"Perhaps one of the most interesting conclusions was a perceived conflict of interest between having the company responsible for the UK's broadband network part of the same company that is a leading internet service provider."
There's nothing new in these observations. The ringfencing between OpenReach and the rest of BT has been present for quite a while. It has kept the lawyers and legislators happy and done pretty much nothing for the customer. As far as I can tell this new review from ofcom is essentially a confirmation of the status quo: Yeah, let's leave things as they are but keep our options open.
Even the CEO of BTGroup pretty much said the same: We have most of these guards in place already, we're happy to work with OfCom.
Originally, it was all just British Telecom, which was a government-owned monopoly. That was split up into BT and OpenReach and privatized in the 1980's, as part of a general market movement.
Putting the infrastructure into public hands has upsides and downsides. If the public is willing to invest money, you can get a pretty workable system: e.g. the Paris subway. If the public isn't willing to invest the money, you can get a very bad system, e.g. Flint Michigan's water supply.
More often than not, public ownership leads to under-investment. In the U.S., for every enlightened municipality like New York that carefully manages its water supply, there are dozens that keep water rates far too low and consequently lack the money to upgrade miles of decaying lead pipes.
All told, BT OpenReach is probably one of the better ways of organizing this function at scale. It's ostensibly private, but it was privatized with a carefully-designed system of incentives to keep investing in infrastructure. OpenReach is, for example, much more profitable than Verizon's wireline division. That's why they're still at least building fiber, instead of trying to get out of the business entirely.
Given that their 21st Century Network was built upon IPv4 with a complete ignorance of IPv6, you'd have to think a split and replacement with someone more competent would be a vital part of growing the UK's technical economy.
It's largely irrelevant that 21CN runs IPv4 as it's implemented as MPLS VPN switching network. What the customer (i.e an ISP) gets presented with is basically an L2 ethernet connection, over which they can run whatever protocol they want, including IPv6. There are competent ISPs available that will utilise OpenReach and that do offer IPv6. BT Retail is not one of these.
The real issues with 21CN are that many parts of the edge network have multiple SPOFs (so a single failure can result in multi-hour or longer downtime for customers served by multiple ISPs that connected to an exchange) as well as insufficient bandwidth provisioned for those links in some areas. Another issue, is that backhaul from exchanges is metered at a fairly expensive rate.
On a lot of the green street cabinets is effectively a massive advert for BT by Openreach (big white sticker, covering most of the cabinet). The green cabinets are supposed to be discreet, I wonder if the banner pasted on the side is included in any of their planning applications?
That message isn't meant to give you hope. It's a taunt.
It's saying "superfast broadband is here in this cabinet, but will never make it the extra 50 feet to your house". I've had that sticker on a cabinet at the end of my road for three years now. But still just sketchy DSL offered to my house.
According to BT's helpful "when the F is Fibre going to F'ng make it to my area" page, my postcode is going to be ready in "March 2016". But then that page used to say March 2015, March 2014 and March 2013 since I've been checking. At least it's always March, so I don't have to get my hopes up more than once a year.
I also hate having to do this mental adjustment - in my head, even 40Mbps isn't "superfast" - it's above the national average, sure - give me 100Mbps, then maybe you can justify using that label
Sadly, superfast broadband has a different definition depending on who you ask. http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2014/08/lets-stop-diffe... And now I see Ofcom are throwing terms like "ultrafast" broadband around. I wish they'd just quote minimum speeds (Ofcom's universal service obligation minimum is 10Mbps).
In France I am not aware of anyone using FTTC. FTTP is the standard and is now widely deployed in large cities. That comparison alone should hurt the pride of the British people!
I wouldn't agree with that. I live in a large town (Bournemouth), on the outskirts where I was getting a variable ADSL service of between 0.5 and 2Mbps depending on the weather; my cabling is not copper but aluminium back to the exchange (about 2 miles away), and was often troublesome, and unlikely to be replaced in the near future.
I now have Infinity, running at a rock solid 38Mbps down and 12Mbps up, for a decent price (almost the same as I was paying for ADSL), and it's been totally reliable.
