Fibre available in my area - but I'm excluded!

Caged said:
You've got quite a large chip on your shoulder about this judging by your similar response to the other thread. There are no restrictions on who is allowed to dig up the country and install fibre optic cables or copper phone lines (outside of planning regulations). Nobody else wants to play because it is incredibly expensive. You could complain that Virgin Media haven't run a high speed service to this location, they have just as much of an obligation (none).

BT Group are a private sector organisation, the only people they have to answer to is to their shareholders. If an area had enough properties that it would make them money then there would be a fibre cabinet there. If the people who live there want a fibre cabinet and it isn't going to make money then you can pay the difference.

Breaking Openreach off from BT wouldn't remove this obligation to make money for shareholders, so it wouldn't improve anything.
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yep i am annoyed because as a Be* user im about to take a big downgrade in service and there isnt many option left. my exchange at present has been "due to be upgraded at end of present quarter" for over 2 years now.

so while i realise its in the BT groups interests to spend nothing as it will get line rental regardless it doesnt mean i have to happy about it.

as for breaking them up, i believe it would because as a massive customer BT retail would suddenly want to be able to sell faster services and it would hav no interest in bolstering another part of the co. BT retail as a massive customer would have an incentive to push its supplier to rolling out vdsl services.
 
So TalkTalk and Sky aren't pushing Openreach for faster products already? Completely separating Openreach from BT wouldn't suddenly make network build and equipment costs cheaper.

The only way to fix this is to use the dirty phrase "government subsidy", which is what BDUK is. This has its own problems though as there are a lot of people who don't think public money should be given to a private company to expand their network, but it's better than the alternative which is the government trying to run it.
 
im sure sky dont really care, bb for them is an add on to selling TV. Talk Talk probably care but arent big enough to compel Openreach.

oh and i loath gov subsidy. BDUK has been a shining example of the incompetence of government at spending money effectively. thats why i say forcibly separate BT retail and Openreach. then market competition should do its thing and fix things.
 
If BT Retail and Openreach run up against things not being worth the investment when they are part of the same group how do you expect this to improve if they were pulled further apart?

There is no market competition in this space because the up-front costs are so high and there's no guarantees of subscriber numbers. You could start up your own FTTP ISP tomorrow if you wanted to, and offer gigabit connections to people, but you'd never get the business plan to work. The vast majority of people don't care about their broadband, other than that they want it to come free with their TV or cost as little as possible each month.

Relying 100% on market forces gives you something like Hyperoptic, that cherry-picks the areas they serve down to the specific building they choose to run a fibre into. It's not a workable model for your average town.
 
Caged said:
What's that got to do with property values? Using that logic Kensington has a lower property value than an estate in Birmingham. Openreach upgrading a cabinet has almost nothing to do with people being pestered on Facebook and everything to do with economics. Economics that aren't related to the tax spend of each household.

It might not suit your agenda but nobody decides to deploy infrastructure based on trying to annoy hard working tax paying pillars of society such as yourself.
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I never mentioned property values. FWIW there is only one cabinet in the whole village.

Caged said:
You've got quite a large chip on your shoulder about this judging by your similar response to the other thread. There are no restrictions on who is allowed to dig up the country and install fibre optic cables or copper phone lines (outside of planning regulations). Nobody else wants to play because it is incredibly expensive. You could complain that Virgin Media haven't run a high speed service to this location, they have just as much of an obligation (none).

BT Group are a private sector organisation, the only people they have to answer to is to their shareholders. If an area had enough properties that it would make them money then there would be a fibre cabinet there. If the people who live there want a fibre cabinet and it isn't going to make money then you can pay the difference.

Breaking Openreach off from BT wouldn't remove this obligation to make money for shareholders, so it wouldn't improve anything.
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OFCOM crush anyone who apposes BT in a national sense.
 
Caged said:
If BT Retail and Openreach run up against things not being worth the investment when they are part of the same group how do you expect this to improve if they were pulled further apart?

There is no market competition in this space because the up-front costs are so high and there's no guarantees of subscriber numbers. You could start up your own FTTP ISP tomorrow if you wanted to, and offer gigabit connections to people, but you'd never get the business plan to work. The vast majority of people don't care about their broadband, other than that they want it to come free with their TV or cost as little as possible each month.

Relying 100% on market forces gives you something like Hyperoptic, that cherry-picks the areas they serve down to the specific building they choose to run a fibre into. It's not a workable model for your average town.
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Fluid Data do just this, I would say their business model is not failing.
http://companycheck.co.uk/company/05296759/FLUIDATA-LIMITED/financial-accounts

Obviously though it makes common sense to run leased lines off your backbone if you are going to do FTTH on a large scale.

