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[Bowdon]

70 North Yorkshire UK Communities Get 330Mbps FTTP from Openreach

Openreach (BT) has today reminded people that they don’t just roll-out their 330Mbps Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) broadband network in urban areas and have now connected around 70 communities in North Yorkshire to the service (reflecting 7,800+ premises), many of which are rural.

At present the operator is still in the early stages of their plan to expand the reach of pure fibre optic FTTP connectivity to 2 million UK premises by 2020 (here). As a result many of their related deployments in North Yorkshire (England) have separately been achieved via the local Broadband Delivery UK and State Aid supported Superfast North Yorkshire (SFNY) project.

[niemand]

Wow. 7,800 premises. With taxpayer aid. From a company with a market capitalisation closing in on £40 billion.

Get in the ****ing sea, BT. When you've delivered to more than 0.00% of Leeds, 3rd largest city in the country, on your own tab I might be impressed.

[Black Sheep]

I don't think impressing you is top of their agenda, Ignitionet. I think individuals like yourself, and no offence given, will ever be happy ..... no matter what service is in the ground or what speeds are given ??
It's just in-built into your nature, my missus is the same ..... always wanting more and more 

When everyone is running on Yottabytes ...... you'll be demanding to be teleported.   

[niemand]

I think it's fair to say that impressing no-one beyond shareholders with the profits and 10% year on year dividend increase and sports owners with rights bids to win content is on the agenda.

Some vague promise of deploying FTTP to largely greenfield sites, where it's cheap, and deploying G.fast, on the cheap, presumably wasn't intended to impress anyone who took more than a precursory glance.

If you don't think not having a single premises passed with non-private line FTTP in the UK's third largest city in the back end of 2016, with no plans to do so, is weak that's your prerogative. It works well for you guys, though, keeps you in a job having to tend the copper that there should by now be negotiations and plans forming to rip out.

[Chrysalis]

They dont just deliver to urban? I think most of their FTTP rollout has been in rural anyway.  As ignition said likely to do with subsidies which urban rollouts dont typically get.

[Ronski]

^^^^^They know and I agree

[niemand]

I think individuals like yourself, and no offence given, will ever be happy ..... no matter what service is in the ground or what speeds are given ??
It's just in-built into your nature, my missus is the same ..... always wanting more and more 

When everyone is running on Yottabytes ...... you'll be demanding to be teleported.

I think I'll just pick up one more thing to put my views into context.

I currently have VDSL that runs mostly at about 60Mb/s. Sometimes it drops into single-digits due to the joys of copper.

I have no prospect of being able to purchase a faster service until the 2020s.

I live in the 3rd largest city in the UK, in an estate constructed in the last 7 years, with full swept t ducting to all properties.

Before moving here, I was on cable. I had 100Mb/s in 2011.

Having an equivalent service, or some prospect any time soon, to what I had half a decade ago would be fine for starters.

A big selling point of FTTC was that it pushed fibre deeper into the access network, providing a clear path towards incremental upgrades. In the name of saving money for content, dividends and enhancing short-term shareholder value that path apparently stops for the rest of this decade as BT deploy a technology that was supposed originally to be FTTdp/rn to existing VDSL nodes.

In the USA Verizon have thrown money at fixed line CapEx to reduce operational expenditure. In the UK BT throw money at operational expenditure to compensate for not spending on fixed line CapEx. One of those provides short term pain for longer term gain. The other is just delaying the inevitable with no incremental value, at all, added by node-based G.fast.

Putting this in comparison to Virgin Media, they obviously have an existing network which they can sweat, too. They aren't. They are in the process of a nationwide access network rebuild programme, alongside a hubsite and headend migration to CCAP. After this they will move to Remote PHY and an n+0 solution - deeper fibre in the network, basically FTTdp.

CCAP allows better use of the existing RF bandwidth, the rebuild increases that bandwidth, the deeper fibre both increases bandwidth per premises passed and improves signal fidelity.

VM can be at a gigabit next year. Indeed, they regard such things as a primary selling point and use them against the Openreach CPs to good effect.

BT seem intent on creating a large group of urban and suburban premises squeezed between those in greenfield and High Street sites and those subsidised by the taxpayer who, even if they do have a G.fast node attached to their VDSL cabinet, will be stuck at speeds not much better than FTTC.

As far as my personal desires go I'll be moving in the next year anyway, and will ensure I'm at a property with infrastructure competition. Perhaps I should move to one of the many villages where my taxes have helped provide far better connectivity than anything BT will be delivering this new build, dense, fully ducted suburban estate in the next decade?

I wasn't fair when I commented that BT haven't impressed me, though. They impressed me with how cheaply they deployed FTTC. They've impressed me with how cheaply they will be deploying G.fast. They've impressed me with the PR job they've done to cover up that what they are doing is incredibly cheap, and that they don't actually spend considerably less than peers on CapEx, even with the wider FTTC rollout.

[phi2008]

Out of interest what would be your remedy(ies) to maximise FTTP roll-out across the country?   

[niemand]

One obvious way that comes to mind is, rather than messing around with G.fast pods, to put PON cards into the existing DSLAMs where there's room, upgrade their backhaul, pull fibre where the ducting is in place to do so, and when the copper is gone, it's gone. A property will not have copper service restored once the FTTP replacement has happened.

Needs a chat with Ofcom of course, but I'm sure if BT put as much effort in justifying this as they have trying to avoid separation of Openreach they should be alright.

Next no more new copper in new builds. Don't offer developers the option of copper.

BT have tons of ducted properties. Now that they've stopped treating each and every FTTP connection like a leased line it makes little sense over anything bar the very short term to deploy G.fast pods where PCPs serve such ducted properties. It's yet more operational expenditure, powering these things, and maintaining the copper as with the much higher frequencies in use there's even more to go wrong.

[Chrysalis]

One has to wonder as well, with BT's obsession in keeping the copper going for as long as possible is it people within BT influencing these decisions to keep people in work, as after all a FTTP structure which inevitably has less faults and maintenance would also probably have a shrinkage of manpower.

But lets not forget its not entirely down to BT, ofcom wont let copper die as they obsessed with LLU adsl.

[Bowdon]

I remember talking to an OR engineer last time they were called out here. He was one of the old guard at BT. When I was asking about fibre deployment he said really BT should have laid some fibre down each time they had to do a dig for maintenance and eventually a fibre network would be created.

I wasn't sure if he was saying BT/OR had been doing that. But it certainly sounded like he thought they should be doing it.

He also said some of the copper networks around London were very old and hadnt been updated since world war 2.

BT have chosen this path to go down. If another company was in BT's place would they make similar decisions? It's a possibility. I think the situation as been caused because BT have had such a big head start on other companies, so they can afford to take their time. I think the situation will only change when there is a genuine challenge to the top dog spot.

[Chrysalis]

other countries already work like that e.g. if the water company needs to dig up the road,m then at the same time the gas company and telco company will work in the same hole so it costs less money.