Bournemouth had FibreCity which promised fibre to the home, and 100M/1G service. The original delivery mechanism (in sewers, with minimal digging) didn't work out, and instead lots of micro-trenching was done. It cost them much more than they anticipated, and the company went bust (more than once, I believe), and provided a sub-standard IPTV and ISP offering (I had it for a month on trial, and it was patchy), so while the numbers would look great, there's more to it than the raw figures.
FTR, my postcode always showed that my area was going to have infinity, but my specific address wasn't going to get it, and even though I registered to be told when it would be available, I was never told - it was only bored clicking one night when stuck at 0.5Mbps that led to me getting upgraded.
BT and openworld definitely need more separation, however, IMO.
the inclination being that BT only goes where Virgin goes.. if you have fibre then you have a choice, but if you're running ADSL then BT doesn't hear you.. BT doesn't care.
Virgin is available at home, but I have two friends who have it, both hate the service, and I don't like the TV setup at all (and know that the ui would not be popular with my mum who is in her late 70s and lives with me), so I wouldn't have gone with them anyway.
I am not ashamed to be using FTTC in the UK, it is fast enough for what I do with it and I don't even pay for the fastest speed that is available for my line.
I got FTTC at home last year, and it was great to go from 1Mbps and unreliable to 20Mbps and reliable. Many people nearby are still stuck at the old speeds.
By the way - the openreach site you mention was totally misleading in my area - it said that 'superfast' was available when in fact it was not (it also gave rollout-time estimates that were wrong by years). Any naive regulator or reporter using their data would be given a falsely rosy view of broadband rollout.
FTTC varies -- I've had it in one location where it was 10/1, and in another at 240/24. Overall experience, when they were working is fine. The Sky/Eircom was slow, but latency was low, the UPC/VirginMedia has dropped packet issues, especially with dns queries. It's also a little odd that the bottleneck is actually the in-house wifi most of the time.
FTTC provides a decent connection speed ("up to" 76Mbps according to BT) but my main gripe with it is that I have to continue with the archaic process of "renting" the copper telephone line between the exchange and my house - for a sum almost the same as the broadband itself. Openreach have clung onto this cash cow by opting for FTTC over FTTP, forcing customers to rent a telephone line they don't want
I have this gripe too. I recently received a letter from BT to say that my line rental was increasing by £1/month so that they could offer more "great services and a wider selection of content".
The only reason I have the line is for the FTTC connection that runs over it (using Goscomb as my ISP, rather than BT) There isn't even a phone connected to it.
I recently changed ISP and told them the copper line was part of the broadband package with my previous ISP (for an extra £10/month) and was assured everything was fine.
One month after the transfer, Openreach ceases the PSTN line and the reaction from my new ISP was "well it's your responsibility to keep up your BT subscription" (never had BT).
Two weeks later, the PSTN line is still dark, and I'm waiting for Openreach to install a new MPF line provided by my current ISP (for an extra £10/month of course).
Apparently the reason for doing this rather than re-start the PSTN line is part of a process called "Local-loop unbundling".
I'm amazed they still can't get LLU -> BT/LLU -> LLU migrations right. We sold ADSL as a second tier provider and once upon a time if you were on an LLU service and needed to migrate to another LLU provider the only sure-fire way of doing it so it didn't fuck up was to migrate back to a BT based service then migrate again. We once had a business customer, paying proper business coin migrate from one LLU provider to another. On the day of the migration the gaining provider's engineer didn't turn up to pick up the pairs and jumper onto their rack which left the customer without service for over 24 hours. So glad I don't have to deal with that crap any more.
But Westminster is also the area where most of the MPs live, and it doesn't get more central London/densely populated than that. You would assume it would be at least on BT's radars. Not even...
FTTC is highly used in France, but under the "VDSL" name because it uses the existing copper/ADSL network. We also have cable (so-called fibre with coaxial termination)
It might be used too but all the people I know in Paris have FTTP. In central London there are typically only a handful of buildings, if any, in an area that are connected.
Depends on how far the curb is from you. VDSL2 Vectoring is pretty good and I'm pretty sure if someone has the option of no fiber or fiber closer so them they would pick the latter. Not everybody lives in cities and FTTC is often the only thing available.
