back to article BT takes broadband to NEW PLACES. That's right: CITIES

BT is trumpeting a new test which will see it install broadband in some really hard-to-reach locations: the middle of cities. Well, provided it can get into the building in the first place. It seems there are some places where it’s impossible to put a cabinet in the street, and that means slow broadband for domestic and small …

  1. Bob H

    The City has long been poorly represented for basic broadband, so this is good news but I have long been suspicious that BT neglects areas with larger business buildings because it wants to sustain the BT Net fibre business.

    In TW8 9HH all the surrounding streets have high-speed broadband but the main business block has none and BT have neglected only the cabinet that serves that building. Perhaps with this news BT might actually one-day extend their reach to such neglected buildings.

    1. dogged

      Maybe they've just vanished in the Brentford Triangle.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Up?

    80Mbps down is nice and all (although still fairly pathetic), but what about up? To democratise the Internet consumers need decent upload speeds as well.

    Cities have the population density that gigabit should have been a reality years ago.

    1. ukgnome

      Re: Up?

      have a +1

      Up speed is as important as down - and there is money in it too.

      All those cloudy storage solutions for pictures of cats, dogs in bow ties and bratty kids.

      If I had a good upload speed then I would of already bought 1TB of clouds.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Up?

        If I had a decent upload speed I'd run more of my own services and screw the cloud providers. Hence why I said "democratise".

        We need locked-in cloud services like we need a hole in the head.

        What we need is the tooling to allow people to take control of THEIR data, THEIR services, THEIR privacy. Yes, that will have to include back-ups etc, it's not an easy problem to solve and could well involve people having to pay (shock, horror).

        Also the government won't like it as it will be much harder to spy on their citizens...which is another good reason to do it!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Up?

      This is regular VDSL, aka FTTC, so it'll be 80/20. I think the reference to G.Fast in the article was spurious.

      Still, having the DSLAM in the basement means you should get the full whack.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Up?

        80/20 it's too bad, but still not ideal. That up is 10-times what I get right now though. :-(

    3. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Up?

      As long as BT is the incumbent telco with a lines business AND a dialtone/broadband business you can guarantee it will do exactly what it can to ensure that it benefits the most from LLU rules.

      By withholding network upgrades in profitable areas it forces clients into the loving arms of....BT. There may be a (quite leaky) chinese wall in place between the lower levels, but in the end Openreach dances to the tune of strategies set by BT head office.

      The New Zealand example is worth looking at. By forcing the incumbent to divest its lineside into a completely separate private company, it's moved in 18 months from being a poster child for how NOT to privatise your telco (rampant anticompetitive behaviour, etc)(*), to one of the most vibrant markets in the world.

      The newly independent lines company is not only selling access to copper and dark fibre (first time ever), it's also leasing out duct space to companies which would previously have had NO access to them (direct competitors and cable companies, etc) which is resulting in less streetwork.

      The effect on LLU has been startling, partly because it hasn't just starting offering this kind of "equal physical access" without administrative roadblocks and via a hell of a lot of expensive hoop-jumping, it's actively going out and soliciting business instead of hiding out the back in such a way that it's hard to deal with and get things done.

      Unless and until the UK govt bites the bullet and forces BT to divest its lines company, the UK telecommunications market will remain difficult to deal with and keep having these not-spots (it's not Openreach which refuses to put stuff in notspots, it's BT head office, etc)

      Mind you, it could be worse - the USA market is staggeringly corrupt and locked down.

  3. AndrueC Silver badge
    Meh

    You would rather hope that having got fibre into the building, there might be an option to run it all the way to the premises

    Absolutely. All BT needs is to agree with the property owner/residents who is going to pay to pull all the cabling through the walls, under the floors or over the ceilings ;)

    1. Sir Sham Cad

      Who Pays

      I'd expect it to work like ordering broadband services normally (I've been doing a stupid amount of that recently but different rant for another time). BT pay for installation of the cabinet (rack) and the company/person ordering the broadband can pay for the fibre run internally. Much as I've just paid extra to have BT run a fibre in a building all the way to the floor and room we need it (Short Haul circuit).

