast north of Glasgow was more or less totally ignored for what can only be called racist/sectarian reasons by Labour & virtually every piece of infrastructure spend came via EU funding. Also there's not a lot of point having a pop at the Scottish Govt when telecommunications is a reserved matter for Westminster.....
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I defer to Rizla. My ignorance of Scottish politics knows no bounds, not helped by my being a foreigner only having been in Skye for 17 years now. I just wrote "government" leaving it intentionally vague, shorter than writing "the bottomless cash pot" (ha ha).
In the past no one ever voted Labour over here, it was always either LibDem (for the candidate) or just possibly SNP.
There are a lot of suffering miserable people over here, stuck with Internet that is crappy 0.5 - 1.0 Mbps is not untypical. The don't even know it could be >25 times better for the same money, if they were just to move a nearly a hundred miles east. It simply isn't right. And I'm sure most would agree. The government(s) up here should be doing the necessary for only those in most need and then anyone else afterwards.
I do _so_ apologise for hijacking this thread. Perhaps an admin would split off / move this recent section suitably, if the Communist Manifesto [ :-) ] considered worth saving.
I worked for local people doing Internet installs for around eight years until my health failed. I saw a lot of unhappy people and the injustice has now got at least three times worse.
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Technically I believe the expenditure falls into two "pots" of money :
1) DEL - Department Expenditure Limits which is money the Scottish Govt control. ie they can to some extent choose what to spend it on. Little/none of this is spent on reserved matters other than compulsory spend like maintaining the parasites income (Crown Estates);
2) AME - Annually Managed Expenditure which is wholly controlled by Westminster. The current figure for "Infrastructure, Investment & Cities" within that spend is £0.
The reason nobody up there ever voted Labour in the past is simple - Labour in Scotland were mostly Catholic & hailed from Eire (my granny came from just outside Dublin) whereas the West Coast/Western Isles were/are mostly wee frees (Free Presbyterian Church). Its six of one, half dozen of the other as to which set of godbotherers are more delusional but suffice it to say that I heard ministers in Lewis preaching that the pope was the antichrist in the early 1990s. The sectarian problem is moot now anyway after the deserved destruction of SLAB in the last general election - one more push next May and they'll be clinically dead \o/
The inital problem with BB up there was that BT stated categorically (no caveats) that they would never install ADSL in the Western Isles or North-West Scotland & this triggered a situation where HIE stuck their noses in & came up with "Connected Communities" - a wireless system largely funded by EU money. Then BT came back into the game & did their usual "lets screw over any local/small suppliers who dare to do what we say can't be done". Result is as BT hoped for - a fragmented mess which will take years if not decades to sort out.
/me comes from Lewis in case people wonder how I know all this & live in Leicester ;)
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@rizla - A bheil Gàidhlig agaibh, a Rizla a charaid, ma-tà?
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Yes but its been more than 25 years since I used it on a daily basis and I wasn't a native speaker past the age of 3 as I spent the first few years in Glasgow (speaking Gaelic in the early 1970s was positively discouraged by the establishment). Rusty is not the word ;)
For those wondering, he just asked me do I speak Gaelic, or a direct translation would be "Then do you have Gaelic rizla my friend?"
Amusingly I remember my mother (native speaker) struggled with the Skye dialect - I was wondering whether ma-ta was slang as it'd always be written ma tha in the Western Isles :)
Oh and for anyone wondering, no I can't understand Irish Gaelic as most of it is gibberish :P
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In Skye you hear ma-thà a lot too, I'm just a bit old-fashioned. Three of my teachers were from Lewis, and others from Skye, South Uist, Harris, Glencoe and from Argyll. So my Gaelic is an awful mess, mostly bits of Argyll mixed with Harris. I wish I had learned one proper undiluted Skye Gaelic dialect.
A few of my neighbours right next door here in Skye are extremely fluent native speakers, and very willing to talk to me, thank goodness. But they are all very elderly which is frightening.