There is a lot of bureaucracy in getting anything done with BT/OpenReach. Most of the contracts have to go through BT first who sub-contract to OpenReach even though they are the same company.
The partnership where OpenReach does everything for the infrastructure and BT adds absolutely no value. The split of the partnership would have been what the consumers wanted.
Th decision falls short of bringing much needed change in the industry. There is still huge number of people who have super-slow internet which is a HUGE shame for ofcom for not having been able to get this problem sorted.
In my area, I get internet speed of 2MBps. I cannot get even basic things done. To put things into perspective, to download 100 photos, it would take 10 minutes.
Ofcom - This is the twenty first century and you are still living under a rock.
Cornwall (where I live) got trumpeted as a target for superfast broadband. As far as I can tell, it's mostly a marketing exercise. The town I live in (~25k people) has loads of green boxes with the livery and I see vans quite often but in the five years I've live here (four different properties), I've never been able to get superfast. I know precisely one person who has it and describes it as "rubbish".
I'm sure there's people that it's working out wonderfully for but I've never found them.
Some kind of shake up is needed in the industry, similar to when cable came in around 2000(?).
Yes it's interesting. Fellow Cornwall resident here and it's the same, every check on the site says that my area is in consultation.
I moved down from Worcestershire last year, only a few miles outside of Worcester but also very slightly rural and exactly the same happened there.
What I guess is happening is they connect up the very centre of large towns/cities and then don't really have any intention of providing fast broadband to the more rural areas, probably because it's not economical.
I actually think it might be somewhat the opposite; there's less messy infrastructure in smaller places and so they're perhaps more likely to get it. I know that a few little places outside of Truro got it, for example.
Up here in Lincolnshire it actually worked out. I live in a town of 18K people, the local council kicked in 300K from a grant they got, the fibre cabinets all sprung up, and I have superfast at home.
What is ridiculous, though, is the industrial estate never did, so my entire office building was sharing a single DSL line until we got a point to point wireless setup.
Sounds about what I was able to get when I lived there in 2006-2008. Can't say I'm surprised they haven't improved.
On the other hand, in the past 5 years, my cable speeds in Oslo have increased from 20/5 to 250/20, and supposedly I might have an option to get 500/50 sometime soon. Would still prefer fiber, but I can't complain nearly as much as a lot of people!
What I find hilarious about the internet space in the UK is that people are seriously using coaxial cables as a marketing campaign now. I suppose everybody gave up on actually pushing fiber closer.
So do I, and the best I can get is about 3 Mbit down, 0.4 up. Openreach have "no plans" and Virgin don't cover the area. I imagine central London is tricky to cable, but still.
Same with me. Live in central London, about 1 km away from the 'Silicon Roundabout' Fastest internet I can get is ASDL with real-life speeds approaching 8 mbit.
Google's project Loon has done an amazing feat that they will achieve full internet coverage for the entire country Sri Lanka by end of next month using 4G LTE network.
Nobody seems to want to invest in laying new fibre. Openreach already offered access to ducts and poles, and OfCom have only said that they're making it 'easier'. If you look at the price of residential broadband, I can see why nobody wants to invest - broadband is too cheap, and I'd bet people wouldn't want to pay a large installation fee.
Note that speed is not the only thing that separates rural and town broadband; it's also price.
Yes, broadband is cheap in towns and cities. But go to the countryside and it's a different story. For me - £25/month (Andrews & Arnold) plus £8/month line rental (Primus).
I'm with A&A as well, and rural based, wouldn't touch any other provider with a 100ft long barge pole.
Our village finally got FTTC cab#1 activated at the end of December (cab#2 which served a much smaller segment of the village went live in September), has made a world of difference for us folks working from home.
BT is leading companies around the world testing out G.Fast, the next generation of DSL technology. Which should give you 500Mbps over 250M of cooper cables.
Because there are no upgrade done on users part other then a modem. This could be quickly rolled out many UK citizens, while others will wait for cabinet to move a little closer to them. Both will be much cheaper and quicker to deploy then FTTH.
Yeah, a friend of mine just moved into a new build with FTTP. Signed up with BT for a 12 month contract. Then got a letter in the post saying Hyperoptic was available in his building :/
The price difference, let along the speed difference, between the two companies offerings is insane.