      If I didn't want to pay the extra then I'd get copper from the cabinet instead of fibre just as BT seem to be currently proposing.

      1. AndrueC Silver badge
        Meh

        Re: Who Pays

        If I didn't want to pay the extra then I'd get copper from the cabinet instead of fibre just as BT seem to be currently proposing.

        Well BT are already offering FTTPoD - FTTP on Demand - in several FTTC areas so the concept isn't new to them. I don't know what it would cost to pull fibre through a building but I'd assume that if there's service ducting it shouldn't be all that expensive. But then again the pricing for FTTPoD is knicker wettingly scary.

        But does the tenant pay and accept they are improving someone else' property?

        Do you try and get the landlord to pay?

        Does BT just absorb the cost?

        Frankly the latter two seem very unlikely.

        1. Alan Brown Silver badge

          Re: Who Pays

          "Well BT are already offering FTTPoD - FTTP on Demand - in several FTTC areas so the concept isn't new to them. "

          BT's prices for GPON services bear little to no relationship to actual cost of supply and seem squarely aimed at preventing uptake.

          Once you have a DSLAM in the basement it's easier and cheaper to provide GPON services to the rest of the building than roll out a bunch of equipment which primarily serves to slow down access speeds and add unnecessary costs.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not just BT playing games - Vodafone too

    >> will have access to download speeds of up to 80Mbps from more than 130 different service providers for the first time

    But Demon (aka Vodafone) won't be among those 130 service providers?.

  5. Annihilator

    Even cheaper

    They could at least enable VDSL on exchange-only lines, ie those that can't get FTTC because they have no cabinet. IIRC most DSLAMs in exchanges are capable of VDSL2 but aren't allowed due to the apparent noise on the rest of the lines - though how this doesn't effect lines from the cabinet I don't know.

    1. AndrueC Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: Even cheaper

      IIRC most DSLAMs in exchanges are capable of VDSL2 but aren't allowed due to the apparent noise on the rest of the lines - though how this doesn't effect lines from the cabinet I don't know

      ANFP. But for the record it's worth pointing out that this isn't some stupid government 'jobsworth' rule. Nor is it something BT have decided not to do for their own reasons. It's the considered opinion of skilled and experienced engineers across the industry who presumably know what they are doing.

      BT are following the rules imposed on them. Bah, humbug :)

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Even cheaper

        "But for the record it's worth pointing out that this isn't some stupid government 'jobsworth' rule"

        Yes, it is.

        DSLAM equipment in street cabinets can trivially offer ADSL2 services as well as VDSL2, at which point the entire crosstalk argument goes out the window because exchange-based DSLAMs would only serve the immediate area.

        IMHO The ONLY reason that BT aren't doing it and putting combo DSLAM/voice MUXes in street cabinets (they're the same price and size as standalone remote DSLAM kit) is for lockin reasons. The same as there's no valid technical reason why you're required to buy dialtone on your *DSL pair.

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

  6. Arachnoid

    Given,,,,,,,,,,

    The recent issues with getting services to present customers Im suprised their backbone can take the strain

  7. This post has been deleted by its author

  8. Irongut

    If digging the road up to lay cable to a cabinet is too hard how do they propose to lay that cable to a building on the same road?

    This whole thing sounds like a racket to me. Cabinet in the building so landlord pays for installation of the cabinet instead of BT and it can be a cheaper design because it doesn't need to be weather proof, etc. Then they can charge all the businesses in that building the normal install fee. WIN - WIN!

    1. Annihilator

      They don't dig up the roads to lay the cable, they run it through the existing ducting, either via push-rods or a little remote-controlled mole to pull the cable through.

      The issue they have in cities is finding the additional space to put an FTTC cabinet next to any existing ones.

