The telco giant will spend £11m in Oxfordshire
doing something it should have done years ago and then coming back cap in hand to get some money for another fibre.. or two.
BT won two more government-subsidised contracts to rollout rural broadband on Monday when it scooped up deals in Oxfordshire and Worcestershire. The telco giant will spend £11m in Oxfordshire installing fibre-to-the-cabinet technology; the local council will cough up £10m and a further £4m will come from the state. The work …
I fail to understand how it can be a fair bidding process when only one supplier is bidding. Common sense says your rules are too strict and you should look at changing the tendering rules in order to solicit more applications. It can only help keep costs down and speed up the roll out.
BT know they are the only supplier so have no need to compete - as long as they clearly don't take the piss too badly the gov will have to just stump up.
What I'd like to see is that all these government paid for bits are forced to be unbundled to competitors AT TRUE COST. i.e. BT don't get to control them or set the prices, they make their money on the setup. Thats it, after that they belong to the UK (not BT). Any profit from these points (i.e. the wholesale markup) returned back to the GOV. That way it becomes a loan not a BT subsidy.
I'd also like to know what options are open for small communications companies have to get in on the gig. Yes, they probably couldn't do a whole county, but they probably could manage 200 or so cabinets. Bet they can't even tender.
>>Fujitsu pulled out of the race for the money earlier this year after complaining of restrictive "conditions" around the process.
Fujitsu: Can we tender for the contract?
Gov: The conditions state your company name must start with a "B" and end in a "T"?
Fujitsu: We'll set up a company called "BET"
Gov: Oh and no characters inbetween.
Fjitsu: Bugger.
For example my exchange (in Town upgraded a while ago) my cabinet 3 miles outside town, on BT's upgrade for March this year.
March comes we get our BDUK funds for the County, the date slips. I contact the nga email for finsing out about these things. They come back with problems supplying power to the cabinet. Now note their is a traffic light right next to the darn cabinet.
Power issues my arse, all BT saw was they now have funds we don't need to spend our own money. This is why they have not spent the money they said they would.
The government should have said to them spend your £1 Billion and then we will start making funds available.
You are mistaken the real change was the introduction of the NTE5 wall socket and the introduction of digital exchanges. The development and implementation of both started under the nationalised BT.
BT were forced to offer local loop unbundling because an EU directive and they were subsequently forced to create Openreach to ensure that they did actually offer equal access to the local network.
They were also pretty slow in getting ADSL services out to the masses. ( I remember them still pimping Home Highway (ISDN) hard even when ADSL services were available and even then their initial ADSL speeds were pretty miserly.)
I really don't buy this private BT is better as it seems that they are frequently forced to do the right thing by government time and time again.
"The development and implementation of both started under the nationalised BT." This seems surely to be an incomplete sentence. I think you probably meant to add '...when they started copying the kit of other already privatised countries, just making minor changes to mess up compatibility"
Private companies are companies that face competition. Being a 'Merkin I'm not well informed of the particulars with regard to BT, but it sounds to me like what you have there is an off-book government operation with private colored lipstick smeared all over the pig. So you have the worst of all possible worlds, but not something that is actually private.
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And does anyone trust our government with complete control of the telecoms infrastructure? They don't exactly have a stellar record when it comes to protecting our privacy and right to personal freedom. At least now BT has commercial reasons for objecting to some of the things they want to do.
Have you seen parts of Oxford? Not 5 miles from those gleaming spires are some pretty awful council estates.
Like every county there are good bits and bad bits.
I live in a 'bad' bit of Hampshire. Lots of ex Council houses so it's hardly 'Knobshire' yet we have FTTC. The nice thing for me is that most people around here are on Virgin so my FTTC link is pretty fast.
Strangely enough, tw miles down the road is our local 'Knob Hill'. They have abysmal broadbad speeds.
Isn't real life strange?
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"I live in a 'bad' bit of Hampshire. Lots of ex Council houses so it's hardly 'Knobshire' yet we have FTTC. The nice thing for me is that most people around here are on Virgin so my FTTC link is pretty fast.
Strangely enough, tw miles down the road is our local 'Knob Hill'. They have abysmal broadbad speeds."
Thing is, your average council estate is brilliant for FTTC/cable. Loads of houses, all close together, all built when cable cos had money to build a network and usually with some meaty BT cabs.
Your average "well to do" area has fewer actual houses, all much further apart and usually fed overhead with no cabs...
FTFA :- "BT won .. contracts to rollout rural broadband .,. in Oxfordshire and Worcestershire. .... mostly feeding high-speed fibre to street-side cabinets"
If there is a street, it isn't rural. Only towns have streets; rural areas have roads and lanes.
What they really mean by "rural " is "non-London". I grew up in Lonon and used to assume that anywhere else in Britain looked like those pictures in "Country Life" calendars. Not so. There are plenty of over-crowded shit holes outside London that could not be called "rural" by any stretch of the imagination, including in Oxfordshire and Worcestershire.
In fact there are not many places in lowland Britain that can properly be called rural anymore. As it happens I live in one (forest and fields all round me), and am not expecting fibre anytime; I'm not asking for it either - I'd move back to the city if I wanted it that badly.