Someone linked to B4RN [1] the other day: community owned, non profit, symmetric gigabit internet in the north west of England, for £30 / month.
If more of these networks spring up, then maybe something good will come of BT's tardiness in laying decent infrastructure. Granted, B4RN is strongly enabled by being able to easily lay fibre under farmland, but there are other models that are more appropriate in urban areas - see e.g. the guifi network [2] in Catalonia.
56 comments
[ 7.6 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadPerceived?
There's nothing new in these observations. The ringfencing between OpenReach and the rest of BT has been present for quite a while. It has kept the lawyers and legislators happy and done pretty much nothing for the customer. As far as I can tell this new review from ofcom is essentially a confirmation of the status quo: Yeah, let's leave things as they are but keep our options open.
Even the CEO of BTGroup pretty much said the same: We have most of these guards in place already, we're happy to work with OfCom.
Translation: Thanks bros!
I can see why you might get sub-contractors to help maintain the network, but shouldn't the infrastructure be in public hands?
Is it just market dogma?
Putting the infrastructure into public hands has upsides and downsides. If the public is willing to invest money, you can get a pretty workable system: e.g. the Paris subway. If the public isn't willing to invest the money, you can get a very bad system, e.g. Flint Michigan's water supply.
More often than not, public ownership leads to under-investment. In the U.S., for every enlightened municipality like New York that carefully manages its water supply, there are dozens that keep water rates far too low and consequently lack the money to upgrade miles of decaying lead pipes.
All told, BT OpenReach is probably one of the better ways of organizing this function at scale. It's ostensibly private, but it was privatized with a carefully-designed system of incentives to keep investing in infrastructure. OpenReach is, for example, much more profitable than Verizon's wireline division. That's why they're still at least building fiber, instead of trying to get out of the business entirely.
[1] http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/09/uk-isp-bt-to-de...
The real issues with 21CN are that many parts of the edge network have multiple SPOFs (so a single failure can result in multi-hour or longer downtime for customers served by multiple ISPs that connected to an exchange) as well as insufficient bandwidth provisioned for those links in some areas. Another issue, is that backhaul from exchanges is metered at a fairly expensive rate.
It's saying "superfast broadband is here in this cabinet, but will never make it the extra 50 feet to your house". I've had that sticker on a cabinet at the end of my road for three years now. But still just sketchy DSL offered to my house.
According to BT's helpful "when the F is Fibre going to F'ng make it to my area" page, my postcode is going to be ready in "March 2016". But then that page used to say March 2015, March 2014 and March 2013 since I've been checking. At least it's always March, so I don't have to get my hopes up more than once a year.
In France I am not aware of anyone using FTTC. FTTP is the standard and is now widely deployed in large cities. That comparison alone should hurt the pride of the British people!
http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/where-and-when/ try the post code "SW1A 2AA" (i.e. 10 downing street). Status of the exchange: no plan for optic fiber roll out.
I hope the CEO of BT always keeps on himself a one-way ticket to a country with no extradition treaty with the UK!
I now have Infinity, running at a rock solid 38Mbps down and 12Mbps up, for a decent price (almost the same as I was paying for ADSL), and it's been totally reliable.
Bournemouth had FibreCity which promised fibre to the home, and 100M/1G service. The original delivery mechanism (in sewers, with minimal digging) didn't work out, and instead lots of micro-trenching was done. It cost them much more than they anticipated, and the company went bust (more than once, I believe), and provided a sub-standard IPTV and ISP offering (I had it for a month on trial, and it was patchy), so while the numbers would look great, there's more to it than the raw figures.
FTR, my postcode always showed that my area was going to have infinity, but my specific address wasn't going to get it, and even though I registered to be told when it would be available, I was never told - it was only bored clicking one night when stuck at 0.5Mbps that led to me getting upgraded.
BT and openworld definitely need more separation, however, IMO.
the inclination being that BT only goes where Virgin goes.. if you have fibre then you have a choice, but if you're running ADSL then BT doesn't hear you.. BT doesn't care.
Cheers.
