G.Fast

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Mobster
Soldato
Joined
9 Apr 2012
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13,166
So BT/Openreach's next plan after FTTC is "G.Fast", yet another use of copper/fibre (although this time fibre to the DP).

Is it likely that this will be similar to the FTTC rollout in that only commercially viable areas will be paid for and councils will then pay the rest, thus leaving many waiting a long time, or is it likely that BT will be able to cover a lot more of the country with so much of the infrastructure already there?
 
A private company is not going to do anything that is not commercially viable. Although the costs do drop if they manage to get remote nodes up telegraph poles, powered from the subscriber end and only serving ~20 customers each, it would presumably be feasible to work on the basis of upgrading people after receiving committed orders for a faster product.

People will always lag behind in rural areas with lower population densities just because the costs are higher, but nobody knows how G.fast is going to operate because it's nowhere near being rolled out yet.
 
My personal problem with the technology is that they'll have very little reason to upgrade existing FTTC areas.

Existing FTTC areas may end up resembling the current exchange only ADSL connections.
 
Areas that overlap with Virgin Media / A. N. Other provider will be upgraded. Areas with literally no other options will be ignored by the commercial rollout like they were last time around.
 
Maybe.

I'm in a Virgin area. I had a connection with them back in the 512Mbit days and moved when ADSL was a faster option. I've since moved several times and currently have a ~60Mbit with PlusNet.

Virgin are offering a much faster connection (200Mbit?), but no static IP (which I do need), and relatively low upstream rates.

How does G.Fast work in areas with all underground cabling? It's one thing nailing a box to an existing wooden pole, but underground works are expensive.
 
bremen1874 said:
My personal problem with the technology is that they'll have very little reason to upgrade existing FTTC areas.

Existing FTTC areas may end up resembling the current exchange only ADSL connections.
Click to expand...

This.

In the average person's eyes, the speeds offered by FTTC are perfectly acceptable.

I disagree, and think that a FTTP rollout should have been funded by the government, simply as once it's there, it will last 50 years+ with little to no maintenance to the actual cables.

It's simply ludicrous that a brand new home, built in 2016, will feature a metallic phone cable, exactly the same as the ones the post office rollout out in the 60's.

Now we have FTTC, no hopes in hell of getting anything faster outside cities for many years.
 
IIRC Thatcher prevented BT from rolling out a major fibre network back in the 80s; and then privatised them. It could be my memory (and political basis) playing tricks, but I blame her for the current situation.

New homes should be properly connected, it should be part of the planning process. If they can't guarantee a reasonable minimum connection speed from day one they shouldn't be able to build.

A large part of the problem is that everything is price driven. People seem to expect to get broadband almost FoC. If providers had some expectation of getting return on investment the infrastructure might appear.
 
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bremen1874 said:
IIRC Thatcher prevented BT from rolling out a major fibre network back in the 80s; and then privatised them. It could be my memory (and political basis) playing tricks, but I blame her for the current situation.

New homes should be properly connected, it should be part of the planning process. If they can't guarantee a reasonable minimum connection speed from day one they shouldn't be able to build.

A large part of the problem is that everything is price driven. People seem to expect to get broadband almost FoC. If providers had some expectation of getting return on investment the infrastructure might appear.
Click to expand...

If the Openreach network was not in the hands of BT and instead ran as a NFP Organisation we would probably have had blanket FTTP by now, all profits invested into maintaining and upgrading the network. No money to roll-out FTTP but billions to spend on sports rights and buying out EE.

Sincerely hope the regulators tear the network from them. We pay a lot of money in line rental, where the hell does it all go? Not into the network that's for sure.
 
thebennyboy said:
If the Openreach network was not in the hands of BT and instead ran as a NFP Organisation we would probably have had blanket FTTP by now, all profits invested into maintaining and upgrading the network. No money to roll-out FTTP but billions to spend on sports rights and buying out EE.

Sincerely hope the regulators tear the network from them. We pay a lot of money in line rental, where the hell does it all go? Not into the network that's for sure.
Click to expand...

If you could prove any of that then Ofcom and all of BT Retails competitors would be incredibly interested to hear it. On what basis would we "probably have blanket FTTP by now"? Line rental costs have been falling year on year, the retail price of line rental is only increasing so that service providers can afford to advertise "free" broadband or stupidly priced fibre deals.
 
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I'd love to get this, as the DP is literally right outside my front door. However I'm in a new build estate on the outskirts of Gloucester/Cheltenham so I really don't think we'd get it for some time!
 
Gigabit said:
So BT/Openreach's next plan after FTTC is "G.Fast", yet another use of copper/fibre (although this time fibre to the DP).
Click to expand...

Well this is the thing, everyone reads about G.fast and thinks "Great BT are going to put a DP near my house so I can get 500Mb speeds!". However putting in lots of new DPs is going to be time consuming and expensive. The latest versions of G.fast can do aggregate(up and downstream) 350Mb/s at 300 metres so rather than thinking about DPs think about the cheaper option of simply upgrading the current FTTC cabinets at least in the beginning of the rollout.
 
It will be helpful for downloading things like those massive 4k blu-rays that are coming this year.

We're already seeing some games being 50gb+ and whilst it's usually a download you only need to make once or twice it would be nice to have the ability to download in a matter of minutes instead of hours.
 
Is G.INP required for G.Fast? As far as I know, only Huawei based cabinets have this rolled out but not ECI cabinets due to issues with it. ECI fibre modems (including the HH5 type A) also had issues with G.INP. I'm in an area using both ECI cabinet and modem, and haven't seen this rolled out to me, which makes me wonder if I even will see G.Fast. 500m away from my cabinet means I'm only seeing around 40mb...
 
Orcvader said:
Is G.INP required for G.Fast? As far as I know, only Huawei based cabinets have this rolled out but not ECI cabinets due to issues with it. ECI fibre modems (including the HH5 type A) also had issues with G.INP. I'm in an area using both ECI cabinet and modem, and haven't seen this rolled out to me, which makes me wonder if I even will see G.Fast. 500m away from my cabinet means I'm only seeing around 40mb...
Click to expand...

Not all Huawei cabinets have had it enabled, only a handful.
 
G.INP was enabled on my cabinet sometime in the last 48 hours, it has been live since early December, seems odd that they'd enable it now.

I thought the G.INP rollout had stopped actually!
 
thebennyboy said:
If the Openreach network was not in the hands of BT and instead ran as a NFP Organisation we would probably have had blanket FTTP by now, all profits invested into maintaining and upgrading the network. No money to roll-out FTTP but billions to spend on sports rights and buying out EE.

Sincerely hope the regulators tear the network from them. We pay a lot of money in line rental, where the hell does it all go? Not into the network that's for sure.
Click to expand...

If they hadn't spent on the sports rights and EE there's a strong chance they wouldn't be in business in a few years' time IMO.

And Openreach is a separate organisation to all of that anyway, even if it also falls under the BT umbrella.

FWIW I agree that Openreach should be independent, just disagree with your take on how BT operates.
 
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