When I was working as a consultant locally, I had quite a few Gaelic-speaking customers most of whom preferred to speak English, sometimes because of all the computer jargon. One couple though, who live in Beàrnasdail up towards the north end of the Island always were much more comfortable in Gaelic and relaxed visibly when I switched from English.
One of my neighbours in the village here has very poor English and she really struggles, again, relaxes greatly if I can persuade her to switch from English to Gaelic, but for all I know she wants to keep trying to practice her English which is very slow and halting, even though she understands it well.
Apologies for drifting so ridiculously far off-topic.
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Ah you had a Hearach as a teacher - they'll probably have told you that everyone else is doing it wrong & they're usually right :D
I had a Hearach prepare me for the mod (singing & poetry, seems like a lifetime ago) and it annoyed the hell out of my mother (who was a Niseach) as the teacher said everyone in Lewis "slurred their words". You can imagine how that went down at home :) She (the teacher) had choice words for people from Skye - can't spell never mind talk and everywhere south of North Uist was dismissed as "Catholics, mainly bog-Irish & illiterate".
Didn't win but came above Karen Matheson (Capercaille) in the "learners" solo singing so there was probably something in it as I was never in her league. I suspect she'd have done a lot better had the mod been elsewhere.
I think we must win a prize for the most OT thread this year :D
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> I think we must win a prize for the most OT thread this year :D
S' e an fhìrinn a th'agaibh, gu dearbh.
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...and to translate for the rest....
"Indeed, its the truth you have"... (literally - you have the truth indeed but in English more like "That's right indeed")
We'll just quietly get our coats peeps :D
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b*cat was sufficiently amused to see if an old Babel-fish could cope . . . only to find it had been washed out to sea by waves of Google. Undeterred, he asked Google Translate for an opinion --
A Gaelic tongue of you, to Rizla to tis ma-ta?
S 'e the named male to th'agaibh, absolute gu.
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If I had been on the development team for Google Translate, I would hang my head in shame.
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b*cat was sufficiently amused to see if an old Babel-fish could cope . . . only to find it had been washed out to sea by waves of Google. Undeterred, he asked Google Translate for an opinion --
A Gaelic tongue of you, to Rizla to tis ma-ta?
S 'e the named male to th'agaibh, absolute gu.
Don't feel hard done by. It is the best Google Translate can do !! :o :D :D
Try slightly more well know languages to 'English' and the results are not much better.
For a laugh try doing a 3 language translation i.e. French to Russian to English or some such, it is hugely entertaining :D :D
(Simple pleasures ;D )
I do wonder if Google Translate has been made 'worse' to encourage sales of Language Translation s/w and Services.
(Obviously, Google will have been paid for this by the Companies winning the business)
A nice way to monitise the 'Free' Google Translate :D :D ;)
[Moderator edited to fix the broken color tag.]
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Reverse-powering small nodes in remote/rural areas is what its all about, hence me saying Openreach won't be using it (frankly people in remote areas of the UK are screwed anyway, they're going to end up with satellite broadband "ticking the boxes").
Unless you live in Cornwall and are the lucky 1/3rd for whom Openreach and the taxpayer have spared no expense to give you FTTP - some of which is in town centres, but sometimes you get it even if you live in the back of beyond. I've driven around plenty of ultra-rurality with FTTP manifolds on every pole - some of which don't even appear to have any copper customers (or properties who could take the service), let alone fibre, others apparently only serving a single house - and rarely does there appear to be any overhead fibre coming out of any of them.
Shame Openreach didn't extend it to the other 2/3rds, many of whom live in built up areas, where the ROI is likely to be greater than 0
What's even more curious is that there's the odd appearance of FTTP to a pole or two in a "sea" of FTTC. I assume they are EO lines. Or situations where BT has deployed FTTP to one street (absolutely not EO) but put the rest on FTTC. Or brand new housing estates where Openreach spent lots of money shifting poles around to accomodate new road junctions, then had to pull in new copper for the new homes, but did nothing about FTTP availability - I'd have thought that would be the ideal opportunity to put fibre in the ground
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........... or the other more likely option of FTTPoD (on demand), whereby the EU will foot quite a bit of the cost to provide it. We seem to have had a bit of an uptake with this around one rural area on my patch.
