Government calls for ideas on how to splash £400m on fibre

Re: Digital minister Matt Hancock

Problem is, who writes the programs?

That's quite obvious: trainees doing homework assignments.

Not all of London has 'superfast' Broadband

There are bits not far from Old St that are on country bumpkin type speeds.

Apparently, the cable ducts are far too full to run any Fibre.

But yes, make sure it is spent only in places that are outside communting distance of London.

Make sure that it is FTTP, none of this FTTC cop out.

"So central London then, as usual, while the rest of the country festers."

Well London does subsidise the rest of the country...

At least let's not waste it on Scotland seeing as hopefully they will be leaving the UK soon after Brexit!

Superfast Crymru paid for the rollout of Copper too.

With the Welsh rollout, there was fair amount of BT trickery to 'just' meet Superfast Cymru contractual targets, i.e. upgrading of 0.5mm Copper to 0.9mm Copper lines in places, to avoid some use of FTTP.

Not exactly in the spirit of what taxpayer thought they were paying for i.e. 'Fibre rollout' which instead, at times, amounted to upgrading BT's legacy Copper Network.

Re: Typical government thinking!

Budgets are for spending. Same thing in the oh so efficient private sector. (Ever tried giving money back to the beancounters? Way harder than getting some in the first place.)

As I'm in a somewhat feisty mood (christmas with the relatives, need I say more?) - technically your gripe is with the administration. As in a democracy, the government is the people. Technically.

Re: Typical government thinking!

In an ideal world it would fund 400 B4RN 1Gbps FTTP Type schemes, where the hard work of creating the intial community scheme, gaining the backing/funding has already been thought through/worked through, so in theory the success and lower cost per FTTP connection, could be replicated. We need to be backing proven 'copy cat' schemes like B4RN, going forward.

A Key objective though is that these communities should be 'on-side' and interested/show willing.

Above all, the other key objective should be about puting more Connected fibre in the ground, not talking about it. Not paying people to talk about it, producing glossy bullshit.

The most important thing is for this money not to end up in the hands of BT, because - let's face it, we are needing to allocate/inject £400 million for no other reason, than the failure of Ofcom regulation/BT market dominance (allowing BT's EE takeover was sheer madness) which is preventing the market itself from rolling out competing true/pure FTTP, to BT's obfuscated, bamboozled sweated copper carcass 'upto' infrastructure.

One aspect that rarely gets mentions is true/pure FTTP would allow virtualised operators to co-exist over the same fibre, so you could take multiple subscriptions from various ISPs at once, as there would be sufficient Fibre bandwidth to deliver multiple services.

The main reason BT are pushing Pointless G.fast is so they can place artificial restrictions on the subscriber, by placing an 'artificial tap' between the customer and the cabinet/pole Fibre endpoint, by using sweated copper on the final segment, to keep 'artificially restricted services' under BT's control.

Re: Typical government thinking!

Well there's a wrong headed thought. In the public sector, if you have money left over for any reason, you should spend it on something (anything - Scott Adams recommends loo paper, as it's flushable if you need the storage space later on) as if you don't spend your full allocation, you obviously won't need as much in future budgets...

Re: BDUK - cheap capital for BT

We have a lame situation now, where dominant BT acts like the sole contractor to the UK Gov.

There is no innovation put forward by BT themselves (off their own back). We, the taxpayer, have to fund and tell BT what techincal improvements we need (via technically incompetent Government direction), and if we don't, the contractor (BT) does nothing.

BT knowing full well they have a good enough income stream with the existing (taxpayer funded) FTTC and EE Mobile Network to see them through to 2030 providing a limited (but very profitable) subset of the overall UK customer base. BT don't care because they know they can hold the UK to ransom.

The pace of technological change no longer needs to be set by BT, because BT know the UK as whole, will set this for them and pay them handsomely, through sheer deperation to compete in the World Economy, in order to keep up. BT don't have to do any real investment themselves.

I mean, why would BT want to upgrade its Network to a true/pure Fibre FTTP 1Gbps+ Network now they own EE, when it would obsolete the data speeds (and the income) of 3G/4G EE overnight.

The CMA (Competiton and Markets Authority) / Ofcom decision regarding BT/EE merger was incredulous, to say there was no market overlap between EE/BT. For anyone technically versed in such matters that decision comes across as technically skewed at best. At worse, highly likely corruption took place.

Re: Really?

It's like average Broadband speeds, they should be averaged over a 4 hour peak usage period, not over the full 24 hours, i.e. not through the night when speeds are at maximum for those hours, when no one is using it.

Also special days of maximum of peak usage; Olympics Coverage etc, should be selected in advance (at the start of the year) for monitoring for separately produced Data, to show the Backhaul network is up to the demands of peak usage, on key dates.

The current Ofcom average speed data is flawed, when measured over 24 hours/quiet periods. And Ofcom, why isn't all data published, we're paying for this monitoring. Make all gathered data public, good and bad. Stop producing pretty trickery, little data sets that make Ofcom look good.

Re: Really?

I imagine that "access to" is short-hand for "we've found a copper wire and installed an ADSL2 modem at our end" and "24Mbps" is shorthand for "this is the maximum possible speed assuming that the customer is next door to the exchange".