I wish someone like Google would come here and do 1GBIT fibre just to de-monopolise BT/Openreach like they did in the states to Verizon.
 
86JR said:
I never mentioned property values.
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Your reply was to a point about property values.

I don't see how using a business leased line as an example of it being possible to put fibre in the ground and make money has any bearing on whether it's possible to do it at a consumer level :confused:. Obviously it's possible to make money offering a leased line service where you charge several thousand pounds for the install and then several hundred each month, but the last mile often goes over Openreach infrastructure anyway. Fluidata use FTTPoD where it's available to provide their services, one of the few companies involved in the trial.

Virgin Media / ntl went bankrupt several times trying to build out an infrastructure that didn't simply cherry-pick buildings that were easy to service, and even then they got to avoid doing much in the more rural areas.

With regards to your article from 2008, everyone has access to the infrastructure, here's the price list: http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/hom...6rNZujnCs99NbIKJZPD9hXYmiijxH6wr CQm97GZMyQ==

If it's so easy to build out your own nationwide fibre network then why is nobody trying?
 
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Caged said:
If BT Retail and Openreach run up against things not being worth the investment when they are part of the same group how do you expect this to improve if they were pulled further apart?

There is no market competition in this space because the up-front costs are so high and there's no guarantees of subscriber numbers.
.
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no there is no competition because the BT group owns all the embedded infrastructure and is a huge service provider. separate the infrastructure from the service provider and then the service provider will demand better infrastructure from its provider.

its really not a hard concept.


its the same reason BT keeps saying it will roll out fttc to exchanges and then doesnt. they make it not worth anyone elses while to do anything themselves because tehy know as soon as they do BT will swan in undercut them.
 
Making Openreach completely separate to BT doesn't magic some competition out of nowhere, it's still one company owning the infrastructure. So now the totally separate BT Retail demand better infrastructure from the newly totally separate Openreach, and Openreach say no (or "yes, here's a quotation for that work"). What do BT Retail do now other than go "oh, ok"?

It's in BT as a group's interest (Openreach, Retail etc) to have FTTC available to as many people as possible, since these products make them more money. They aren't holding off in certain areas because they want to spite people, it's because dropping a £60,000 fibre cabinet into an area with 30 houses will never see any return. These are the locations where BDUK funding gets used to fund the upgrades.

I don't think the current situation is ideal by any means, but it's such an expensive problem to solve that no private company will take it on, and the government isn't going to build a network out when there's no money left.
 
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well why dont we do it and see what happens shall we.

and they dont do it out of spite, they do it because they only care about the return differential n doing and not doing. proportionaly for openreach this would be larger as it would not be taking into account other aspects of revenue form the line.
 
Try what and see what happens?

If Openreach wasn't playing according to the rules then you'd see BT offering products that no other providers could, at prices undercutting other providers, and their faults getting fixed first, and fines coming down from Ofcom. This isn't happening - all Openreach customers get treated the same. Someone tried explaining this to you in the other thread but you weren't too bothered about reading it.

Spinning Openreach out of the BT Group won't suddenly cause another company to emerge with the finances to put fibre in the ground across the entire country and turn the UK into a broadband utopia. If it was viable then they would already exist.
 
dear god its like talking to a brick wall.

openreach as part of BT group has no incentive to have competition between BT retail and others.


by the same way that forcing the opening of exchanges gave competition, companies offering things like adsl max when BT only offered 2mbit created competition. right now BT protects its cabinets in the same way.
 
Their incentive for competition is more uptake of products in general, they make the same amount of cash no matter what ISP people go with, so it doesn't concern them what provider people choose.

FTTC products are already like the LLU DSL services of old, ISPs that provide connections aren't paying BT Wholesale for transit like in the pre-LLU era.
 
Because they already are unbundled to an extent - every provider gets the path between the customer and the exchange and pays the same price for it, there would be no advantage to letting ISPs come along and install their own kit - for a start the cabinets aren't large enough and there are a huge number more cabinets than there are exchanges which has a huge impact on costs. Unbundling was as much about ISPs not having to simply resell a BT Wholesale product as it was about being able to connect the lines to their own ADSL2+ DSLAMS.

When vectoring happens sometime next year then every ISP and customer will benefit from it.
 
I really can't understand what benefits that would bring Sky, other than the freedom to spend a lot of cash digging their own fibre in. It's the same DSLAM at the end of it.
 
Because it's not my call. If Ofcom think they have a point then it will probably happen.

Edit: It's got to be said that that obviously only applies to areas that already have FTTC. Considering this discussion started off as a coverage argument then further unbundling doesn't solve that.
 
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