Virgin cable available right now, BT have put off upgrading my cabinet to FTTC for over 4 years now.
Still, I'm getting ~8Mbps/1MBps so it's hardly a reason to complain.
By the way - the openreach site you mention was totally misleading in my area - it said that 'superfast' was available when in fact it was not (it also gave rollout-time estimates that were wrong by years). Any naive regulator or reporter using their data would be given a falsely rosy view of broadband rollout.
The only reason I have the line is for the FTTC connection that runs over it (using Goscomb as my ISP, rather than BT) There isn't even a phone connected to it.
Same scenario and ISP here, but I switched line rental to Zen's most basic no-calls-included package at 12 UKP per month.
Still not 'cheap' but cheaper than BT Retail.
We don't even have a landline phone in the house.
One month after the transfer, Openreach ceases the PSTN line and the reaction from my new ISP was "well it's your responsibility to keep up your BT subscription" (never had BT).
Two weeks later, the PSTN line is still dark, and I'm waiting for Openreach to install a new MPF line provided by my current ISP (for an extra £10/month of course).
Apparently the reason for doing this rather than re-start the PSTN line is part of a process called "Local-loop unbundling".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling
I imagine the entirety of Downing Street is connected back into the larger Whitehall network via redundant private gigabit circuits.
Depends on how far the curb is from you. VDSL2 Vectoring is pretty good and I'm pretty sure if someone has the option of no fiber or fiber closer so them they would pick the latter. Not everybody lives in cities and FTTC is often the only thing available.
The partnership where OpenReach does everything for the infrastructure and BT adds absolutely no value. The split of the partnership would have been what the consumers wanted.
Th decision falls short of bringing much needed change in the industry. There is still huge number of people who have super-slow internet which is a HUGE shame for ofcom for not having been able to get this problem sorted.
In my area, I get internet speed of 2MBps. I cannot get even basic things done. To put things into perspective, to download 100 photos, it would take 10 minutes.
Ofcom - This is the twenty first century and you are still living under a rock.
Edit - Thanks Xophmeister for spotting the typo
I'm sure there's people that it's working out wonderfully for but I've never found them.
Some kind of shake up is needed in the industry, similar to when cable came in around 2000(?).
I moved down from Worcestershire last year, only a few miles outside of Worcester but also very slightly rural and exactly the same happened there.
What I guess is happening is they connect up the very centre of large towns/cities and then don't really have any intention of providing fast broadband to the more rural areas, probably because it's not economical.
What is ridiculous, though, is the industrial estate never did, so my entire office building was sharing a single DSL line until we got a point to point wireless setup.
We got fibre last year.
On the other hand, in the past 5 years, my cable speeds in Oslo have increased from 20/5 to 250/20, and supposedly I might have an option to get 500/50 sometime soon. Would still prefer fiber, but I can't complain nearly as much as a lot of people!
Google's project Loon has done an amazing feat that they will achieve full internet coverage for the entire country Sri Lanka by end of next month using 4G LTE network.
Yes, broadband is cheap in towns and cities. But go to the countryside and it's a different story. For me - £25/month (Andrews & Arnold) plus £8/month line rental (Primus).
Our village finally got FTTC cab#1 activated at the end of December (cab#2 which served a much smaller segment of the village went live in September), has made a world of difference for us folks working from home.
BT is leading companies around the world testing out G.Fast, the next generation of DSL technology. Which should give you 500Mbps over 250M of cooper cables.
Because there are no upgrade done on users part other then a modem. This could be quickly rolled out many UK citizens, while others will wait for cabinet to move a little closer to them. Both will be much cheaper and quicker to deploy then FTTH.
What amazes me is that Hyperoptic sells 1gbps internet over OpenReach fiber but BT only sells 300mbps (at a higher price) http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/08/hand...
The price difference, let along the speed difference, between the two companies offerings is insane.
If more of these networks spring up, then maybe something good will come of BT's tardiness in laying decent infrastructure. Granted, B4RN is strongly enabled by being able to easily lay fibre under farmland, but there are other models that are more appropriate in urban areas - see e.g. the guifi network [2] in Catalonia.
[1]: http://b4rn.org.uk [2]: http://guifi.net