      1. Fuzz

        When BT install the VDSL street cabinets they have to dig the road between the voice cabinet and the new VDSL cabinet, this might be a metre or sometimes it's the other side of a street.

        In any largish building there will be a BT duct entering underground bringing in 100s of voice pairs from the street cabinet terminated at a demarcation point. BT will add a rack near this demarcation point and bring in the fibre connections using the existing duct. No need to dig anything and no need to find the space outdoors for the cabinet.

        As for FTTP, I'd guess this is actually harder in a building such as this since BT would need to run fibre from the demarcation point through existing risers and ducts which may travel through other tenants offices depending on the design of the building. The copper will already be there ready to use.

      2. Alan Brown Silver badge

        "The issue they have in cities is finding the additional space to put an FTTC cabinet next to any existing ones."

        These "cabinets" you speak of are merely a weather housing over a base and pedestal. There's nothing technical in the way of combining the 2 into a larger single cabinet - except lock-in.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          "These "cabinets" you speak of are merely a weather housing over a base and pedestal. There's nothing technical in the way of combining the 2 into a larger single cabinet - except lock-in."

          That's wrong. The broadband kit and FTTx lines go in a separate, RF shielded box. If you put all the lines, including POTS lines and ones served with ADSL from the exchange, in the same box, lots of people would end up with broadband that used to work no longer working.

          It's the same reason that telcos don't put VDSL kit in exchange buildings. The frequency plans are different and it would result in, for example, a BT VDSL rack's downstream signal completely swamping the weak upstream signals arriving on the main frame from, perhaps, Talk Talk's ADSL rack.

    2. Sir Sham Cad

      Well, it will be a cheaper design, by the sounds of things, yes. I didn't get the impression from the article that the landlords were paying for the rack installation, though. I thought BT footed that bill and the incentive for the landlord to allow it was faster connections into the premises. Otherwise, yes, I'd expect every landlord in the area to tell them to sod off.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Finding room for a cabinet isn't easy. There are rules about how much pavement width must be kept free for pedestrians and wheelchairs and the like and some councils have planning restrictions that essentially prohibit new street furniture.

      The roadworks problem is that if you're digging up the pavement to install a cabinet you have to divert pedestrians into the street, which requires roadworks guarding and that's what you need permission for. There are all kinds of restrictions on utilities now in terms of streetworks - they're supposed to synchronise their efforts - so if BT wants to install a new cabinet and the gas company wants to install a new main in the same street in 9 month's time - guess what happens?

  9. Lordhartley

    I had my home internet fitted by BT to my new home yesterday (80mb for personal use, waahoo!), the 2 engineers (yes, for some reason it took 2?) said there are very strong rumours going around that they may run fiber optic cables to telegraph poles, then have Wireless access points on top of these. Actually a good idea if you think about it..

    1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

      You you sure they were engineers? Surely they'd have been technicians, no engineering needed.

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        "Surely they'd have been technicians, no engineering needed."

        I wouldn't call anyone whose training consisted of a 6 week bootcamp a "technician".

        Customer Premises Equipment linesmen are not in any sense of the word "technicians". When one shows up for a purported DSL fault and claims that he can't install a DSL circuit (which is what he was supposed to be doing) because he "hasn't had the training", then they're just apes in a boilersuit doing monkey-see monkey-do.

  10. This post has been deleted by its author

  11. 15yr wait
    Unhappy

    Very poor service from BT

    I am not receiving the service for which I am paying BT (broadband).

    I live in a rural area of N. Ireland and have been paying for Bt Broadband for many years.

    My Broadband Speed Test ; Results; - Bt Exchange to Home 1.02mb; Download 0.72mb;

    Upload 0.33mb;

    BT Staff in N. Ireland are unapproachable or arrogantly ignoring problems with their existing customers.

    How does one get to speak to BT staff to have this problem rectified or how do we get them out of their Ivory Tower?

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