Regarding ROI .................the perceived average time it will take to turn investment into profit on rural FTTC BDUK projects, is expected to be 20-25yrs. Which is why every single other bidder invited to partake .... buggered off quick sharp.
What the ROI would be on FTTP, only those at the top of the food chain in BT will know. If it isn't a viable proposition, they WILL NOT do it, their commitment is to their shareholders first and foremost. Blame Maggie.
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........... or the other more likely option of FTTPoD (on demand), whereby the EU will foot quite a bit of the cost to provide it. We seem to have had a bit of an uptake with this around one rural area on my patch.
If you're replying to me (and the weird availability of FTTP in Cornwall), it all appears to be bog standard FTTP, not on demand. Which would explain why no one actually appears to be connected to the FTTP equipment, and generally multiple poles have it, not just the odd one or two (with the exception I already pointed out).
I know some of the people who live in these situations and BT's various broadband checkers (retail and wholesale) both agree - it's standard FTTP, pay £53 a month plus line rental and you can have 330Mbit Infinity 4 from BT Retail and BT TV and all the trimmings (or lower speeds for less money of course - which FTTPoD does not permit)
That said, there is some curious FTTPoD availability here. Some exchange areas have it (like mine, and has done for years), others don't - FTTC otherwise available of course. I have no idea how BT arrives at that decision. In one example of "FTTP in an FTTC area" I don't think FTTPoD is even available to the FTTC customers
Regarding ROI .................the perceived average time it will take to turn investment into profit on rural FTTC BDUK projects, is expected to be 20-25yrs. Which is why every single other bidder invited to partake .... buggered off quick sharp.
But wouldn't the decision to install the larger cabinets in some places suggest that BT expects high uptake? If BT is so cost-conscious they wouldn't pay more than they need to.
You could also argue that no one can really compete with the behemoth that is Openreach - they have the poles/ducts/cabinets/exchanges/backhaul and they already control everything (and there's nothing to stop them from muscling in, such as BT doing their own FTTP in the B4RN service area, or historically finally deciding to do ADSL where others have rolled out wireless). That's why no one wants to try.
What the ROI would be on FTTP, only those at the top of the food chain in BT will know. If it isn't a viable proposition, they WILL NOT do it, their commitment is to their shareholders first and foremost. Blame Maggie.
But they have done it. Just in the places where the expenditure is high and the ROI is low. That's why it makes no sense, and why BT's protestations of "FTTP is too expensive and impractical" make no sense, considering they've proven that they will do it when they want to
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Don't forget that a lot of Cornwall got done early in the process, a lot of other areas were supposed to fttp but BT found it too slow and problematic to install, and thus more costly so switched a lot of fttp areas to fttc.
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Don't forget that a lot of Cornwall got done early in the process, a lot of other areas were supposed to fttp but BT found it too slow and problematic to install, and thus more costly so switched a lot of fttp areas to fttc.
I don't have concrete evidence but I noticed the FTTC went in long before the FTTP. My cabinet was first in the village to get any sort of work done to it (FTTC), then well over a year later they came back and did more cabinets + FTTP for the chosen few, then a long time after that (this year) they came back and did a bit more, including doing FTTP to a single pole.
The neighbouring exchange area was one of the first in the county to get anything, and is practically all FTTC - including on the EO lines for customers next door to the exchange, as it was the trial exchange for un-EOing lines for FTTC. Some of the very rural areas on the exchange (that are also EO lines) haven't had any form of upgrade yet, just ADSL2+
If anything it seems like the opposite, the later stuff is more likely to be FTTP