The following is a rather blunt public gripe over the difficulties
http://aaisp.blogspot.com/ are finding with BT Wholesale's services and equipment. I beleive other ISPs are equally frustrated although they might not broadcast that fact.
However I hope everyone remembers, whether we like it or not, practically
ALL non-cable ISPs rely on a properly maintained local loop (hopefully without aluminium) provided by BT Openreach. If the BT Group become
"the carrier of last resort" it follows that their revenue will fall substantially. This might starve BT Openreach of capital investment and make matters much worse. I suppose some might suggest that would be the best trigger possible to provide FTTH but I shudder to think of the short and medium term consequences.
Kind regards,
Walter
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People not in a BE areaBE only cover around 80% population so many of our customers will not be in a BE area.
We appreciate all of the frank and honest comments from our customers, and we know that on occasion we are the cause of an issue and we take that very seriously. What most customers are expressing to us is concern over the huge number of BT issues and that they feel BT have lost the plot. We do sympathise with you all and understand your frustration.
The fact that we are trialling BE lines and expect to launch a full service offering next month is good news for everyone who can get BE service. It is different, and has different prices. But being different allows the use of BT+BE lines at the same place for a high availability service. Even today's issue (a hardware problem in our equipment) was a matter of seconds of outage for our customers that are doing that already. Our redundant systems worked as planned.
However, there is some good news for those not in BE areas. Basically, BT will not get their act together (as some of you have put it) until they have to. It is serious competition from people like BE that will do that. The fact is that we could move 80% of our lines to BE just like that, and so could a lot of much bigger ISPs. It is only now, in the last few weeks, that a decent wholesale offering has been available from any LLU operator with sensible coverage making it viable for many ISPs to offer an alternative to BT.
We are doing our bit to spread the word and I am talking at a UK network operators forum tomorrow to explain not only the major BT issues we have seen but how, in practical terms, other ISPs can do the same.
It is only by some serious competition like this that BT director level will take notice and sort these huge issues we have all been seeing.
As BT know, we continue to work closely with them at a technical level to help them undertstand and resolve problems. The outcome we want is not to ditch BT, but to encourage BT to provide a quality service again. We put a lot of time and effort in to systems which we then make available to BT to help them resolve issues, and we have even helped with issues we have not reported because we have the technical expertise to do so.
If BT do not make some serious steps forward in the next few months then they will have some serious problems. 21CN is losing credibility. They will become the carrier of last resort for in-fill coverage. Lets hope that does not happen, in which case people not in BE areas will benefit too. That is what we would like to see and so we will have two quality carriers to offer to our customers.
Thank you all for your patience in all of these recent issues, and we'll keep you posted.